Book Launch at Beirut Art Center

As part of the Home Works 6 Platform, the Beirut Art Center is hosting the book launches of “The Dialogue That Is Us” by Tony Chakar and “Ressentiment” by Adel Nassar.

In 17th century Europe, “emblem books” were quite common, and they mainly spoke of the end of things, of a failed world and its defeats. In emblem books, everything became an allegory, and image and text were joined in a strange unity, where the image was not an illustration of the text and the text was not a caption for the image. “The Dialogue That Is Us” takes emblem books as its point of departure: from the wreckage of History, images are seized and transformed into allegories that illuminate the present of a world (the Arab World) that did not produce them. But then, in the wreckage of History, strange affinities form between things, no matter how remote.

“Ressentiment” is a collection of selected poems on resident anger, edited and translated by Walid Sadek and published by Ashkal Alwan.