“Sutures” - Encres et fusains de Sandra Ghosn

Why “Sutures”? Because, explains Sandra Ghosn, "In black ink and charcoal, the lines become stitches between the white left by the bombardments and the obstinacy of drawing a chosen future. They inscribe the gaze into a present where the breath of the absent persists." On view at the IMA Library, a selection of works made between 2022 and 2026 tells us of the indelible link between the past wounds of her native country and a world in the process of coming into being.

This exhibition will be inaugurated on April 18 with a meeting with the artist, interviewed by curator and art critic Claire Luna.

"It is from this origin that my thinking about connection, memory and what is drawn against oblivion is constructed. My drawings extend this idea and capture what is withering while maintaining a tension toward what seeks to come into being. When one world collapses and another emerges, what remains to be seen? This exhibition stands there.

I collected the poems of my grandfather, Ghantous Saliba. His book of Zajal, Ghoullat Omr, written in Byblos from 1960 and completed in 1985 in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, carries a language shaped by its territory. It moves me even more today because I did not know him in life. His memory reaches me beyond his passing, surviving the threats of destruction that still hang over his native landscape.

Sutures is born of that encounter. In black ink and charcoal, the lines become stitches between the white left by the bombardments and the obstinacy of drawing a chosen future. They inscribe the gaze into a present where the breath of the absent persists." Sandra Ghosn

Works on display

- Au cœur des étoiles, 140 × 100 cm, India ink on paper, 2022
- Émergence, 428 × 150 cm, India ink on paper, 2024
- 4 large suspended formats, 120 × 90 cm, India ink on paper, 2025
- 42 small formats, 29.7 × 21 cm, India ink on paper, 2026

Sandra Ghosn

Sandra Ghosn is a Franco-Lebanese artist born in Beirut in 1983, where she grew up in a context marked by the civil war. She studied illustration and comics at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), before continuing her training at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris, where she specialized in printed imagery.

Based in France since 2008, she has developed a practice focused on drawing, India ink, graphite and pen, exploring line density, the whiteness of paper and the psychic processes at work in the making of the image. Her work stands at the crossroads of contemporary drawing and poetic narrative, confronting the gaze with what emerges from the unconscious and from non-figurative spaces.

She has exhibited in numerous contexts in France and internationally, notably at Salon DDessin (Paris), La Ferme du Buisson (as part of the PULP Festival), the École normale supérieure in Paris and the Menart Fair at the Palais d’Iéna.

In 2019 she received the Mahmoud Kahil Prize for a work published by Les Crocs Électriques, and that same year she created the cover for Samandal magazine, winner of the Fauve d’Or for experimental comics at Angoulême.

Her book Séances Spéciales, published in 2025 with the support of DRAC Île-de-France and the City of Poitiers, unfolds between words and images to create a reflective space where drawing and narrative intertwine, offering a meditation on memory, intimacy and language.