Walid Sadek is an artist and writer. His early work from mid to late 1990s investigates the familial legacies of the Lebanese civil war. He later begins to posit, mostly in theoretical texts, ways of understanding the complexity of lingering civil strife in times of relative social and economic stability. His later written work, between 2006 and 2016, proposes a theory for post war-society disinclined to resume normative living. During those years, his artworks seek a poetics for a sociality governed by the logic of protracted war and search for eruptive temporalities to challenge that same protractedness. Around 2016, sensing a fundamental socio-political and intellectual change in the country, Sadek decide to conclude his post-war work which up until then grappled in various ways with the conditions of living in a protracted now. In a text published in 2019 titled

“A surfeit of Victims: A Time After Time”, he begins to theorize the conditions of living in a time after the time of post war, during which the memories of war are reduced to empty ciphers that can no longer constate a shared history.
Paintings 2020-22 is his first exhibition of paintings and his first solo show in Lebanon since 2010.

Walid Sadek is professor in the Department of Fine arts and Art history at the American University of Beirut.