HUSSEIN NASSEREDDINE

From February 1 to 4, 2024, Fondazione Zucchelli in Bologna hosted the exhibition “Deserted Island (on dropping bomb*shells)”, organised by Studio Stuppia in collaboration with OOU Nomadic Gallery, with support of Galleria d’arte PORTANOVA12 and Cassata Drone Expanded Archive. The exhibition, curated by Dušan Smodej and Carmen Lorenzetti, focuses on themes such as the environment, war, censorship, mass media, and involves seven different international artists/collectives. Through the convergence of these different narrative styles, the exhibition project aims to recreate a situation of peace and serenity, that typical calm one experiences before (or after) a storm.
Hussein Nassereddine, one of the artists involved, will presents the project “Two Birds, Sleeping”.

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You describe yourself as a multidisciplinary artist working in installation, writing, video and performance originating from a practice around language. How did you start, though? Which medium came first? And how do they build on top of each other?

Hussein Nassereddine: It is hard to define the point in which it started. There is a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is that Language came first, then mediums, such as installation, video, or performance all came after.

The long answer is that growing up, my parents were displaced from their hometown in the Lebanese south, then occupied by Israeli forces. They had to move to the capital, Beirut, and it is where I was born in the early 90’s, while our town was still occupied. For 7 years, growing up, our relatives would come to our house in Beirut, and narrate with their voices the town that they left and no longer had access to. They would sing, and describe the houses, the trees, and the roads, forming a meticulous oral map of the place. I had created a mental image of that place, and developed a sensitivity towards these songs and improvised poems. In the year 2000, the south was finally liberated, and I was eager to see this place that I had memorized mentally and sonically. When we arrived, we found that the village had been completely destroyed, and what remained was only that oral image that I had. I sometimes jokingly say that this was the moment where I became an artist.

Your Instagram username is @photo.hussein. Do you see a connection between photography and language, words, poetry? Your sound installation “Two Birds, Sleeping”, that is going to be a part of “Deserted Island (on dropping bomb*shells)”, an exhibition curated by Dušan Smodej and Carmen Lorenzetti, opening from February 1 to 4, 2024, at Fondazione Zucchelli, is based on this concept. Can you tell us more about the work?

HN: The name ‘photo.hussein’ was inspired by photography studios in Beirut in the last century, where a photographer named Samir, or Samira for example, would automatically call their studio “Photo Samir” or “Photo Samira”. I thought it was funny when I created my account and never changed it since.

The Idea of creating an Image without visuals, is at the core of my work, and of “Two Birds, Sleeping” in particular. To go back to the story I told in the first question, “Two Birds, Sleeping” is an audio recorded walk, with my brother, in the same village, 22 years after that moment I described earlier. The walk, and our conversation, digs into the depth of these oral accounts, and questions the ways in which we can create, with language, places that we have never seen. It also explores the history of “Descriptive Poetry”, a practice that was present in ancient Arabic literature, where poets were sent to describe places. The work is set against a sonic background of a love song from the last century (released around the same time the south occupation started). The song is a 40 min rehearsal tape, between the singer and the composer, that I amplified on loudspeakers across the village as we walk. The song echoed in the open landscape of the Lebanese south, mixing with other sounds from other places, all creating a mythical sonicscape as we walked and talked.

The work attempts at exploring this duality, between a real place and its image in language: there is me and my brother, there is the singer and the composer singing the love song in the background, there is the sonic landscape and its echoes, but there are no visual images.

“Photo Hussein” could be a photography studio where you would go to get your photo taken in words and songs.

The exhibition in Bologna reads very politically-charged. Is politics a large topic in your work? You come from a land surrounded by conflict and war, but your work feels calming and poetic.

HN: Afternoon walks with ones you love, while the breeze hits your face in the fading golden sun, is something that no colonizer or occupier can take away from you – no matter how hard they try.

Still from “Two Birds, Sleeping” (2022) – Courtesy of the artist ©

Your latest performance work “Laughing on the River, Your Eyes Drown in Tears” is a sort of a poetry reading. In Arabic culture, poetry is read aloud more often than in the Occident. What is the border between a poetry reading and an artistic performance? Or a lecture-performance for instance.

HN: In my work poetry is always used as a medium, as a carrier for Ideas and feelings and not as the end result. This is why I am an artist not a poet.

In the performance, poetry is used as a historic reference, and a medium that works with other mediums such as songs, sculpture, and works on paper that are present in the performance set up. The figure of the poet as a narrator of times and places (especially in Arabic literature) is something that was important in this performance. I wanted to narrate and to describe the history of water in language, places and fountains long gone, and my own relation with the river, time, and History.

The performance goes from Arabic poems of pre-islamic times, to texts I wrote, to love songs from the arab world’s golden era of Pop, to oral tales from villages, to theories on the lexicon of vision in the arabic language (viewing, seeing, glancing, perceiving, looking etc… – The Arabic language has about a hundred verbs to describe someone seeing something) and how that affects our perception of time.

Still from “A King Made Of Nothing” (2022) – Courtesy of the artist ©

You’re based between Paris and Beirut. The connection between those two cities is historical, but would you say it’s growing stronger or weaker? Why do you move between the two cities?

HN: Paris and Beirut are both cities with very vivid artistic histories. I have my studio in Beirut, and I am very much attached to this city on many levels. I spend my time there producing works and exploring new mediums and materials. The lebanese south is also a place of inspiration that always finds its way in my works, in its geography and its oral histories. I like how time functions there. Paris is a place that allows me to think and to reflect, and that allows me to be in contact with many different artistic practices, and a relation to history that is very different from what I experienced in my home country. Encounters in these two cities are also very different, I try to learn from both.

What are your plans for the future?

HN: I plan to work further around these themes, with new works that explore language, sound, the human voice and time. “Laughing on the River, Your Eyes Drown in Tears” will be touring in a few shows and countries this year, and I plan to start working on a new body of work that cumulates my last two years’ research on singers and time.

The English translation of my first book “How to see palace pillars as if they were palm trees” (Arabic copy published in 2020 by Kayfa ta) is coming out soon alongside other publications that I am currently working on that will hopefully be published soon as well.

Cover image: Hussein Nassereddine, photo by Vartan Serayderian, courtesy of the artist.