Chromatic Wednesdays: Eyeless Seeing, Lungless Breathing

Season 4, Episode 9

The evening starts with the screening of Ruba Salameh’s short film Yamm, continues with Alia Hamdan’s lecture To soliloquize amongst a crowd, followed by Mazen Kerbaj’s performance Lungless and concludes with a conversation, moderated by Gabriela Manda Seith, that brings together all of the artists.

The eyes are an extension of the brain – quite literally so as they originate from the same tissue. Forming a unit, we can imagine the eyes as the brain turned outward. Hence, we grasp that what we see feeds the brain, and that what our brain has absorbed shapes how we see the world. Taking this relationship between seeing, perceiving and knowing into account, the event engages our senses to recognize images of violent erasure and annihilation in Palestine and Lebanon despite their denial.

The contributions by Ruba Salameh, Alia Hamdan, and Mazen Kerbaj invite us to ask: What does it mean to engage in seeing without eyes, hearing with the resonating body, and speaking without a voice to express what is unseen? And how can memories of a ‘before’ or past experiences of violence make us perceive the present in a different light?

Yamm (Open Sea), film by Ruba Salameh (2016, 9’17”)

Yamm (Open Sea) is a video work that captures Ruba Salameh’s persistent return to a bus stop in Salah Al-din Street in East Jerusalem – where a huge billboard of the sea of Gaza overlooks the awaiting passengers and passersby. Infused by recordings of the Tantoura sea, a Palestinian village that was eradicated by a paramilitary organization in 1948, the poster defies erasure as the film breathes new life into its image and interrupts the usual flow of everyday life in Jerusalem.

To soliloquize amongst a crowd, lecture by Alia Hamdan

To soliloquize amongst a crowd. To find an anchor in eyes that see, even through the muzzling of mouths. To invoke an excess of seeing through modes like “seeing by way of blindness” and “seeing by way of death,” which arise from the sustained proximity of the eyes to ruins and corpses (Walid Sadek). To ground oneself in a seeing in excess is to slowly prepare to diagnose what would be the negative of seeing—what is it to have eyes today but fail to see? What is it to see clearly yet avert one’s eyes? Based on a diary drafted in Berlin over the past few years, the soliloquier dwells on the political ecology that binds eyes here and elsewhere.

Lungless, performance by Mazen Kerbaj (2025)

Lungless is a composition developed for the custom-made instrument „Putin’s Organ“, evoking the Soviet World War II rocket launcher known as Stalin’s Organ – whose echoes of destruction resonate across historical and contemporary conflicts. From his voluntary exile in Berlin, Mazen Kerbaj recalls his childhood during the war in Beirut, in which these rocket launchers were heavily used, and reflects on how the inhabitants came to recognize their shared experiences of the conflict through overlapping soundscapes. In response to the indifference to the civilian suffering in Gaza, Lungless aims to transform outrage and grief into sound creating a sonic alarm. The title Lungless carries a double meaning: literally, it refers to the sound produced by an air compressor, and metaphorically, it reflects the inability to speak in the face of war’s violence.

Conversation with Ruba Salameh, Alia Hamdan, and Mazen Kerbaj (artists), moderated by Gabriela Manda Seith (curator).

An event by Chromatic Wednesdays, hosted by neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), and curated and moderated by Gabriela Manda Seith.