Contributor Bios

Jacques Aswad

Poet, art critic, art theorist, translator, translation theorist, lexicographer, editor, born in Beirut, 1957. His poetry was put into music by protest singers Issam Hajj Ali and Ahmad Kaabour, then by contemporary classical composers Joëlle Khoury, Karim Haddad and Houtaf Khoury. In 2015, artist Sophie Museur interpreted Jacques Aswad’s Le temps de Dieu, with Ensemble Fragments in a touring performance titled Qu’on ne peut posséder deux fois (eponymous cd published by Quart de ton, Namur, Belgium 2016). Jacques Aswad cocurated the 1995 exhibition Abstract Painting in Lebanese Art and wrote the analytic, theoretical and historical text of the exhibition’s catalogue published by the Alumni Association of the Lebanese American University (LAU). He contributed to other artistic events in Beirut as member of the jury, or selection committee (Autumn Salon annual exhibitions, Sursock Museum, 2003-2005; The Corniche Project, Ashkal Alwan, 1999; Exposure, Beirut Art Center, 2009), in Beirut and Algiers as lecturer or lecturer-performer (“White blind” in Walid Sadek’s Place at Last, Beirut Art Center, 2010; Museum of Manufactured Response to Absence [MoMRtA] intervention, Modern Art Museum of Algiers [MAMA], 2013; “Arabic, my mother” in Mounira Al Solh, All Mother Tongues are Difficult, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, 2014; Home Works 7, Ashkal Alwan, 2015).

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