A general view of Beirut‘s Sursock Museum in the Lebanese capital.

From nighttime walks around the city to workshops on art conservation, Beirut’s grandiose Sursock Museum reopens this week as Lebanon’s first interactive museum of contemporary art.

Closed for eight years for major renovation work, the impressive mansion-turned-museum is to open to the public from Thursday, free of charge, with exhibits honoring the history of art in Beirut.

The walls have been adorned with photographs from Lebanese collector Fouad Debbas and vibrant, geometric paintings from the country’s “golden era” in the 1960s.

Outside, two grand white staircases curve upwards in an arch above the entrance, overlooking a spacious mezzanine to be used for a host of activities.

“For a lot of people, a museum is a place to visit and to look. We hope that this museum will be more than this — that it’ll be a place for interaction,” said Tarek Mitri, who chairs the museum’s committee.

Among the plans are nighttime walks throughout Beirut hosted by local artists and photography classes for teenagers.

The projects are a welcome innovation for Beirut residents, whose city has few museums of any kind and little public space.

“Although we are a museum, we should be seen as a space for exchange, for encounter,” said museum director Zeina Arida.

“We lack public spaces, spaces where we can quarrel, get along, where we can express without getting into conflict,” Arida told AFP.

The Sursock Museum started out life as a mansion built in 1912.

It first opened its doors as a museum in 1961, in accordance with the will of its owner Nicholas Sursock who wanted his grand home transformed after his death.

“The museum was very active since it opened in 1961 until the beginning of the civil war” in 1975, showcasing both international and local artists, Arida said.

From the museum’s sleek newly-constructed wings to the bright paintings on its walls, Sursock is a testament to “the history of art in Beirut,” said the head of collections, Yasmine Chemali. “It’s the first museum of modern and contemporary art in Beirut and this collection really shows the history of art,” she said.

The mixed-medium “Gazes at Beirut” collection of photographs, sketches and paintings traces the city’s transformation from a small coastal town during the Ottoman empire to a buzzing metropolis by 1960.

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