MOCA Movements 2026: Zena el Khalil

MOCA Movements 2026: Zena el Khalil
Sacred Catastrophe: Healing Lebanon, 2013 - 2017

This film documents a healing ceremony conducted by Zena el Khalil in abandoned, war-torn spaces in Lebanon. These sites are marked by violence, rupture, and historical erasure. Movement here is not choreography, nor symbolic gesture, but a functional act within a ritual system. Through breath, sound and rotation, the body becomes an instrument through which space is listened to, cleared and re-attuned.

At the heart of the ceremony is Sufi whirling: a continuous circular motion that dissolves the boundary between stillness and motion, body and environment. The artist does not perform for the camera; rather, the camera bears witness to a process of becoming a vessel. As the body turns, attention shifts away from selfhood toward transmission. The movement opens a channel through which grief, memory and latent energy held within the architecture are metabolized and transformed. Equilibrium is established. Through repetition and balance, the body becomes a stabilizing instrument: listening, chanting, clearing, and recalibrating the space it inhabits.

Working directly in spaces that have endured war, displacement and trauma, el Khalil approaches movement as a cosmological force. Her practice begins in silence, listening to the land. Sound, understood as the first creative vibration, emerges through chanting, breath and the rotational momentum of the body. The ceremony culminates in painting: pigments made from ash, earth, and ritual materials are applied on site, allowing the residue of movement to condense into form. The paintings exhibited later are not illustrations of the ritual, but its precipitate. What remains once vibration has passed through matter.

In this work, movement is both method and medicine. It is a way of entering wounded spaces without domination, of allowing them to speak and of offering care without erasure. Rotation becomes an ethics: a refusal of linear time, a return to cycles and an insistence that transformation can occur within conditions of rupture rather than resolution. Here, the body moves so that space may breathe again.

@moca_london
www.zenaelkhalil.com
@zenaelkhalil

Credits:
Sacred Catastrophe: Healing Lebanon, 2013 - 2017
Camera: George Kurian, Maher Abilmona
Sound: Zena el Khalil, Backing Vocals: Ginou Choueiri
Ceremonies conducted for various abandoned homes
in Aley and for Beit Beirut. Lebanon.

Biography
Zena el Khalil is a transdisciplinary artist, writer and sound healer. Merging art and healing modalities, Zena has been conducting healing ceremonies in spaces that have historically endured trauma and violence, such as environmental disasters and war-torn sites. Her works serve to uplift human consciousness and transforms these spaces into generators of peace and reconciliation creating bridges between universal consciousness and the physical world.

During the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, Zena was one of the first largely followed Middle Eastern bloggers, her writings were published in the international press, including the BBC, CNN and the entire Guardian G2 supplement. In 2008, she was invited to speak at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, and soon after completed her memoir, “Beirut, I Love You”, translated into several languages and receiving star reviews. She has been awarded a Senior Fellowship at TED and has given several TED talks.

In 2017, Zena held a ground breaking 40-day exhibition and multi-disciplinary project in Beirut entitled Sacred Catastrophe : Healing Lebanon at Beit Beirut, Lebanon’s museum to the memory of war. Conducting a daily peace offering to a total of over 10,000 visitors, she was the first artist to exhibit in this historic war relic.

Her work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC to name a few. She lectures and exhibits internationally, including biennales, institutions and museum shows such as the MADRE Museum of Contemporary Art Napoli, Mori Art Museum Japan, and the Merz Foundation Turin. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a Bachelor of Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut. She has apprenticed under Sufis, Shamans, and Yogis around the world.