OFF THE GRID: Solo exhibition

Art on 56th Gallery is pleased to present OFF THE GRID / اشتراك, a solo exhibition by Lebanese artist Dyala Khodary.

This exhibition considers the transformation of Beirut’s urban landscape through its electricity crisis and the hybrid systems of infrastructure that have emerged in response. Within this context, Khodary’s practice, which moves between abstract and figurative approaches within a conceptual framework, becomes a means of reading the city as both image and structure, surface and system.

The reliance on private generator subscriptions, commonly referred to as ishtirak, has produced a dense and informal electrical network that now defines much of Beirut’s visual environment. Exposed wires, improvised connections, and layered technical interventions have become embedded in the city’s architecture, reshaping not only how it functions but also how it is perceived.

In Khodary’s work, these elements are not treated as documentary motifs, but as visual systems in themselves. The tangled circuitry of the city is translated into compositions where order and disorder coexist, where repetition, fragmentation, and layering echo the conditions of urban instability. What appears at first as visual chaos gradually resolves into a structured language of adaptation.

Rather than representing crisis directly, the exhibition examines its slow normalization. Infrastructure becomes both subject and metaphor, revealing how temporary solutions accumulate into permanent urban conditions. The city emerges as a surface continually rewritten by necessity, where visibility and invisibility operate in tension.

Through OFF THE GRID / اشتراك, Khodary’s practice opens a reading of Beirut as an evolving system of traces, material, visual, and social, where everyday infrastructures quietly shape the aesthetic and emotional experience of the city.