London-based Lebanese artist Ramzi Mallat presents Not Your Martyr at the V&A South Kensington as part of London Design Festival. Co-curated by Rachel Dedman, the V&A’s Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East, the work will be on display in the Medieval and Renaissance Gallery.

An intimate memorial to lives lost in the 2020 Beirut Port blast, Not Your Martyr takes the form of vibrant glass ma’amoul, traditional Lebanese shortbread pastries shared during Easter and Eid. The artist presents these fragile forms as a “counter-monument” to the explosion and to the Lebanese Civil War – which began 50 years ago this year. The work offers quiet homage to these uneasy anniversaries, acknowledging the enduring imprint of collective trauma.

Mallat explores the socio-political impact of globalisation on notions of identity and memory. Working across sculpture, installation and film, he transforms everyday objects and shared cultural rituals to reflect on heritage, loss and collective resistance. In Not Your Martyr small abstracted shapes hold the enduring and ephemeral characteristics of sunbursts and raindrops, leaves, flowers and petals. The monument’s shifting components gather into a precarious reminder of the vulnerability of peace, while its title asserts a refusal, and resists the impulse of turning victims into martyrs.

Not Your Martyr is shown alongside an installation by Lebanese artists Rana Haddad and Pascal Hachem, entitled Debris of Text and Eyeglasses, in a display entitled ‘Counter-Monuments, Beirut’. Both works use the perceived fragility of glass and the intimacy of the everyday to reflect on the impact of the Beirut explosion five years on.

The display is supported by LDF and the V&A’s Jameel Programme.