THE SET OF BASSEM SAAD’S assured, playful, and provocative video Congress of Idling Persons, 2021, is strewn with the accoutrements of pandemic and protest: a tent, a table covered with onions, a spirometer (for testing lung capacity), bottles of medicine that a young woman compulsively cracks open and closes. Some of the objects are for aiding a patient’s recovery from illness, others for enduring protracted demonstrations or mitigating the effects of tear gas. Shot in part inside the theater of a much-loved Beirut cabaret, Congress meticulously braids together three tumultuous events, four major political issues, and five compelling characters. These elements combine to create one substantial work of art, which asks whether anyone can ever really belong to another person’s fight.
On the surface, Saad’s video looks at the Lebanese uprising that began on October 17, 2019; the outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020; and the incredible relief effort mobilized by ordinary people in response to the Beirut port explosion on August 4, 2020. The juxtaposition of these events enriches their respective delineations of contestation and collectivity. Our lodestars are the musician Sandy Chamoun and the DJ and translator Rayyan Abdel Khalek, who charmingly recollect their experiences over two years of upheaval (their dialogue occasionally doubling, producing an effect the writer Shiv Kotecha describes as “rippling the speech patterns of each character”), and the voice of Saad himself, which, in the magnetic aesthetics of the piece, comes into the frame via perfectly symmetrical bilingual subtitles laid over the images on-screen.
Two additional narrators help crystallize these interlocking parts: the Palestinian writer Islam Al Khatib, wise beyond her years, and the feminist labor organizer Mekdes Yilma, who punctuates her seriousness of purpose with flashes of vicious humor. Their reflections bring the Lebanese uprising and Black Lives Matter into dialogue with the dispossession of Palestine and the largely invisible struggle to abolish the most violent abuses of the kafala system, under which more than two hundred thousand migrant workers in Lebanon, most of them young women from Africa or Asia, are left unprotected by existing labor law and exposed to conditions akin to modern slavery. In arranging his subjects as he does, Saad locates the crucial pressure points affecting the flow of solidarity across different communities and art’s capacity to connect with viewers across different terrains.
The only child of two public-school teachers from outside of Beirut, Saad has a tremendous appetite for stories attesting to common experiences of, say, chronic underemployment, besiegement, aggressive policing, or the collapse of one’s country. His growing body of work includes short fiction, sculptures evoking broken bodies, and videos dwelling on ecological disaster. His most recent project, in collaboration with the writer Sanja Grozdanic´, is an ambitious performance called Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century), 2021, which delves into the dysfunction of the Lebanese state and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the two bound together in the bizarre and disappointing theater of the International Criminal Court. With gentle familiarity, Saad skewers various sectarian positions, including the peculiarities of Christian minorities in the Middle East. (His genius 2018 video Saint Rise, for example, deciphers the mixture of ethnic superiority and existential dread in the absurd adventure of a giant fiberglass sculpture of Saint Charbel being erected on top of a dusty Lebanese mountain by a company that once hoped to construct a floating island off the country’s Mediterranean coast.) True to their worlds, his subjects speak Arabic and English as well as Amharic. His method hinges on an intuitive, honest intelligence that makes references to Mikhail Bakhtin and the Lumpenproletariat without ever sounding naive or pretentious.
Paced by echoes, glitches, and slips, Congress of Idling Persons shuffles through its subjects’ perspectives and then sticks, albeit fleetingly, on vivid images of tension or release. Protesters torch a police van on DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn. A blonde woman in a cream-colored sweat suit yawns through her exercises in nearby Fort Greene Park. A young man with a huge shovel dances down a street in Manhattan’s SoHo, gloriously bashing in storefront windows. Al Khatib shifts an injured foot under her desk. A rescue team detects a heartbeat in the rubble of a collapsed building in Beirut; the army blocks access to the site. A demonstrator somewhere in Syria swirls white paint on black asphalt to write ASSAD HAS FALLEN in beautiful script, evoking one of many dreams buried in the wide-open space of disaster. A short clip of the Chilean anthem “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Way) sends chills down my spine. Yilma regards Saad’s camera stoically, telling the story of young Lebanese men objecting to her participation, to the presence of young Black women, in “their” uprising. She is disappointed but unfazed. “In the same way that you’re demanding your rights,” she says, “so are we.”
Congress of Idling Persons has its New York premiere at Doc Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art on March 5 and 9.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a critic based in New York and Beirut.