Hussein Nassereddine

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Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River
2023 - Installation |  Foil stamping on leather covers, paint
 
Dimensions  variable


Work Footnotes: Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River presents a series of book covers that exist without books—objects caught in a liminal state, always incomplete, always slipping into absence. Borrowing from Arabic literary traditions, these covers are crafted using the same leather and gold foil techniques as historical manuscripts. Yet, they remain empty shells, evoking the loss of entire texts, places, and histories. 

The titles adorning the covers reference three historical literary books that have been lost to time. These works survive only in footnotes, alluded to in other texts but never fully present—mirroring the artist’s experience of his family’s village in southern Lebanon: The landscape had been erased—only language preserved its presence. 

Suspended between existence and disappearance, these covers blend into the color of the walls behind them, as if attempting to dissolve. In their material absence, they embody the paradox of memory: that which is lost can be spoken into presence, yet never fully reclaimed.

1. Mohammad: They were sitting in our home, or were they in the houses they’d come to after they left the village? The rooms reverberated, as if fifty poets had gathered to chant, before slipping into slumber like birds. They sang of the village, and the tender trees and the meadows. Their voices painted its shapes, beckoning the listener to see. Their words birthed the village anew.
   
   Did you know that ancient poets sang the castles and gardens? Their mouths would be filled with marble: their palms held what they had once seen. The buildings and the gardens vanished, leaving only the memory of what was once said. Do you think they were like these poets who had lived in ancient times?
   
   Hussein: One does not have to be a poet to know the shape of things. Maybe they sang of the time they knew, because they did not know, when their mouths were churning with the taste of houses and the trees, that this place will only be seen by you and I, and those who’d been touched by the singing, but not by time or the distances.
   
   Mohammad: It might have been written in the books of mortal poets and singers: Do you know what was written in The Book of Lost Abbasid Songs? 
   
   Hussein: It was written that “The door of the body would only open for the singer, whose voice echoed the revelry of conquerors”. 
   
   Mohammad: And what was written in The Book of Audible Palaces?  What happens to the orchards after the poets had sung them and before the books were lost?
   
   Hussein: Their hands carried them. Ibn Hayyan wrote that “soft hands, no matter how delicate, could not hold the river”.
   
   Mohammad: He was right.
   
   Hussein: Where do they go then, after they had left our house and the rooms they carried in their bodies? How could the singer deliver his last serenade?
   
   Mohammad: They dwindle into the shade, one after the other...They retreat into slumber as birds.
   
   

AEST


Paris — Beirut


© 2026 All Rights Resrved

Hussein Nassereddine
Current Exhibitions: 

1. Faire Place au Monde, Cité internationale des arts, France - 8 Oct 2026 - 16 Jan 2027
2. Loss Marginalia, A M Qattan Foundation, Palestine - 16 May - 26 Oct 2026 

hsn.nassereddine@gmail.com
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Latest texts Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Beirut and Paris. His work originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments rooted in collective histories and resources of songs, poetry and ruins.