Sfeir-Semler is celebrating the 40th year of her eponymous gallery, which she opened first in Hamburg in 1985, then in her birth city of Beirut in 2005, as the Lebanese capital opened up after years of civil war. It was at that point too that she began to prioritise artists of the Arab world; and as the artworld’s own axis has shifted eastwards of late, Sfeir-Semler’s roster is being more widely recognised as stellar. While this year saw shows from Etel Adnan, Marwan Rechmanoui and Ian Hamilton Finlay, she marked the anniversary with group shows across the Hamburg and Beirut spaces, exhibitions that ignored neither present political realities nor fraught pasts, with works coming from both an older generation (a series of birthday cakes to regional dictators and tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan photographed by Walid Raad; Al Aqsa Park, a 2006 animation by Wael Shawky concerning Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock) and artists Sfeir-Semler has more recently adopted (WshWsh, a 2025 sound installation by Lawrence Abu Hamdan based on the Umayyad fountains of Damascus, and Rayyane Tabet’s neon AMNES(T)IA, 2025).