Grass Grows In The Mouth When You Talk About It
Sound Installation. 2017
How to make an image without image? This sound installation explores the possibilities inherent in images built verbally: formed in the mind by language, unlimited by periphery, materiality or stillness. Departing from the practices of Abbasid and Umayyad poets, sent to ancient ruins to record their architecture and spatial significance in words, Nassereddine plays with the tropes of Arabic poetry composition. Grass Grows In The Mouth When You Talk About It imagines the artist’s natal village in south Lebanon. Locked in a cycle of destruction and rebuilding, it is a place marked materially by the regional political upheaval of the last century. This rhythm has muddied memories – generations of village architecture are preserved only in testimony, channelled through the voice of the artist. In an age of ubiquitous photography, poetry reminds us of the slippery, ambiguous nature of memory; the work argues for the precise and expressive potential of the invisible image.
