Guest lecture: Walid Sadek

Born in 1966, Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. His early work investigates the violent legacies of the Lebanese civil war as partially and inadequately experienced by a young Christian-born Lebanese: Once I Dreamt I was the Phoenix (1995); Half-Man (1995); Home Play (1996); The Last Days of Summer (1997). He later began to posit, mostly in theoretical texts, ways of understanding the complexity of lingering civil strife in times of relative social and economic stability: A Matter of Words (2002); From Excavation to Dispersion: Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon (2003); The Acquisition of Death: the Ends of Art and Dwelling in Lebanon (2004). His recent written work endeavours to structure a theory for a post-war society disinclined to resume normative living: From Image to Corpse (2006); Place at Last (2007); Seeing Rude and Erudite (2007); PeddlingTime when Standing Still: Art Remains and the Globalization That Was (forthcoming, 2011). Concomitantly, a number of art installations propose a poetics for a social experience governed by uneasy contiguity with the remnants and consequences of violence: Love is Blind (2006); Knowledge of the Expelled (2007); Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse (2007); On Learning to See Less (2009); Place at Last (2010); Kozo Okamoto Resides in Greater Beirut (2010). Walid Sadek is associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut.

Walid Sadek is visiting KIT on his way to the opening of a solo show "Inside, Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse", curated by Bassam el Baroni and on display at Hordaland Art Centre 14th of November – 21st of December 2014. There is a text written specifically for this occasion by Kaelen Wilson Goldie "On the work of Walid Sadek":
http://www.kunstsenter.no/en/om-walid-sadeks-arbeider-av-kaelen-wilson-goldie