Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River, 2023. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River, 2023. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River, 2023. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River, 2023. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River, 2023. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River, 2023. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River, 2023. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Even the Most Delicate of Hands Could Not Hold the River, 2023. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
At its core is the notion of “entering time,” a liminal moment where the singer’s voice merges with history, dissolving the boundaries between lived and mythical time. The architectural framework, reminiscent of a stage or threshold, invites viewers to inhabit a scene of both revelation and loss. Mirrored surfaces fracture perception, while rich wood textures and deep red curtains allude to the weight of memory, performance, and the inescapable movement of destiny.
the work traverses histories of conquest, lamentation, and the enduring power of song,where language and voice contend with the inevitability of time’s passage.
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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.
- Faire Place au Monde, Cité internationale des arts, France - 8 Oct 2026 - 16 Jan 2027
- Loss Marginalia, A M Qattan Foundation, Palestine - 16 May - 26 Oct 2026
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