Extended Cities is the artistic residency of The Muse multi studios, an integrative regional organization committed to making art accessible through collaborative projects that respond to cultural and social contexts. Conceived as a space for experimentation and dialogue, the residency investigates the layered relationships between cities and nations, while addressing themes of history, literature, memory, construction, and destruction.
Art and Law – Representations, Trials, and Power is a seminar that investigates how the law and judicial systems are represented, reimagined, and challenged through art. From ancient Mesopotamian tablets to contemporary performance-trials, artists have repeatedly staged justice—sometimes reflecting its ideals, other times exposing its failures.The seminar invites participants to think of law not only as a regulatory framework that governs artistic practice, but as an artistic subject in itself. Through literature, cinema, theater, performance, and visual arts, we will explore how legal institutions, trials, and systems of power have been depicted, critiqued, and transformed within artistic forms. By analyzing case studies across history and media, students will gain a deeper understanding of how art shapes public perceptions of justice and how, in turn, legal systems influence cultural production. The seminar further asks whether art can act as an alternative arena of justice—verifying, questioning, or even supplanting institutional law when systems fail.
11th of October 2025
ARD Art Institute, link
Lily Abichahine is a lawyer, researcher, and artist. She was born in Beirut in 1985, and she graduated from the Law School of Saint Joseph university in 2007 and Paris Descartes University (2008). She trained to become an attorney-at-law at the Beirut Bar Association and served as a legal counsel and researcher in Lebanon, France, and The Netherlands. After obtaining her BA (2018) and Masters (2019) in Performing Arts from Paris VIII University, she developed her artistic practice in the format of lecture-performances, installations and videos, exploring the intersectionality between art and law, as presented in her works: Exquisite Corpse (2021, Frankfurt, Lecture-performance), L’Étreinte (2022, Paris, Lecture), Abjad Hawwaz: How I Was Destroyed By a Mall Thrice (2022, Beirut, Installation), and the ongoing project Mare Nostrum / Our Sea (since 2021: Choreography for a Woman and a Stone, 2021, Palermo, performance; Secrets of the Infinite Sea, 2022, Bremen, Lecture-performance; Tantalus Cries, (2025, Athens, Lecture-performance). Her interests revolve around international law and legalities, geopolitics, postcolonialism, history, art history, archeology and anthropology.
