Drawing inspiration from her native Beirut, Zena Assi’s work portrays the socio-cultural aspects and intense emotions of contemporary urban society such as migration and memory. Inspired by Goya in his depiction of suffering, Assi illustrates the corruption-made humanitarian crisis facing present-day Lebanon. In Memento Mori, she depicts an exhausted over-burdened woman, sitting next to a skeleton. An age-old artistic reference to the inevitability of death, Assi gives a contemporary and local twist on this classic depiction, adding layers of meaning both symbolically and literally with the collaged mixed media.