"Personnages" is the first museum retrospective dedicated to the Franco - Palestinian artist Maliheh Afnan (Haifa, 1935 - London, 2016). A figure still little known to the art public, in five decades of intense activity Afnan has been a diasporic witness to the upheavals and destinies that have characterized the world of the Mediterranean Middle East.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by an evocative series of drawings, Personnages, made over several years and executed by Afnan in mixed media, in which a succession of faces and human figures appear.
The representations within the works simulate a crowd of ghostly presences through which the artist returns fragments of his own experience in the troubled path of twentieth-century Middle Eastern events. Each work tells a face, a possible memory and a forgotten history , alluding to the uprooting from one's own culture and identity as a not only historical but also existential dimension of human destiny.
The exhibition path presented at the MAN is characterized by a series of enigmatic works performed by the artist on different types of supports and using different techniques including glazing, combustion and plaster reliefs. Also on display are two works from the seventies, cartoons subject to a combustion process that alludes to the contemporary drama of the Civil War in Lebanon, and an installation, built using ancient Bahá'í books, a religious cult founded by Bahá ' u'lláh in the 19th century and Afnan family's cultural bed.
The tour ends with a showcase that presents a selection of sketches and drawings in small format. From these sketches an aspect emerges that runs through all the artist's work, the perception of the tragic as indissoluble from the dimension of humor and irony.

Born in Palestine to Persian parents of Bahá'í religious tradition, Afnan has spent a diasporic existence, from the Mediterranean shores of Palestine and Lebanon to the United States, from Kuwait to France and England. It is precisely the historical and social events from the 1940s onwards in the Middle East that characterize the artist's artistic career, a witness to the traumatic events of those decades, such as the devastation of the Civil War in Lebanon.