Hussein Nassereddine

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River Papers 
2025 - Carbon paper  |  100 x 70 cm (each)




Work Footnotes: In River Papers, Hussein Nassereddine traces the passage of time through the physical act of mark-making. Using carbon paper—historically employed by Arab poetry scholars and annotators—the artist creates rubbings of his father’s grave, each imprint capturing the gravestone at a specific moment. The work transforms a gesture into a series of documents, suspended in time.

The papers, with their fragile, transient quality, evoke both presence and loss. They recall the transmission of knowledge, the act of inscribing and re-inscribing history, while also pointing to what fades with each reproduction. The deep blue surface, like water, holds memory yet constantly shifts, questioning whether anything can remain unchanged over time.

By embedding excerpts from historical and oral narratives—stories of celestial movements, eclipses, and omens—Nassereddine situates personal grief within a larger literary framework. These accounts, passed down through generations, function as unstable monuments to loss, much like the grave rubbings themselves. River Papers reflects on the fragility of remembrance and the ways in which time, like water, both erases and preserves.

1. Al-Hamaoui narrated in his book, Fara’id Al-Simtayn, based on the stories of Asmaa Bint Amiss, that the prophet Muhammad had his head in Ali’s lap when he slumbered until the sun had set. Upon waking, the prophet realized that he had not prayed Al-Asr prayer and mentioned it to Ali, then he asked God to return the sun to its earlier position. The sun returned to the place it was in before the prophet had slept. Asmaa said: He got up and prayed, and the sun descended again.
   
   
2.  Ibn Qulawayh narrated the story of a man from Jerusalem, who had said: “We had a premonition about the death of Hussein Ibn Ali. So I said: How did you know? To which he replied: We did not lift a stone, or a rock, except that we saw beneath it blood boiling. The walls turned red like leeches. For three days sizzling blood poured from the sky. For three days the sun was eclipsed until it was blotted out.”
   
   
3. The village’s elderly in the South used to speak of a man whose siblings tossed him into the river. His eyes went dark as soon he touched the water. The boys used to burst out laughing at the eyes shut over the river’s surface. They were rough, like the air in the village.
   
   
4. When a man dies in the villages, a photo is chosen to frame him in death. One photograph. It becomes his image, his entire life is contained in it. As if to be remembered after the event—that is after his other photos are forgotten, beyond those that remain in the imagination, even after the passage of time—he is remembered as he was in the photograph above his grave, or in his family’s house over the couch on which the elderly lounge on a hot afternoon. One photograph becomes all the years.
   

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.