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| Bilal Khbeiz |
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| Born 1963 Kfarchouba, Lebanon, lives and works in Los Angeles. Bilal Khbeiz is an artist, poet, essayist and journalist. His work often involves the coming-together of these activities, for example in the 50th Venice Biennial he created a site-specific work titled Self-Portrait: Knowledge Does Not Precede Effort, which featured footage of Khbeiz’s wife, who is Iraqi, reading a text on screen. Subtitles beneath her conveyed another series of texts that Khbeiz wrote in the style of Borges, Derrida and Baudrillard and nearby on a computer screen was displayed another text by Khbeiz about Afghanistan. In a review in the Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Khbeiz describes the work as being specifically made for a “Western audience and a Western venue”. Adding that “it has a trap on which the work is set. The trap speaks to the relationship that binds the West to the rest of the world, and specifically to us.” Khbeiz is also a member of Group Tuesday, a collaboration along with Fadi Abdallah and Walid Sadek that first appeared as such during the third edition of Beirut's Home Works Forum in 2005. At this forum for 'curatorial practice' the trio presented a piece called Public Time, a 'file' filled with interlocking Arabic texts written over the course of eighteen months, during which Sadek, Khbeiz, and Abdallah endeavoured to witness (rather than document) a number of rupturing events that are never explicitly named. Khbeiz has participated in the 6th Sharjah Biennale, and amongst other exhibitions in the 50th Venice Biennial and in editions of Home Works, Beirut. With Group Tuesday he performed Public Time in a reading at a symposium held at Modern Art Oxford as part of the group exhibition Out of Beirut and participated in the eighth edition of the Sharjah Biennial in 2007. He has published poetry and books on cultural theory that include Fi Annal jassad Khatia' Wa Khalas (That the Body is Sin and Deliverance), Beirut, Dar Al Masar, 1999; Globalisation and the Manufacture of Transient Events, 'Home Works 2', Beirut, 2003; The Enduring Image and the Vanishing World, Moukhtarat, Beirut, 2005. Other publications include Perhaps Memory of Air (Merime Press, 1991); On My Father Illness in the Unbearable (Beirut: Dar Al Jadid, 1997); The Body is Sin and Deliverance (1998); Al-Kasal (Indolence; with Walid Sadek; Beirut: The 3rd World, 1999) and The Water is Cool in the Coffee Shop (Beirut: Hamra Project, 2000). |
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