Political Anticipation and Dead Time: Salma Shamel in conversation with Vartan Avakian, Fadi Bardawil, and Sarah Rifky

January 23, 2020

Shortly after the uprisings erupted across Lebanon last October, protestors declared that the “real end” of the Lebanese civil war is happening now, rather than 29 years ago. In the spirit of this temporal correction, where “now" supersedes the past 29 years, we come together as artists, curators, academics, activists, and inactivists to reconsider our imagination of revolutionary beginnings and indefinite endings. Without access to the future in Lebanon, scholar Salma Shamel invites writer and curator Sarah Rifky, artist Vartan Avakian, and anthropologist Fadi Bardawil to take a moment together to revisit the Egyptian uprising and discuss political anticipation, repressed needs, and the dead time in between.