Basyma Saad is an artist and writer born in Beirut. Through film, performance, and sculpture, as well as essays and fiction, she explores notions of mourning, spontaneity, and surplus. With dark humor and an emphasis on forms of struggle, her work places scenes of intersubjective exchange within their historical frameworks.

Basyma’s work has been presented and screened at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Poetry Project (New York), CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Triangle-Asterides (Marseille), Swiss Institute (Rome), Ludwig Forum (Aachen), Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), the Busan Biennale, and Transmediale. Her most recent film, Congress of Idling Persons (2021), received Special Mention in the New:Vision Award category at CPH:DOX 2022.

She is currently working on a new film titled Permanent Trespass, based on a theater script of the same name, with Sanja Grozdanić.

Her writing appears in n+1, The New Inquiry, Protean, Spike Art, Jadaliyya, FailedArchitecture, X-TRA, and The Funambulist.

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Impersonal Mourning, Personal Realism

Little is new about death being rained on the land in a manner that attempts to render the bystander impotent and the victim impersonal. Less and less is afforded by way of elegies and eulogies. Many figures populate this diorama of scorched earth: martyr, mourner, militant, melancholic, mother, and other. As for the artist and writer, how can she diligently return to taking death personally? What kinds of realism can she partake in? 

In this workshop, we will read canonical and contemporary texts by writers including György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Trinh. T. Minh-Ha, Etel Adnan, and Abdaljawad Omar, all of whom approach questions of representation and realism, in relation to both the living and the unjustly fallen. We will articulate and name certain formal devices, figures, and themes, before beginning our own attempts at cultivating an artistic realism that rejects the impersonality of mass death while allowing for impersonal mourning. 

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