Ahead of her solo presentation with Hafez Gallery at Art Dubai 2026, Lebanese artist Lana Khayat speaks in images as much as in words. Working between the stillness of the Arabian desert and the layered memory of the Mediterranean, Khayat’s practice weaves together botanical forms, abstraction, stitching, and fragments of language into works that meditate on identity, resilience, femininity, and inheritance. The lily, a recurring motif in her compositions, becomes a symbol of quiet endurance, while traces of Arabic, Tifinagh, and memory move through surfaces that feel at once intimate and expansive.

For Marie Claire Maison Arabia, we asked Lana Khayat 15 short questions on beauty, memory, women, language, Lebanon, and the landscapes that continue to shape her visual world.

Why the lily? Because it keeps coming back. It doesn’t ask permission. It’s soft and it’s stubborn, which felt true to everything I was trying to say about women.

What does a landscape remember? Everything. The desert holds the silence of what was never said. The Mediterranean holds the noise of everything that was. I work between the two.

What part of Lebanon lives in your work? The insistence on beauty, even when things are broken. We were never taught to stop making things.

Why bring language into abstraction? Because Arabic script isn’t only text, it’s gesture, it’s form, it’s the body of a culture. I don’t ask you to read it. I ask you to feel that something is being said.

What does femininity look like to you? Layered. Patient. Structural. A thread that holds more than it looks like it should.

What does the desert teach you? That stillness isn’t emptiness. That you can carry heat and still be quiet about it.

Why work with stitching and texture? Because I wanted to make something you could almost feel without touching. And because it’s slow, it asks me to be present in a way painting alone doesn’t.

Can abstraction hold memory? That’s all it does, for me. Every form is somewhere I’ve been, or someone I’ve lost, or something I can’t name yet.

What inherited gesture stays with you? My great-grandfather restored things with his hands. I make things with mine. I think the motion is the same, careful, deliberate, believing the work matters.

What grows after the storm? Whatever was always supposed to be there.

What are you trying to preserve? The knowledge that beauty is a form of resistance. That making something delicate is not the same as being fragile.

What are you trying to let go of? The idea that I have to justify taking up space.

What colour feels like resilience? White, after you’ve looked at it long enough to see everything inside it.

When does a painting feel finished? When I stop being afraid of it.

If your work had a scent, what would it be? Old linen, jasmine, and something slightly mineral, like the air just before rain hits dry stone.