Jalal Toufic

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962, in Beirut or Baghdad, and died before dying in 1989, in Evanston, Illinois. A number of his books were published by Forthcoming Books. He has made over twenty films and videos: essay films and conceptual films; short films, feature-length films, and “inhumanely” long ones (72 hours, 50 hours); standalone films and others that form part of mixed-media pieces; films he shot himself and films composed entirely of images from works by other filmmakers—Hitchcock, Sokurov, Bergman, etc.—as well as six created in collaboration with his wife, Graziella Rizkallah. His work—alongside that of artists and pretend artists—has been shown in Sharjah Biennials 6, 10, and 11; the 9th Shanghai Biennale; the 5th Guangzhou Triennial; MoMA PS1; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou; ZKM; Kunsthalle Fridericianum; MAXXI; FKA Witte de With; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; and elsewhere. Many of his films and videos are available for viewing on Vimeo. In 2011, he was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD. From September 2015 to August 2018, he was Director of the School of Visual Arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (Alba).