Language: English.
Venue: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 4th floor.

Tickets available online.

Fehras Publishing Practices (Nancy Naser Al Deen, Sama Ahmadi, and Sami Rustom) host a listening session devoted to the iconic Lebanese singer Fayrouz (* 1934, Beirut), one of the most beloved voices in modern Arab music.

Unfolding within a scenography inspired by Fayrouz’s musical plays, this two-hour session journeys through the musician’s 1960s repertoire, woven with stories from the collective's archives, gathered from booksellers, street libraries, private collections, and fan networks, tracing histories of Afro-Asian cultural production. This archival hospitality portrays Fayrouz's work and its bearing on the political and cultural shifts of their time.


The session resonates with Susan Buck-Morss's proposition that "if the present is imagined not as the culmination of the past but rather as its rescue, then a radical pedagogy practices this gesture in its mode of historical recuperation" – a reflection cited at the opening of Natascha Sadr Haghighian's 2023 book What I Do Not Recognize Yet, Now at This Very Moment. In this light, Fayrouz's voice gathers us to listen together in a turbulent present, holding their journey as a prism through which to reflect on our own.

This listening session will be audio-recorded and made available for streaming via Refuge Radio.