Kulturrummet as a Situated Spatial Practice
Parul Ghosh
Charbel Khadra
Abbas Sbeity
I'm Abbas Sbeity (b. 1991, Lebanon), a designer, curator, and cultural practitioner based in Helsingborg, Sweden. My practice explores the intersections of design, urban life, and participatory culture through artistic, curatorial, and research-driven methods.
My independent curatorial work investigates social, political, and spatial issues by engaging communities in co-creation and critical dialogue.
I co-founded Kulturrummet, a grassroots platform and space dedicated to multidisciplinary, site-specific, and community-driven cultural programs.
As the founder and strategist at Creative Insights Studio, I offer consultancy services in design, strategy, and research, primarily for the public and civic sectors.
I lecture in Design Theory and Management at Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (Lebanon) and serve as a guest lecturer in Embedded Design at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University (Sweden).
My academic background includes CuratorLab at Konstfack in Stockholm (2025), an MA in Design from ALBA, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Lebanese University. I bring extensive experience in cultural management, including leading learning programs and grant schemes for artists, journalists, and cultural practitioners across the MENA region.
In Lebanon, I founded Architects for Change (2014–2019) and am a board member of the MENA Design Research Center, where I managed and programmed four editions of Beirut Design Week (2015–2019).
Curating Elsewhere: Kulturrummet as a Situated Spatial Practice is a curatorial and spatial practice embedded in Söder, a stigmatized and marginalized neighborhood in Helsingborg, Sweden. It emerges from more than 3 years of working in placemaking and public space in the neighborhood, where we have curated events and cultural interventions with local communities, artists, associations, and municipal actors. In 2025, we established a physical site, a ground-floor space that serves as an exhibition, workshop, and shared studio.
Kulturrummet is a place and a process: a testing ground for rethinking cultural infrastructures in contexts often overlooked by dominant narratives of urban development and creative economy. It challenges the idea that cultural value must be centralized, spectacular, or institutional. Instead, it attends to the everyday, proximity, care, and cultural action as forms of spatial resistance. The practice engages with participatory programming, feminist hosting, and learning-by-doing approaches rooted in community and lived experience.
Kulturrummet explores how cultural infrastructure can emerge from within communities, rather than being imposed from above. We curate, host, and produce programs that move between contemporary art, design, urban practices, and social engagement. Our early activities have included public workshops, curated events, and capacity-building sessions for local associations and artists.
Kulturrummet is grounded in values of care, accessibility, and co-creation. It aims to support artistic and civic imagination in taking space. We strive to challenge the boundaries of geography, discourse, and belonging by fostering opportunities for collaboration, reflection, and shared cultural production.
We seek to expand this approach in dialogue with other spatial and curatorial practices across Europe. We are interested in residencies, co-learning formats, or activations that invite neighborhood-based engagement elsewhere.