Hussein Nassereddine

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Years of The Shining Face: The Palm Tree Forest 

2025 - Installation | wood, red paint, moquette 

                    Dimensions variable




Years of the Shining Face: The Palm Tree Forest examines the instability of metaphors when time is disrupted. The installation references the poetic comparison between palm trees and architectural pillars, a motif in Arabic literature. However, these columns, resembling stage props, suggest a performative element rather than a stable structure. 

The work draws from the story of ‘Abd Al-Rahman the Entrant (731-788 AD), the first Arab ruler of Andalusia  who, after thirty years in exile, died upon seeing a palm tree—a moment where time condensed into an instant. For Nassereddine, this collapse of time challenges the function of metaphor, which relies on continuity to operate. A lyric inscription from Syrian singer and Arab Pop icon George Wassouf (1961- ) , whom the artist considers a “Time Being” further reinforces this relationship between language, time, and perception. 

Set against a burning horizon, the work reflects on memory, displacement, and the conditions that shape historical narratives.








Work Footnotes

1. “palm trees”: These were said to have been the palms of the Peninsula, or the palms of Al-Ha’il and its palaces.  Others have identified them as: the palms of the Abbasids; palms along the Nile; the palm tree of ‘Abd Al-Rahman the Entrant—or read perhaps “like the homesickness felt by ‘Abd Al-Rahman before his palm tree”; the palm trees of the Syrians, which they planted in Syria but which blossomed in Spain.  It was said that the pillars killed him—or rather, it was the palms2, or the pillars of the palms.  It is also said: the closer he got, the more the palms seemed to overflow.
   
   
2. e.g. i.e. the story of ‘Abd Al-Rahman, the Falcon of Quraysh, and his palm tree.  And that he stopped in time for thirty years after he crossed the Euphrates from the Levant towards Andalusia. For thirty years, he did not see any palm trees in Andalusia. Then, when he saw a single palm tree in the Rusafa of Cordoba, for the first time in thirty years, he minded the time, and died—in a instant—under the shade of his palm tree.
   
   
3. According to some other interpretations, the palm tree moved in time. That is, it did not move in space, coming from the Levant, for example, since there were no palm trees in Andalusia at the time of Abd Al-Rahman. It might have come from another time, or from the Time that Abd Al-Rahman entered.
   
   
4. “That someone else replaced me, that your heart is not mine”.
   

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.