Nadia Bou Ali will be joined by poet and scholar Mohammed Nassereddine to read and discuss extracts from his Arab translation of her 2019 book, Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic. The book is an ambitious attempt to reorient debates around Arab culture and global modernity in relation to psychoanalysis, capitalism, and universality. It offers the first psychoanalytic reading of 19th-century works written during the nahda movement by Ahmad Faris Shidyaq (1805–87) and Butrus al-Bustani (1819–83), showing how their writing forged a curious relationship between language and politics – a relation driven by a desire for as well as anxiety about modernity.
The readings will be followed by a conversation with the audience and book signing.
The discussion will be in both English and Arabic.
Barzakh welcomes wheelchair users.
This event is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) for the 2023 Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject?
The discussion will take place in English and Arabic
ينضم إلى نادية بو علي الشاعر والباحث محمد ناصر الدين لقراءة ومناقشة مقتطفات من ترجمته العربية لكتابها الذي صدر عام 2019، التحليل النفسي وحب اللغة العربية. الكتاب محاولة طموحة لإعادة توجيه النقاشات حول الثقافة العربية والحداثة العالمية بعلاقتهما بالتحليل النفسي والرأسمالية والكونية. يقدم الكتاب أول قراءة تحليلية نفسية لأعمال النهضة في القرن التاسع عشر التي كتبها أحمد فارس الشدياق (1805-1887) وبطرس البستاني (1819-1883)، موضحاً كيف شكلت كتاباتهما علاقة غريبة بين اللغة والسياسة – علاقة مدفوعة بالرغبة للحداثة وقلقها
ويلي القراءات نقاش مع الحضور وتوقيع للكتاب
ستكون المناقشة باللغتين الإنجليزية والعربية
يرحب برزخ بالمقعدين
ينظم هذه الندوة معهد بيروت للتحليل النقدي والبحوث للمدرسة الصيفية لعام 2023، هل يوجد ذات ثورية؟
In this talk, Natasha Gasparian will review the postcolonial and decolonial reception of avant-garde historiography to reconsider the definitions operative in the rejection of the category. Positing the asynchronicity of avant-gardes as a constitutive, but historically overdetermined, feature of capitalist modernity, she aims to recover the political valence of the term and argue for its continued relevance for emancipatory struggles worldwide, notably here the ongoing struggle for the liberation of Palestine, which previously comprised a distinct movement known as the Palestinian Revolution (1967-1982).
Natasha Gasparian is an art historian and curator who works primarily on modern and contemporary art in the Arabic-speaking world. Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and St John’s College, she is pursuing a DPhil in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her criticism has appeared in Artforum, Camera Austria, and Texte Zur Kunst. She is the author of Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess: The Changing of Horses (2020). Recent curatorial projects include “Je suis inculte !” an exhibition of the Sursock Museum’s permanent collection, co-curated with Ziad Kiblawi. Natasha is a member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) and she is currently a doctoral research fellow at the Orient-Institut in Beirut.
This screening is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) in collaboration with the Orient-Institut Beirut for the 2023 Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject? For more information, please visit https://bicarlebanon.org/summerschool/.
In 2022, the economic crisis in Lebanon had led the country to the brink of total collapse. By the time this film began was completed, more than 16 bank heists had been carried out across the country. Assembling interviews with depositors and the critical theorist Nadia Bou Ali along with archival images and TV material, On Bandits tries to make sense of the surreal situation in which the country finds itself.
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Gian Gigi Spina is a writer, researcher, and sometimes an artist. He has worked and taught in pedagogical experiments, including International Art Academy Palestine, Escola da Cidade (São Paulo), the Ionion Center for Arts and Culture (Greece) as well as CILAS (Cairo). He is currently learning Arabic, while speaking five other languages, and is constructing an interdisciplinary body of work on the materialization of power in history, narrative and the public sphere. He was part of the residency programs as Capacete and Documenta 14 in Athens (2017), MMAG Foundation in Amman (2018) as well as GEGENWARTE/PRESENCES in Chemnitz, Germany (2020). Recently, he has participated in the Sheffield Film Festival, Les Rencontre d’Arles and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. His writing has appeared in Mada Masr, Folha de São Paulo, Arts Everywhere, World Policy Institute, and several other independent publications. He lives Cairo and his work can be seen at http://gianspina.com
This event is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) for the 2023 Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject? For more information, please visit https://bicarlebanon.org/summerschool/
This presentation explores processes of de-subjectification and revolutionary subjectivation in the framework of colonial and racializing violence. For this purpose, it chooses the Palestinian diaspora context in Central Europe. The ideas El Bulbeisi presents are based on her 2015 book “Taboo, Trauma and Identity: Subject Constructions of Palestinians in Germany and Switzerland, 1960-2015” (in German).
Sarah El Bulbeisi joined the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) in November 2019 after completing her PhD at the Institute for Near and Middle East Studies at the LMU Munich, Germany. Before joining the OIB, she led the DAAD project “Violence, Forced Migration and Exile: Trauma in the Arab World and in Germany”, a Higher Education Dialogue between Palestinian and Lebanese universities as well as with the LMU Munich. Prior to that, she worked as a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for Near and Middle East Studies at the LMU Munich.
This talk is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) in collaboration with the Center for Arts and Humanities at the American University of Beirut and the Orient-Institut Beirut.
The discussion will take place in English.
الفلسطينيون في أوروبا الوسطى: نزع الخضوع وتشكّل الذات الثورية في سياق العنف الاستعماري / العنصري
يستكشف هذا العرض عمليات نزع الخضوع وتشكل الذات الثورية في إطار العنف الاستعماري والعنصري. لهذا الغرض اختير سياق الشتات الفلسطيني في أوروبا الوسطى. تستند الأفكار التي تقدمها سارة البلبيسي إلى كتابها الصادر عام 2015 بعنوان المحرم والصدمة والهوية: تركيبات الذات للفلسطينيين في ألمانيا وسويسرا، 1960-2015 (باللغة الألمانية)
انضمت سارة البلبيسي إلى المعهد الألماني للأبحاث الشرقية في نوفمبر 2019 بعد حصولها على درجة الدكتوراه في معهد دراسات الشرق الأدنى والأوسط في في ميونيخ، ألمانيا. قبل انضمامها إلى المعهد الألماني ، قادت مشروع العنف والهجرة القسرية والنفي: الصدمة في العالم العربي وفي ألمانيا، وهو حوار التعليم العالي بين الجامعات الفلسطينية واللبنانية وكذلك مع في ميونيخ. قبل ذلك، عملت كمحاضرة وباحثة مشاركة في معهد دراسات الشرق الأدنى والأوسط في ميونيخ
In collaboration with Beirut Art Center, we will be screening two films by Bahar Noorizadeh. The screenings will be followed by a discussion between the artist and Bassem Saad.
Friday June 23, 2023 | Beirut Art Center | 7pm To register for a place, please write intern@beirutartcenter.org
Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future (2023) Single-channel video (30’)
Installation view of Teslaism, Tresor 31 Exhibition, Kraftwerk Berlin, 2022, photo by Helge Mundt
Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future is a third-person racing musical game featuring Elon Musk and his self-driving car/lover and life coach as they drive towards a shareholder meeting in a post-gamified Berlin landscape.
The work takes the newly built Gigafactory in Berlin as a prism to describe the emergence of Teslaism (succeeding post-Fordism) as an upgrade to the system of production and consumption predicated on advanced storytelling, financial worldbuilding, and imagineering “the look of the future.” The Teslaist CEO is a collage artist. Weaving together one tweet, one dance move, one meme after another, he creates a set of perpetually postponed and too-fabulous-to-be-fake narratives to make time make power. If post-industrial Detroit was soundtracked to techno’s futures, the age of Teslaism seeks its own common sonic imaginaries: forms of resistance inhabiting our exceedingly financialized cities.
Teslaism was commissioned for Tresor 31: Techno, Berlin, and the Great Freedom (2022), an exhibition reflecting on three decades of musical evolution, social change, and city development from Berlin to Detroit, told through the lens of techno’s history.
Free to Choose (2023) Single-channel video (36’), text Bahar Noorizadeh, Rudá Babau, and Waste Paper Opera
Still from Free to Choose (2023), courtesy of the artist.
Free to Choose is an operatic financial sci-fi (fi-fi), narrated by Milton Friedman, in which we encounter the credit banking system as a time travelling machine.
In 1997, in post economic crash Hong Kong, Philip Tose, ex-race car driver and CEO of an insolvent company travels to the future to borrow a lump sum from his older self to rescue his business. Hong Kong in 2047 turns out not to be very different from the Hong Kong of “One Country, Two systems”: centralisation has not eradicated nepotism, and activism has become rating activism: young people advocating for free time travel for everyone, including the untrustworthy and the discredited of a corrupt credit system.
In the background is superstar economist and real-life evangelist Milton Friedman’s myth of neoliberalism as represented by Hong Kong: In his long career as a market ideologue and advisor to the conservative governments of the US and the UK, Friedman hailed the city as the modern exemplar of free markets, needless of heavy-handed government planning and control. “If you want to see Capitalism in action, you should go to Hong Kong.”
Much like the economic worlds built in metaverse and gaming platforms today, Hong Kong was the testing ground for the parable of neoliberalism. Once certified in its advanced colony, neoliberalism would return to shape the economic policies of Western powers in the decades to come. In 2023, despite once claiming the highest rate of public housing in the world, Hong Kong now holds one of the deepest wealth gaps and one of the most lucrative real estate markets on the planet.
About the artist Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice looks like for the present. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, a co-authored and socially-connected project that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London.
The discussion will take place in English.
This screening is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) in collaboration with Beirut Art Center for the 2023 Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject?
Joining the 2023 BICAR Summer School virtually, psychoanalysts Gabriel Tupinambá and Mohamed Tal will briefly introduce their recent books, the former’s The Desire of Psychoanalysis: Exercises in Lacanian Thinking (2021) and the latter’s The End of Analysis: Dialectics of Symbolic and Real before entering into a discussion with Nadia Bou Ali about the broader threads of the limits and challenges of psychoanalysis. What is the political import of psychoanalysis in a moment of rampant fantasies of the end (of the world)?
Mohamed Tal is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. He had a private practice in Beirut from 2009 until 2022, when he moved to Dubai to practice. He is an affiliate of the Rome Institute and a member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). Dr Tal has worked as a psychotherapist with humanitarian organizations in the Middle East, including Doctors Without Borders, WarChild Holland, Handicap International, and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit. He also taught a seminar on “the Real” at the École Libanaise de Psychanalyse from 2018 to 2021.
Gabriel Tupinambá is a philosopher and psychoanalyst working from Rio de Janeiro. He is the Head of Social Strategy at the Alameda institute (www.alameda.institute) and a member of the research collective Subset for Theoretical Practice (www.theoreticalpractice.com). He is the author of The Desire of Psychoanalysis (NUP, 2021), and co-author of the book An Architecture of Edges: The Lefts in Times of World Peripheralization (Autonomia Literária, 2022) and Hegel, Lacan, Žižek (Altropos Press, 2013).
The discussion will take place in English
This event is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) for the 2023 Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject? For more information, please visit https://bicarlebanon.org/summerschool/
Dziga Vertov’s documentary film Odinnadtsatyy (The Eleventh Year, 1928) is dedicated to the 11th year of the October Revolution. Joining other now canonical films that celebrate the first decade of the Bolshevik Revolution, such as Eisenstein’s October of the same year, Vertov’s film is a hymn to Stalin’s program of the rapid industrialization of the country, and especially the eastern regions of Ukraine.
The film both preludes and crystalizes the contradictions of Stalin’s so-called “second revolution”, otherwise known as the Great Turn, or the Great Break (Velikiy perelom) which launched a massive program of industrialization, and collectivization of agriculture. The film utilizes the techniques of avant-garde filming and montage to render cinematically the transformative power of socialist construction as constitutive of Soviet reality itself. The temporality of the film, as it moves from longer panning shots implying a narrative structure and historical meaning, to rapidly changing frames of nature-man-machine synthesis signifies the revolutionary and avant-gardist overcoming of the past for a future-directed present.
This screening is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) for Angela Harutyunyan’s course, “Time and Revolution: Historicity after “the End of History” within the 2023 Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject?
دزيجا فيرتوف، السنة الحادية عشر، 1928 (54)
فيلم دزيجا فيرتوف الوثائقي (السنة الحادية عشرة، 1928) مخصص للسنة الحادية عشرة لثورة أكتوبر. إضافة إلى الأفلام المعتبرة الأخرى التي تحتفل بالعقد الأول من الثورة البلشفية، مثل فيلم أكتوبر لآيزنشتاين في العام نفسه، فيلم فيرتوف هو إشادة ببرنامج ستالين للتطور الصناعي السريع للبلاد، وخاصة المناطق الشرقية من أوكرانيا
يقدم الفيلم ويبلور تناقضات ما يسمى بـ”الثورة الثانية” لستالين، والمعروفة باسم “المنعطف الكبير” أو “الانهيار العظيم” (فيليكي بيرلوم) الذي أطلق برنامجًا ضخمًا للتطور الصناعي والتنظيم الجماعي للزراعة. يستخدم الفيلم تقنيات التصوير والمونتاج الطليعي ليظهر سينمائياً القوة التحويلية للبناء الاشتراكي كمكوِّن للواقع السوفيتي نفسه. إن زمنية للفيلم، حيث ينتقل من اللقطات الطويلة التي تنطوي على بنية سردية ومعنى تاريخي، إلى إطارات متغيرة بسرعة لتوليفة الطبيعة-الإنسان-الآلة، تدل على التغلب الثوري والطليعي على الماضي من أجل حاضر موجه نحو المستقبل.
تم تنظيم هذا العرض من قبل معهد بيروت للتحليل النقدي والبحوث (بيكار) لدورة أنجيلا هاروتيونيان، “الزمن والثورة: التاريخية بعد’ نهاية التاريخ‘” ضمن المدرسة الصيفية لعام 2023، هل يوجد ذات ثورية؟.
Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research 