‘Rapid Response’ Exhibition Spotlights Displacement and Ecocide in War-Torn Lebanon

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Against a backdrop of escalating conflict, the artist Ieva Saudargaitė Douaihi has this week travelled from the Lebanese capital of Beirut to the British city of Norwich to present a “rapid response” exhibition exploring themes of rupture and instability.

Through a series of large-format photographic studies of native Lebanese flora, the show is an attempt to reflect worsening hostilities in the region—before deaths are eclipsed by fast-moving events and political narratives. Titled Uprooted and hosted at the artist-led Outpost Gallery, it explores structural displacement and ecocide as intertwining losses.

“I felt compelled to respond while still inside the moment,” Saudargaitė Douaihi told Ocula. “I was struggling with the way violence was being mediated, reduced to statistics, repeated imagery, and often distorted framing.

“While the work remains indirect, it is shaped by the realities of displacement and by the destructive logics that produce it.”

The artist’s prints are created using plants native or endemic to Lebanon, dug up in their entirety from areas currently under occupation or attack, and before being placed against a white background. The resulting images show flowers and roots alike in forensic, almost scientific detail. 

The work revolves around the interruption of growth, continuity and belonging. By severing the plants from the ground, Saudargaitė Douaihi creates a wound that is both literal and symbolic. Through her photographs, the specimens remain suspended between extraction and the possibility of re-rooting.

The images go on display as Lebanon faces fresh and ferocious Israeli bombardment. On Wednesday, around 300 people were killed after Israeli strikes hit more than 100 targets in just 10 minutes. The bombing was described by the Israeli military as an attack on the Iran-backed militia group, Hezbollah.

On Thursday, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said the action violated the ceasefire agreement announced by the US and Iran just two days earlier, following almost six weeks of war across the Middle East.

Saudargaitė Douaihi explained: “The work doesn’t illustrate events, but is shaped by the same conditions: abrupt rupture, instability, and the constant negotiation between staying displaced and returning. The uprooted plant functions as a quiet parallel to what is happening on the ground in Lebanon.”

The situation in the country has been worsening since the outbreak of war between Iran, the US and Israel on 28 February. As violence spread across the region, renewed conflict between Israel and Hezbollah forced more than a million people—almost a fifth of Lebanon’s population—from their homes.

Saudargaitė Douaihi’s recent experiences in Beirut have been shaped by airstrikes, low-flying jets and the uninterrupted buzzing of drones. These conditions have not suspended her daily life, but have altered it, producing a continuous sense of precarity. 

“You move through your day and the city with an awareness that everything is contingent,” she said. “That lived tension becomes part of the work’s underlying structure.”

Her exhibition, Saudargaitė Douaihi told Ocula, considers uprooting not only as an image, but as a mechanism. “It is enacted through the removal of people, the transformation and degradation of land, and the erasure of existing relationships,” she explained.

“In this context, ecocide is not separate but intertwined. The uprooted plant becomes a small but precise articulation of this process. What is at stake is not only the loss of place, but the systematic breaking of ties that make place possible.”