Lara Habib Kobeissi: Nazar (نَظَر)

LADA is partnering with Shubbak Festival 2025 to present Lara Habib Kobeissi’s Nazar, a one-to-one VR performance that engages all five senses in a transformative ritual rooted in protection practices from Southern Lebanon.

Nazar takes participants on an intimate journey into a digital reconstruction of the creator’s childhood home, exploring the complexities of her relationship with her mother over three decades marked by regional conflicts and migration.

Part memoir and part immersive archive, Nazar delves into evil eye rituals passed down through generations, communicated primarily through touch. The experience unfolds as experiential poetry, culminating in a multi-sensory choreography with audio-recordings of surveillance drones, motion-captured gestures, and chants that seal a covenant between a people and their land, moon, stars and vines.

Rooted in research into Southern Lebanon’s protection practices, Nazar explores innovative ways to digitally archive intangible cultural heritage in an act of soft resistance aimed at restoring the body, collective memory, and intangible heritage. As you engage with this immersive experience, you’ll encounter a strange gaze symbolizing slow violence, prompting deep reflection on the preservation of cultural practices and the role of tactility in a world growing increasingly digital and isolated.

Nazar is generously supported by the British Council and Arts Council England.