Memory is a fickle, fragmentary thing. Highly selective, it is easily distorted or obscured by contemporary or subsequent events, personal or public pressures, fear or hurt, as well as the necessity of forgetting. Since the end of the civil war in 1990, Beirut has become a fertile ground for radical and innovative art making. Out of Beirut introduces work from 18 contemporary Lebanese artists who explore themes such as memory, change, loss and reclamation using photography, video, film, and text. By stepping outside their country and its recent past, better to absorb its impact, the artists have taken the physical and social fabric of their city as their subject, looking at ways that they and the residents of Beirut have responded to the political events that have occurred all around them.

In her documentary-style video, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere made in 2003, 13 years after the end of the war film-maker Lamia Joreige walks through the districts around the Green Line which used to divide east and west Beirut to "map a landscape of memory". As if they were fragments of the shelled buildings that still dot the city, she explores the fragments of truth that form memory, interspersing interviews with residents of the former demarcation zone with everyday street scenes. Normal life carries on: a boy skips down a street, cars hoot their horns, a woman serves coffee, and men play dice barely looking up from their game to talk of massacres witnessed. The artist asks the same question of all she meets, "Do you know anyone who was kidnapped here during the war?"

Another video installation, Distracted Bullets, Symptomatic Video Number 1, 2005, by filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, maps' the city itself with panoramic night-time views that record religious and civic holidays celebrated by fireworks and shooting. Flashes and flares, and sounds of fireworks and firearms intermingle, the firearms left over from a partial disarmament in 1994.

The muffled sounds of gunfire coming from this video provide an eloquent if unexpected connection to Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre's Summer 88 hanging nearby. Yacoub's snapshots', a series of eight black-and-white photographs taken as she accompanied a photojournalist around war-torn Beirut in 1988, show shells of buildings, empty of people, empty of life: a devastated cityscape. A second work by artists Hadjithomas and Joreige is a rack of damaged postcards produced from burnt negatives. The title says it all. Postcards of War Wonder Beirut: The story of a pyromaniac photographer suggests the destruction of buildings from bombings and street battles.

Out of Beirut is a huge and ambitious project that works on many levels: political, personal, historical, language and art. Encompassing thoughts and memories of what was lost during the wars, the faces never forgotten and lost futures impossible to imagine, it takes us further, into the aspirations of a people and a country with a war-torn past, a present, and a future.