Critical Writing Workshop with Nida Ghouse

On responding to Hassan Khan’s Six Questions for the Lebanese (2001)

This writing workshop coincides with Hassan Khan’s solo show The Portrait is an Address at Beirut Art Center. In the English title of the exhibition, the word “address” contains at least two meanings, if not more. The workshop will explore, together with its participants, different notions of addressability particularly with regards to what it might mean to write in relation to a work of art. It will consider not just how we write—that is, the form of address, but also from where we write—that is, one’s own address, or place in the world. An early work of Khan’s from 2001, titled 6 Questions to the Lebanese, will serve as a tool for discussion. In this short video, Khan sets up a dialectic between the work he could have made about a place and the work he makes. In acknowledging the challenges he faced in making a work about a place, he ends up making a work that challenges the place. The workshop will debate not just whether 6 Questions to the Lebanese is still relevant for the art context in which we operate today, but rather how to address it. Does one respond to the questions—referred to in the title—that the work poses? Or to the work itself? We will examine what it might mean to write from the gap and the implications that has for our own ability to be addressed.

About Nida Ghouse
Nida Ghouse is a writer and a curator, and presently the director of Mumbai Art Room. Her ongoing engagement with Hassan Khan’s practice first took form through a two-week series of events titled 14 Proper Nouns at Delfina Foundation (London 2011). Her latest text, “The Loss of Tokyo”, was recently published in Dreams and Music: Hassan Khan (Revolver Press 2016).

Cost
Regular: $20
Students: $15

For more information or to make a reservation
01.397.018