In a war-torn historic house-turned-museum in Beirut, archives of Lebanon’s troubled past merge with artistic renderings of its grim present to depict a country seemingly in perpetual turmoil.

Newspaper clippings, film negatives and diary entries from the years leading up to Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war tell a story of government corruption, public sector strikes and student protests.

They will be shown alongside contemporary images, videos and art installations that illustrate contemporary Lebanon in the grip of political paralysis and the worst economic crisis of all time.

“Allo, Beirut?”, which premiered Thursday and runs until 2023, seeks to reveal the decades-old rot at the heart of Lebanon’s downward spiral, said exhibition director Delphine Abirached Darmency.

“Sometimes it’s weird to explain what we’re experiencing without knowing what happened in the past,” she said.

“Beirut is suffering, we are suffering,” she added, arguing that much of Lebanon’s misery is rooted in the problems of a bygone era.

The exhibition arose in part from the discovery of the archives of the late billionaire Jean Prosper Gay-Para, who owned the once famous Les Caves du Roy nightclub and is widely regarded as a symbol of Lebanon’s golden era before the civil war.

“These sick minds obsessed with making money,” Gay-Para writes in a text on display about the country’s political elite.

That sentiment is still shared by a population reeling from the unprecedented economic crisis that’s been widely blamed on the country’s businessmen and political barons.

Gay-Para “spoke in the 1960s about what we live today,” Darmency said.

More than three decades after a devastating civil war, Lebanon is reeling from a financial crisis that has led to a rise in poverty as the currency has lost more than 90 percent of its value on the black market.

Beirut continues to be scarred by the massive 2020 port port explosion of a heap of ammonium nitrate, killing more than 200 people and fueling a population exodus on a scale similar to that experienced during the civil war.

Alongside the archive material, the show features installations by young Lebanese artists who have been asked to express their feelings about their city.

Rawane Nassif has made a short documentary about the neighborhood of Beirut she grew up in, returning this year after two decades to take care of her ailing parents, both of whom have since passed away.

“The film shows the state of loss,” the 38-year-old anthropologist and filmmaker told AFP. “Beirut mourns. It mourns the death of its people and the death of all the opportunities it once had.”

Visual artist Raoul Mallat, 28, also explored grief in a short film that combines family archive footage from his childhood with recent footage from Beirut.

“This project really helped me mourn some aspects of my city that I will not find again,” he said.

The exhibition venue itself is a testament to Lebanon’s complicated past. Known as the Yellow House, the three-story Beit Beirut was built in the 1920s by renowned architect Youssef Bey Aftimos.

Dotted with bullet holes and other civil war damage, it stands next to the so-called “Green Line” that divided Beirut’s Muslim and Christian quarters during the conflict.

It has been renovated and transformed into a museum and cultural space, which opened temporarily in 2017. Due to difficulties it was closed again, but the new exhibition has reopened it to the public.

Holes in the walls once used by wartime gunmen were lined with screens showing footage of the unprecedented 2019 protest movement demanding sweeping political change before running out of breath.

One of the rooms is decorated with worn furniture and vandalized objects collected from the now-abandoned Les Caves du Roy nightclub to recreate the room from Beirut’s heyday.

The installation by the Lebanese artists Rola Abu Darwish and Rana Abbout aims to make a symbolic statement about the rubble and the turbulent existence of Lebanon.

“Beirut is built on rubble,” said Abu Darwish, 38. “For me, one of the key elements of Beirut is rubble.

“It’s part of where we live, how we live and who we are. And I have a feeling we’re going to be making more rubble in the direction we’re going.”