Bechara Maalouf – Flights Are Cheaper in May

“Flights are cheaper in May” — this practical reminder by his father marks the start of Bechara Maalouf’s annual trip to Lebanon. Year after year, subtle transformations in environment and community has reshaped the generations-long home. And yet, so much of the daily life patterns there remain the same: a thick brick house with iron-clad windows, next to a cherry orchard, against the backdrop of a mountainside; people living off the land, playing with fireworks from the local grocer; the wafting smell of steaming coffee.

In Flights Are Cheaper in May, Maalouf explores how sentimental rituals practiced through generations are inevitably altered. Lamps, the primary medium of the show, act as sculptural archives, capturing and preserving the memories of his intergenerational family home in Kfertay, Lebanon. Fabricated from articulated aluminum, the artworks echo the geometries of wrought-iron windows in a different scale and form. Through these “memory protectors,” Maalouf expresses lineage: a structure that has shifted meaning as it travels through memory, migration, and time.

Rather than mourning what fades, Maalouf’s work speculates on how objects live on by changing. A cherry-shaped dimmer switch nods to the fruit trees in the orchards scattered around the home; a limestone fossil mimics the layered impressions speckled throughout Lebanon. These pieces do not attempt to freeze memory in place, but to hold it gently and knowingly as it continues to move. Each component is a reminder of a place that lives on in memory and practice.

Bechara Maalouf is a Lebanese-American visual artist and furniture designer based in Queens, New York. He focuses on the present time, illuminating how things endure not through perfect preservation, but through transformation.