Beirut does not feel like a conservative place. The girls wear shorts up to here and hair down to there. Cocktails are consumed by the gallon, and there is a rumbustious, if incestuous, arts scene. But this week, the limits of Lebanon's liberal attitude to art were tested by images of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Shia group Hezbollah, and a smiling Barbie doll.

Some photographs, featuring Barbie dolls and a garish Middle Eastern mishmash of political and religious iconography, were removed from a high-profile exhibition of work by the Lebanese artist Jocelyne Saab by the gallery over fears that they could “create sectarian strife”, according to Nasri N. Sayegh, the artist's spokesperson. The Sense, Icons and Sensitivity show is about what Saab calls “the other side of Orientalism”, exploring the way that the East views Western women. Saab says she sought to do this with populism and humour, with “neo pop art” images of Barbie representing the Western woman, all uncovered hair and matching accessories.

But for the Planet Discovery gallery in Beirut, pictures of Barbie cavorting wearing only Iraqi bank notes, with a crucified Ken doll, and with Christ and Nasrallah memorabilia, were too much. The gallery is part of the huge project to rebuild Beirut after the civil war. It is run by Solidere, the huge regeneration company founded by Rafik Hariri, the Prime Minister, who was assassinated in 2005. “Politics and religion are two very sensitive issues that we don't want to undermine,” a gallery representative said.

Saab, a former war reporter, who has spent the past 40 years making feature films, documentaries and images focusing on human rights, is angry. “I was offered the exhibition after the gallery had seen all the photographs,” she explains. “I said: ‘This is a mistake; if you see the other photos they are in the same vein',” she says. “But they came and violently took [the pictures] off in front of me.”

Particularly galling for the artist - and particularly telling about Lebanon - is that the show had already opened with all the photographs in place, and no one had made any complaints. There had even been representatives of the Ministry of Culture at the launch party, who had spoken approvingly of the pictures and suggested a tour to Europe.

Hezbollah, too, was sanguine about the images of its leader in the company of the plastic princess. It had made no complaint. Kitsch images of Nasrallah in unexpected contexts are by no means rare in Lebanon. In any market one can easily pick up a Nasrallah paperweight, bracelet or cigarette lighter.

But in Lebanon, the state is weak and Hezbollah, which is part of the opposition coalition in government, is strong. So, for an artist, official approval by the Ministry of Culture is no guarantee that pictures will stay on display. Even the possibility that Hezbollah might take issue with the pictures is enough to scare gallery owners into self-censorship.

At a concurrent exhibition, another gallerist also refused to show the banned images. “It is too serious that we are dealing with the conflict between the East and the West,” he says. While lamenting such self-censorship, he says that this is “a country that has a lot of fear and this is how fundamentalist groups make people afraid”.

Saab, showing the remaining pictures in Planet Discovery, gesticulates at the empty spaces. “Look,” she says, “this is an installation in itself.” The sad thing, she says, is that the censors missed the point of The American-Israeli Playground, the picture with Christ, Nasrallah and Barbie. “It was meant to show a graveyard,” she said, “to show the way the Americans and Israelis use Lebanon,” leaving many dead in the country's conflicts.

She believes that such images can be cathartic for a society. “The woman who came and moved the picture was so angry, and by taking the image away she has trapped that anger. It could have helped Lebanon to move on.”

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