Years of The Shining Face: She Walked On By, 2025. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Years of The Shining Face: She Walked On By, 2025. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Years of The Shining Face: She Walked On By, 2025. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Years of The Shining Face: She Walked On By, 2025. Exhibition: Hussein Nassereddine: Years of The Shining Face, Beirut Art Center 2025. Photo: Youssef Itani.
Here, the village exists in a dual register: one shaped by the persistence of memory and another by the unrelenting forces of geopolitics. The hills, the grass, the distant house—these are familiar coordinates, yet they tremble with uncertainty. The video’s soundscape emerges from the village’s loudspeakers, layering announcements with the wind, the distant echo of recitations, and the weight of the unsaid. In this polyphony, time folds: myth and testimony collapse into each other, rendering the past porous, the present haunted.
Nassereddine’s practice often draws from the ruins of language, retrieving voices from the margins of poetry and history. His work meditates on how places persist in memory and how their absence is articulated—through song, through testimony, through the fragile architecture of words. She Walked On By extends this inquiry, charting a path between mourning and invocation, between that which vanishes and that which endures in the echoes of the land.
Excerpts or full videos are availble upon request.
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I was there in the meadow near our house in the village, near that small hill, and Hussein, the grass was so tall it was touching my knees, and it was so green. I stood there and the cold wind was seeping under my shirt, are the hills moving from their places? I looked at our house which seemed so far, deserted from its inhabitants. There, in the distance was a man on a horse, a shining man, the grass blossomed under the palms of his hands. His face was shining in the field like a planet.
-You will take my sight away!
-“Don’t be afraid, Hajjeh” (His hand on my shoulder, shining like the face of God)
- “I am the shining face” (The trees turn on their heads)
-Who is shaking the trees from their ribs?
-“Your son Mahdi says hello”
***
I answered, then I answered, and I kept answering until she walked on by. Then I forgot -my soul- then I woke up, I noticed that she had taken the sun and faded away.
***
The heads of the tall grasses almost touched the ground, Hussein, as if the man were moving them from their roots.
-“Your son Mahdi says hello”
-Did you see him?
-“His face is like a moon, Hajjeh” (the red sun stops in its place)
-And do you know all those who are there? (My heart slips out of my hands like a ball)
-“Do not be sad”
The light wind was blowing on my face, the tears that escaped me were falling among the grass. I saw from there our little house burning, our house that I had not minded since Mahdi died, and the hill over there, and the edges of the green grass, all gone, and the shining face gone. The horizon was burning, the fires were red, their shapes were static, as if they were drawn by hand over the distant horizon, and they moved away every time I got closer to them, I ran towards them, and they were still there, not getting any closer.
- 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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