Liam Sibai is a Belgium-based researcher and artist from Beirut, Lebanon. His artistic work often centers on the formation and dissolution of social groups, with projects such as “Geo-Imposition” in 2021 and “Gone with the Wind Jabal Amel” in 2022. These themes translated into his academic pursuits at KADOC, notably explored with a piece like “Rome on Both Sides of The Lebanese Civil War” and its accompanying lecture “New Catholic Territoriality.” Additionally, his lecture “Dissonant Unity,” delivered as part of the New Centre’s 2024 Spring/Summer Public Program, further ventures into these concepts. Sibai’s scholarly pursuits have also involved expanding upon the ideas of his friend and former professor, Fares Chalabi. His articles “The Narcissist Image” and “Interpretation Contra Structural Reading” published with &&&, and his contributions to The Ramzi and Saeeda Dalloul Art Foundation’s arhcive, draw upon and engage with Chalabi’s thought.
Articles
Aesthetic Transparency
In my previous two texts for &&&, “The Narcissist-Image” and “Interpretation Contra Structural Reading”, I talked about two distinct modes of reading art and the problems they respond to. These two modes are that of structural reading and interpretation. An interpretative reading of a work of art encodes the work of art in the language… Read More »
Interpretation Contra Structural Reading
This article is an extension of “The Narcissist-Image,” departing from Fares Chalabi’s presentation in “Deleuzian Aesthetics.” Much of Chalabi’s Deleuzian Aesthetics is based on a critique of interpretation, which for Chalabi, is a procedure for reading art where “this means that, and that means this,” that something like the color black points to a feeling… Read More »
The Narcissist Image
In his course Deleuzian Aesthetics Fares Chalabi presents an extended typology of mutually exclusive, rigorously defined image-types, or what I like to call aesthetic structures or aesthetic logics. An image-type or aesthetic logic is a form that structures the entirety of a work of art – take, for example, the ‘series’. The logic of series,… Read More »