Zena Ghossoub

Biography

Zena Ghossoub born 28 November 1983, Zalka, Beirut, Lebanon) is a Lebanese visual artist, painter, sculptor, and poet, and the founder of GHZ ART Gallery. She works across painting, sculpture, and installation art, exploring themes of transformation, identity, and the human experience.

Early Life and Education

Ghossoub developed an early interest in art, mythology, and philosophy. She pursued formal art studies and later established a multidisciplinary practice that integrates traditional techniques with contemporary experimentation. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Lebanese University, Faculty of Fine Arts II, and a degree in Interior Design from Notre Dame University. She later obtained a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Arts from the Lebanese University, where she presented a thesis titled The Impact of Cybernetics on Arts in the 1960s.

Career and Artistic Style

Ghossoub began exhibiting her work in Lebanon during the early 2010s. She participated in the Visual Art Forum IV (2013) and Visual Art Forum V (2014), organized by the Lebanese Artists Association for Painters and Sculptors (LAAPS) in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Beirut. Her paintings The Cold War (2013) and The Cocoon Woman (2014) were exhibited during these events.

In 2016, she executed the bronze sculpture Metamorphosis (H: 50 cm, 18×33 cm), which was exhibited in Hazmieh and later acquired by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture.

Her 2018 sculpture Kuberneto, exhibited at the Institut Francais du Liban and the Lebanese University, was featured in L’Orient-Le Jour, which described the work as exploring “the alienation of modern man by technology and machines, as well as their impact on our society.

Ghossoub’s artistic approach blends science, nature, and technology with reflections on human psychology and the social effects of mechanization. Her works often investigate how technological progress reshapes emotional, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions of life. Through organic forms and layered materials, she evokes the dialogue between inner and outer transformation.

About Artwork

Transformation is not a subject I illustrate, it is the operating principle behind everything I make. I use it to investigate identity, existence, and the porous boundary between the physical, the technological, and the spiritual: three states that don't stay separate long enough to be studied apart. Each continually reshapes what the others can hold.

Metamorphosis began this investigation through the body. In these drawings, paintings, and sculptures, the body appears not as a finished form but as a structure holding several states at once; contained and dissolving, one stage visible through the next. The body, here, is a process rather than a portrait of one.

That principle is a form holding multiple states simultaneously; didn't stay confined to flesh. It became the question I carried into a different kind of body: one built from circuitry rather than tissue, where the transformation under study shifted from the body itself to the presence surrounding it; what happens to someone's sense of being there once that presence starts being read, and answered, by something that isn't human.

Kuberneto is where that question takes physical form. A sensor-driven sculpture built with light, sound, and motion, it stays dormant until it registers a viewer nearby, then responds in real time to their proximity and movement. The viewer doesn't observe Kuberneto, they activate it. That shift is the work's real subject: attention that has learned to wait for a system's response before it counts as presence. The more fluently these systems answer us, the less fluently we answer each other.

I don't resolve this. The same responsiveness that lets Kuberneto meet a viewer with light and sound is reshaping how we meet one another; global in reach, intimate in effect, and still uncertain in what it costs. My work holds that contradiction open, because the transformation it describes is still in progress, in the object and in whoever stands in front of it.

Artistic Practice

I work across painting, sculpture, installation, and poetry — moving between mediums that fix a transformation in place, like the bronze of Metamorphosis, and ones that only complete themselves in response to a viewer, like the sensor-driven Kuberneto. A tangled, threadlike line runs underneath most of the work — drawn, painted, sometimes left bare over color — behaving like wiring, veining, or woven structure. I return to that same architecture across different materials and palettes, treating process itself as part of the argument: how transformation actually happens, in a body, a belief system, or a machine.

Techniques & Materials

I build surfaces in layers — thin, translucent passages set against ridges of impasto — so the canvas keeps a visible record of its own making. Over or within that, I draw a tangled, threadlike line, sometimes in ink, sometimes carved back into wet paint, that behaves like wiring or veining rather than outline. In sculpture, I move between traditional casting, as in the bronze of Metamorphosis, and constructed systems wired with sensors, motors, light, and sound, as in Kuberneto, where the technique itself — responsiveness — becomes part of the work's meaning.