Walid Sadek. Place at Last

Beirut Art Center is proud to present the first major solo exhibition by Lebanese artist and writer Walid Sadek in Lebanon, Place at Last. The exhibition features works elaborated by Sadek since 2004, which include printed texts, silk-screened texts on walls as well as floor and wall objects. The exhibited works constitute three related clusters which represent a summation of Sadek’s research in art and writing into the conditions of living a protracted civil-war.

The first cluster, titled Learning to See Less, traces an itinerary for eyes, stamped with violence, that learn to see the world through near-blindness. The second, titled Love is Blind, approaches the duration of a protracted civil-war as a maker of un-hopeful survivors inhabiting intimate ruins. The third cluster, Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse, considers whether the work of mourning can be initiated in the presence of an object in excess, namely a non-communal corpse, and whether we can learn to linger with the unbridgeable sufferance of the other.

Born in 1966, Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. His early work investigates the violent legacies of the Lebanese civil war as partially and inadequately seen and experienced by a young Christian-born Lebanese: I Once Dreamt I was a Phoenix (1995); Half-a-Man (1995); Home Play (1996); The Last Days of Summer (1997). He later began to posit, mostly in theoretical texts, ways of understanding the complexity of lingering civil strife in times of relative social and economical stability: A Matter of Words (2002); From Excavation to Dispersion: Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon (2003); The Acquisition of Death: the Ends of Art and Dwelling in Lebanon (2004). His recent written work endeavors to structure a theory for a post-war society disinclined to resume normative living: From Image to Corpse (2006); Place at Last (2007); Seeing Rude and Erudite (2007); Peddling Time When Standing Still; art remains in Lebanon and the globalization that was (2009). Concomitantly, a number of installations propose a poetics for a social experience governed by uneasy contiguity with the remnants and consequences of violence: Love is Blind (2006); Dear Stephen (2006); Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse (2007); Learning to See Less (2009).

Walid Sadek is currently associate professor at the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut.

Walid Sadek
Place at Last