It’s always a jolt to see your life reduced to a pile of boxes. A new art installation in the Hangar at UMAM in Beirut recreates exactly that startled feeling when everything is piled up to become a cluster of clutter in the corner of a warehouse, a pile of boxes, shelves and old furniture. My Place in Between was created by Nathalie Harb and Alys Williams, artists from Beirut and London respectively, shown in London earlier this year and now coming to Beirut.

The installation takes as its theme the heartbreaking process of moving house and itself might seem small and stranded in the corner of this echoey space in Ghrobeiyeh. But for anyone who has seen their life, possessions and memories shrunk to a pile of junk, the smallness will resonate.

And there is redemption in the details. The possessions on a bookshelf go from Beatrix Potter to diaries of adult life in a neat visual timeline of a life. And as the viewer insinuates themselves into the work, tiny videos become apparent – a seascape at the bottom of a teacup, a lady asleep on a couch, an older woman visible through a worn patch on an old suitcase, which Alys tells me is a personal reference to the death of her mother. A life emerges from the flotsam and jetsam.

The artists began working together on the project earlier this year, discussing their own manifold experiences of moving house, city and country and creating between them a third character whose life is boxed up in the installation and who is represented by a fabric torso whose material trails through the piece, becoming a sofa and tiny bed, too.

Moving house, says Alys, was a theme that had huge resonance in when they exhibited at the ICA in London, a city boiling with immigrants. “We had a lot of people,” she says, “come up to me afterward and say that they had had a life in a different country, they had moved a lot.” But it is possible that the exhibition has even greater significance for Lebanese people, displaced so often by war and driven to emigrate by tough times. The choice of exhibition space underlines this; the Hangar is also collecting an archive of civil war documentation, as it is consciously trying to record the Lebanese experience of the conflict.

Exhibiting in the south of Beirut, as opposed to richer and cosmopolitan areas like Gemmayzeh or Achrafieh, gives the experience a different feel also. Nathalie Harb says that when she first exhibited at the Hangar three years ago, the more usual art-viewing crowd were less willing to come down, although “people who were interested came.” But people from the neighborhood, she says, did come, and they asked about what the art (another abstract installation) was, and why it existed. But she says, on the whole, they participated without asking themselves too many questions, which is says Harb, satisfying for an artist who tries to express herself through images.

This work, she adds, fits into Lebanon’s artistic dialogue that is inevitably influenced by conflict and displacement. “So much work here,” she says, “is about memory and about transport. It was good to work in a space that is an archive and that has this industrial structure.”

I leave them putting the finishing touches to the exhibit, rearranging the Scrabble tiles, the annotated texts and the battered furniture, some of which came from Hangar’s attic, creating a life story out of hundreds of tiny fragments.

My Place in Between is at UMAM until November 5. For more information click here.