In the Presence of Absence

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In the Presence of Absence. Ahmet Öğüt, Bakunin’s Barricade, 2015–2020. With works from Else Berg, Timo Demollin, Marlene Dumas, Pieter Engels, Nan Goldin, Käthe Kollwitz, Jan Th. Kruseman, Kazimir Malevich and PINK de Thierry. Photo Peter Tijhuis.

What Sinan [Antoon] has done withIn the Presence of Absenceis a kind of miraculous work of dedication and love. Reading this volume is sheer enjoyment and sublimity.” Darwish is the premier poetic voice of the Palestinian people… lyrical, imagistic, plaintive, haunting, always passionate, and elegant–and never anything less than free—what he would dream for all his people. —Naomi Shihab NyeBritte Sloothaak & Fadwa Naamna (on behalf of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), Cédric Fauq (curator and writer, Palais de Tokyo), Monika Szewczyk (director De Appel, Amsterdam), Prem Krishnamurthy (designer, curator, writer, Wrkshps and (co-) artistic director FRONT International 2021) and Zippora Elders (artistic director Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen and co-curator sonsbeek21-24)

Muncy: Captain, I noticed that Velasco's motorcycle isn't parked outside for the third day in a row. Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Sing like the Southerners Do, 2019, sound-drawing installation. Courtesy the artist. The last chapters of his book recall the post-Oslo period. Darwish returned to Ramallah after some twenty-five years with a feeling that mixed “the tourist’s curiosity, the visitor’s sadness, and the returnee’s joy.” An especially memorable passage evokes Darwish’s self-consciousness during his first visit to Gaza, “city of misery and might”: “You walk down the alleys ashamed of everything: your ironed shirts, the aesthetics of poetry, the abstractness of music, and a passport that allows you to travel the world.” And yet the stations of this life — exile, prison, migration, return — trace a recognizably Palestinian itinerary. Kansas: The Absence of Presence" (in Finnish). Musiikkituottajat – IFPI Finland. Retrieved August 2, 2020. a b c d "Interview with Zak Rizvi and Tom Brislin of Kansas - The Absence of Presence". May 19, 2020.

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Mahmoud Darwish was laid to rest on a hill in the West Bank overlooking Jerusalem, his legacy transcendent and present in his homeland. Ewing, Jerry (March 30, 2020). "Kansas release trailer for new album The Absence of Presence". Prog . Retrieved June 19, 2020. No list on Palestinian literature is complete without the acclaimed poet Mahmoud Darwish . . . In the Presence of Absence is a fascinating piece of prose, with an aging Darwish reflecting on his youth and tracing the journey that his life will take him, infused with the poetic voice for which Darwish is renowned.” — Esquire

In conjunction with the exhibition In the Presence of Absence, several of the participating artists discuss various themes related to the exhibition in three online talkshow. The author of 15 books, including 2021's "Night Came With Many Stars," two novels for children, and three anthologies of philosophy, Van Booy was raised in rural Wales and the Oxfordshire countryside, and currently lives in New York, where his latest book is set. In "The Presence of Absence," his fifth novel for adults, the main character, Max Little, is also an author and also a prolific one, still relatively young, lying in a Manhattan hospital and dying of an incurable disease, realizing painfully that "everything I've written was child's play — actually, not as wise, because children know they're playing." I don’t know why I feel like I don’t know why I am here. I am not here for myself. That is something I have known for the majority of this short life I’ve - begrudgingly - lived so far. When recalled by words, those moments are impervious to the attempt to raise the body to the station of the soul. Who among us has not said to his woman: “I only exist in you,” and was truthful. We were truthful, as well, when we found our existence in a similar utterance in a different place. So do you know how to love? You cannot answer, perhaps because you did not notice the subtle atmospheric shifts when traveling from pole to pole: love and passion, rapture and infatuation, ardor and affection, fondness and devotion, blazing love and bewildering love, craving and caprice, dalliance and desire, longing and lust, admiration and attraction, and other desires in search of senses. In every station the body has a certain state, and for every state there is a station between death and life. So you never know where or how you are.In a beautiful passage about death and Beirut, Shaheen’s translates: “…it rises and falls, as the emptiness of the sky echoes the howl of steel. It is as if you were hearing the dripping of water from a tap that had not been firmly turned off; or as if you were listening to steps approaching the door but never arriving.”