2026
in collaboration with hussam hasan
acc galerie
weimar, germany
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— Ibrahim al-Koni
The desert resists permanence. A constantly changing landscape. The Bedouin adapted their lives to its logic: reading space through paths, seasonal memory, and wasim — markings inscribing water ownership across generations without deeds. Their Nabati poetry reflects this same condition. It lived orally, passed from mouth to ear. Never fixed, never still.
Yet in 1926, a Bedouin leader built a fort in Jordan's southern desert, resisting a colonial order that prescribed nomadic peoples as anti-architecture. Seventy-four years later, the British erected a fortress in Wadi Rum to stage a fantasy: the desert as barren and wild. It mistook the unbuilt for the uninhabited. Both structures failed. The desert took over.
For al-Koni, "the desert has everything." Time in the desert does not move — past, present, and future exist at once. The desert unbuilds public space, suggesting that public spheres can emerge through presence and shared time rather than permanence.
This performance was part of Monday Night Lecture, a format in collaboration between ACC Galerie and the MFA programme Public Art and New Artistic Strategies, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
cover photo: Wadi Rum Polaroid, Hussam Hasan
Documentation: Courtesy of ACC Galerie Weimar