Join the Beirut Art Center as it hosts the book launch of “The Dialogue That Is Us” by Tony Chakar.
Description: 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