Jalal Toufic

11 October 2022

What Was I Thinking?, pp. 72–82

The seminar will encompass a close reading and discussion of pages 72-82 (under the heading Destiny’s multiple Bodies) from his book What Was I Thinking?

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. His books, a number of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download, free of charge, at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com. He has made over ten films and videos, which include essay films and conceptual films; short films (7 minutes, 8 minutes, etc.), feature-length films (110 minutes, 138 minutes, etc.), and “inhumanely” long films (72 hours, 50 hours); videos that are standalone works as well as ones that are part of mixed media works; films that he shot and films in which all the images are from works by other filmmakers (Hitchcock, Sokurov, Bergman, etc.). His work, along with that of artists and pretend artists, has been shown in the 6th, 10th and 11th Sharjah Biennials; the 9th Shanghai Biennale; the 1st Asia Biennial & 5th Guangzhou Triennial; MoMA PS1; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou; ZKM; Kunsthalle Fridericianum; MAXXI; Witte de With; Deichtorhallen Hamburg, etc. Most of his videos and films are available for viewing on Vimeo. In 2011, he was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD, and from September 2015 to August 2018 he was the Director of the School of Visual Arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts.