FIELD MEETING TAKE 6: THINKING COLLECTIONS
Bassem Saad & Edwin Nasr (Beirut)
This Ritual I Wish You Could See (Render & File)
Lecture-Performance
Synopsis: A lecture-performance by the collaborating artist duo that deals with rituals of war in the rendered image. The performance focuses on various political parties in the Middle East and their uses of virtual reality and video games in juxtaposition to Western military-entertainment mindsets. It takes the form of a documentary text made up of an ascending sequence of visual, sonic, and prose fragments. Applying the imagery of spiritual figures, as well as the masculinity of soldiers in computer-generated war environments, the simulations of sites and territories emphasize a variety of central historical, geopolitical, and identitarian narratives.
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Edwin Nasr is an independent writer/researcher and former journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon. His writings, which focus on decolonial praxis, queer subjectivities, and radical political formations, have been featured in publications such as The Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, ArteEast, Muftah Magazine, Reorient, and Counterpunch. Nasr has recently given a talk at Harvard University VES and is currently the communications coordinator at Ashkal Alwan, a non-profit committed to contemporary artistic practice, production, and research.
Bassem Saad is an artist, writer and researcher whose practice often grapples with identity-based space, knowledge production, architectures of labor, market exchanges, and interfaces including affect or bodily pleasure. He is the current resident fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut and in 2018, Saad spoke at the Harvard University VES and showed his work in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennial. His video works have been screened in Beirut, Paris, and Rimini.
