Saturday January 2024, 5 pm

Poetry reading by Hussein Nassereddine and Chahla Chafiq

As part of the exhibition The Earth has Shifted, and on the occasion of the Nuits de la lecture 2024 event, L’Atlas organises a poetry reading with the artist Hussein Nassereddine and the writer Chahla Chafiq, followed by a conversation with the participants. A guided tour of the exhibition will precede the event.

Hussein Nassereddine, “Laughing on the River, Your Eyes Drown in Tears”

Performance, 35 minutes
In Arabic with French subtitles
Commissioned by Jameel Art Center, Dubaï, 2023

As if narrating to an audience gathered around water, artist Hussein Nassereddine orates stories of bygone poetry, and of poets whose jaws would appear brimming with marble. His fabulations are at once timeless and shaped by specific historical encounters, mirroring the complex rapport between the Arabic language, poetics and water. The artist invites us to long desert nights where sea waves wash over poets’ bodies, and then turn into silver shimmering atop ponds, foreseeing the glimmer on the surface of rivers, alongside which kingdoms and their luscious gardens would come to be built centuries later. Tears turn to ponds, and ponds dissipate over time. Nothing remains but the wet voice of the poet, and librarians’ records held in dry books, and historians’ accounts written on papers flooding with the blue of rivers and springs. This lecture-performance, held in Arabic with French subtitles, draws out from Nassereddine’s examination of histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction, water and image-making.

Chahla Chafiq was born and raised in Iran. Exiled since 1982, she lives in France, where she writes essays, novels, short stories and poems in French. Among her works : Le Rendez-vous iranien de Simone de Beauvoir (essay, iXe, 2019), Demande au miroir (novel, L’Âge d’Homme, 2015), Chemins et brouillard (short stories, Métropolis, 2005). Some of her poetic pieces hav been published in reviews (Sarrazine, 2023) or anthologies (Frontières ad libitum, IDEM, 2023). A bilingual volume of poetry is about to be published.

Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Beirut (Lebanon), and Paris (France). His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments – some verbal, some sonic, some tactile – rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making. His works, performances and texts have been presented in museums, biennales and institutions around the world, including Home Works Forum 9 (2024),  Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2023), Jameel Art Center (2022), MISC Athens (2021), and Beirut Art Center (2020), Fondazione MAXXI (2018) among others. His first book How To See The Columns As Palm Trees was published in 2020 with independent publishers Kayfa ta.