Beirut's wounds on show in display of art damaged by port blast

Nayla Romanos Iliya’s sculpture Entangled Love had been in the lobby of Beirut’s five-star Le Gray hotel a few hundred metres from the port. The explosion gutted the building, badly damaged the piece and sent Iliya into “a coma-like state”, she said. “I was not able to function, I was not interested to work, unable to create anything, unable to think, it was too much to cope with,” she said. “The fact of proposing to show art that probably endured the same thing I did was the magic formula for me. I felt like blood was running again in my veins.”