The talk

At Hours Beirut, I explored global perspectives on personal hygiene, in a session on maintaining the self.

Main themes

How does the Indian government keep people from urinating in public? Why do Muslims have a shattaf culture (and Christians mostly shun it)? Why are dictators so private about their poop? Do fecal transplants work? Is your poop green?

The conference

Hours Beirut 2019 was an intimate three-day conference exploring how maintenance and the act of maintaining can be understood in the context of innovation and creativity.

The talk

My talk was part of the main conference in a session titled “Weak Signals” and futher nuanced my research by focusing on the role of sex work in the advancement of the toilet.

Main themes

How are sex work and toilet innovation linked worldwide? What can we understand from the toilet gods in multiple cultures? What is the future of the toilet? How is Germany’s toilet culture linked to its economy?

The conference

Over the course of four days and three nights in 2020, the House of Beautiful Business connected thousands of people around the world. They used video, audio, and text, and met in both the virtual world and the real one at more than 30 local hubs and through outdoor activities amidst the covid pandemic to present The Great Wave.

The House of Beautiful Business is a membership-based global think tank and community. Through online programming, gatherings, media, and partnerships, we bring together business and nonprofit leaders, technologists, scientists, philosophers, and artists who share a common quest: to shape a more beautiful vision for the future of business, technology, and humanity, built on emotions, ethics, and aesthetics instead of efficiency, extraction, and exponentialism.

I first came across the mystical figure of Al Khidr in the short story Muneera written by Khaled Al Farraj (1929). I quickly found out about his cult following on Kuwait's Failaka island and in Bahrain, where shrines were built by his purported footprints. Women would sprinkle rose water at the site of his shrine with the hopes that the sweet water would bring sweet news of pregnancy.

Although Al Khidr appears in the Quran's Surat Al Kahf as the wise servant of Moses, there was a fatwa issued against his shrines and they were repeatedly rebuilt and demolished. Across faiths and cultures, saintly figures appear to assuage our anxiety about death and longevity. Al Khidr's precursor appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh as the eternal Utnapashtim. He is the Green Man in Celtic lore. He is Elijah of the Torah. St. George the dragon slayer, who is resurrected four times, is widely revered and even referred to euphemistically in Lebanon when we say that one who has gone mad has "gone to Al Khidr."

In this homage to him, with artist Gráinne Hebeler, we created an image of the Green Immortal linking together cross-cultural rumors about his appearance and powers. We placed these across the floating city of Venice in contextually relevant places with the intention of keeping the multiplicity of his legends alive.

These images, along with a number of artifacts and texts, were displayed in a glass coffin as part of a Museum of Immortality at Ashkal Alwan, curated by Anton Vidokle (e-flux). Summer 2014.

The Freemasons are contentious on their home soil, let alone in a colonial context - in Palestine - and then in a satellite colonial context - Palestinian Freemasons in Kuwait.

In this work, I try and imagine what it must have been like as a Palestinian in Kuwait who is a part of the Freemasons - to whom or what does one pledge allegiance after one has lost their country?

If you peel back the layers of beautiful imagery - gleaming G's (which stand for a secular, all-encompassing God, or the supreme architect of the universe in Freemason jargon), towering columns, stairways to heaven, and all seeing eyes, a complex history and problematic set of cultural appropriations are unveiled. By appropriating ancient Egyptian and Greek symbols and coupling them with an essentially capitalist approach to finance and real estate development, a kind of schizophrenic logic becomes apparent in the Freemason way.

On one hand, I presume there is a sense of pride in being accepted into such a rooted tradition, worthy of being framed in silver and displayed in an office. And on the other hand, I see a kind of irony to this - by silkscreening the same image in blue and yellow I make a nod to pop culture's appropriation of Freemason symbology, voicing my worry that orientalist hegemony is being further propagated in our world today.

This work was shown at The Mine gallery, Dubai in March 2015

It was part of The Post Oriental Odyssey show curated by Mo Reda