Two Birds, Sleeping, 2024. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Two Birds, Sleeping, 2024. Still.
Two Birds, Sleeping, 2024. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Hussein Nassereddine’s Two Birds, Sleeping layers the voices of the artist and his brother, Mohammad, as they recount fragments of stories passed down by those who once inhabited their ancestral village in southern Lebanon—now a site of absence, erased by war and displacement. Their words unfold like echoes, conjuring the village in the minds of listeners, much like ancient Arab poets who revived lost places through verse.
In the background, the melancholic strains of egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez’s She Walked On By (1974) drift through the village’s amplifiers—devices once used for prayers, death notices, and communal calls. Now, they disperse memory, distorting time and space. The artist describes this effect as a mythical sonic scape, where the past lingers in the air, untethered from chronology.
A duality courses through the piece: the artist and his brother mirror Abdel Halim Hafez and composer Mohamed Abdel Wahab, whose recorded rehearsal plays in the background. Just as the two singers wonder whom the girl in the song smiles at, the brothers grasp at a village that exists only in language, measuring it against the place that once stood. The title itself, Two Birds, Sleeping, suggests both presence and absence—a moment of rest hovering between wakefulness and forgetting.
The brothers recall how displaced villagers, gathered in new homes, would reconstruct their lost village through speech, preserving it in language. As the sound piece unfolds, the village is summoned and dissolved, its existence suspended between narration and silence. Like the poets of early Islamic eras, who transformed ruined landscapes into words, Nassereddine and his brother sing of a place they never truly knew, yet are bound to through echoes that refuse to fade.
Excerpts and full audio are availble upon request.
- She smiled the same smile once more, and walked on by, as if life gathered in a moment and then fell away in another.
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