Abstract:
 

Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen  (Archive Books, 2026) brings together a collection of Oraib Toukan’s essays, translated into Arabic for the first time. Toukan develops a haptic approach to making and writing about images from what she describes as their “soil grain.” Moving between image and terrain, visibility and touch, the political and the intimate, the conversation explores what exceeds the frame of the visible. What happens when we approach an image not only as something to look at, but as something with a material, tactile, and affective life? What might soil, wandering, desire, and attachment reveal about the ways images hold histories and relations that cannot be fully seen? Toukan explores the stakes of looking, the textures of place, and the forms of knowledge that emerge when we attend to what an image touches, and to what lies beyond it.

The event is part of The Public Life of Empathy, a multidisciplinary series curated by Zeina G. Halabi that explores empathy when it encounters the extreme conditions of war and genocide. Rather than treating empathy as an uncomplicated capacity for identification or solidarity, the project examines its limits, contradictions, and political stakes: How do writers and artists represent suffering without reducing it to spectacle? What ethical demands are placed on those who witness violence, and on those who mediate it through language, images, and art? And what forms of relation to the suffering of others remain possible when violence itself challenges the very possibility of understanding, identification, and representation?
 

This event is in collaboration with Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal

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