Nov 04, 2022 | 06:00 pm
Impulse III
Walid Sadek is an artist and writer. His early work is an attempt to assess the lingering familial legacies of the Lebanese civil war. He then posits ways of understanding the complexity of lingering civil strife in times of relative social and economic stability. His later work, between 2006 and 2016, proposes a theory for a post-war society disinclined to resume normative living. In recent years, sensing a fundamental socio-political and intellectual change in the country, Sadek decides to conclude his post-war work which up until then grappled with the conditions of living in a “protracted now” and begins to theorize the conditions of living in a time after the time of post war, during which the memories of war are reduced to empty ciphers that can no longer constitute a shared history. Walid Sadek is professor in the Department of Fine arts and Art history at the American University of Beirut.
Abstract
I would like to step back and describe, while theorizing, the figure of the non- posthumous survivor that lives under the conditions of a protracted post-war in order to ask what remains of it in the time after, the time after the time of post war and concentrate on one pressing question: What figure, and what body, when history is apprehended as horrific mise-en-abime.
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