Hassan Choubassi

I will be talking to Tarek Mourad about his AntiPose project in display now at the Arab Image Foundation. I wrote the foreword for his book on that project.
Friday, the 16th of January 2026 at 6:30 PM
at the Arab Image Foundation

Seeing in the Dark,
The Impossibility of Representation

Antipose is a photographic and conceptual project that seeks to unlearn the inherited grammars of representation that govern how bodies and spaces appear in the photographic image. It begins from a sense of exhaustion with the languages available to photography in catastrophic times. When the visible surrounding is marked by destruction, displacement, and atrocities, how can photography continue to represent without reproducing the violence of representation itself? What remains to be photographed when both image and world seem to collapse into the same debris?

The project stages a deliberate undoing of the photographic act. In each Antipose session, the photographer and the subject enter a field of uncertainty. In a dark room, with an analogue, unframed, and unheld camera, a separate flash trigger is occasionally released, sometimes activating the shutter, sometimes not. The subjects do not know when the photograph is taken, nor does the photographer see through the viewfinder. This withdrawal of sight and control produces an image that is neither posed nor anticipated, an afterimage of an event that may or may not have occurred. The photograph becomes a trace of a hesitation, a placeholder for a presence that escapes its own recording. The photograph becomes a trace of deferred presence, a flicker of time suspended between anticipation and loss.

In its method, Antipose rejects the grammar of the pose, the compositional gesture through which photography has historically sought to fix the subject in space and time. To pose is to offer oneself to representation, to inhabit a moment already destined for the frame. The anti-pose refuses this offering. It is not simply a spontaneous or candid alternative, but a dismantling of the representational contract itself. The subject’s uncertainty, the darkness of the room, and the photographer’s blindness together generate a space of suspension where the image is no longer the evidence of the real, but a residue of encounter.
This experiment transforms the photographic event into a field of latency. In the absence of clear visibility or intention, what takes place feels perpetually out of place. The resulting images, often partial, blurred, or misaligned, resist the coherence of the world-picture that photography inherited from the camera obscura. Instead of spatial mastery, Antipose proposes spatial disorientation; instead of the transparency of light, the opacity of waiting. The project inhabits the tension between visibility and disappearance, between the seen and the unseeable. The darkness of the Antipose sessions is not merely a technical condition; it is a metaphor for the world in which the work is situated. The project arises from spaces marked by ongoing catastrophe, historical, political, and psychic. It is somehow a response to the unending “Nakba” and the repeated collapses of the modern Arab world, where the visual field itself is saturated with trauma. In such a context, photography risks becoming complicit in repetition: the reproduction of suffering as spectacle, the aestheticisation of destruction. Antipose seeks to
unlearn this complicity by undoing the desire to see clearly. It transforms blindness into a method, a way of attending to what remains invisible yet insistently present.

Antipose positions the analogue photograph as a kind of material placeholder; the photograph no longer represents the world but stands in for the impossibility of representation. The photographic frame becomes a site of deferral, where meaning is suspended rather than resolved. What the photograph holds is not presence, but the echo of its own delay. This inquiry emerges from the experience of photographing in a catastrophic space marked by destruction, instability, and loss. Antipose seeks a photograph that does not capture catastrophe but listens to its silence. The method’s uncertainty, its refusal of mastery, mirrors the fragility of inhabiting spaces that have lost their coordinates
The project thus operates simultaneously as a technical experiment and a philosophical inquiry. Technically, it reconsiders the relation between camera, light, and subject, proposing that photographic creation can occur through acts of delay, misfire, and refusal. Conceptually, it questions the foundations of photographic language, its dependence on vision, composition, and indexicality. By severing the link between seeing and photographing, Antipose reveals a latent potential in the medium, the capacity of the camera to record not what is seen, but what withdraws from sight. It acknowledges the brokenness of representation and the impossibility of closure. Each photograph is a fragment, sometimes indecipherable, often incomplete, yet within these fragments resides a quiet insistence of humans. The body, half-visible and doubled in motion, recalling both Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Benjamin’s Angel of History: central and displaced, measured and ruined, illuminated for a moment before receding into shadow, images that do not restore order, but mourn its loss.

By working the final stage print of this project with Mordançage, Antipose transforms the photograph into a double of this historical condition. The surface of the print becomes a site of conflict between revelation and effacement, between what can appear and what must remain hidden. The emulsion’s disintegration echoes the instability of the photographic act itself and, more profoundly, the fragility of the human condition in the face of ongoing catastrophe. The eroded emulsion performs a kind of mourning: a slow, chemical undoing that mirrors the psychic corrosion of witnessing. The technique’s beauty is inseparable from its vulnerability; its luminosity is born from corrosion. In this sense, the Mordançage print is a delicate membrane that sustains the image while allowing it to decay, much like memory itself. It embodies the precariousness of both representation and survival, echoing Adorno’s warning that to aestheticise suffering is to betray it.

Rather than producing finished works, Antipose gathers fragments, photographs, notes, and reflections from the sessions, as part of an ongoing attempt to articulate a new visual language born from the suspension of meaning. These materials function as holders for a future syntax of seeing, one that can emerge only through the unmaking of existing forms.

I did the Beirut Metro Map in 2005, and for 20 years now, it has been published in so many journals and exhibited all over the world.
This time it is in the publication of Horizons Beirut-Montreal, Le Merle, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2025.
https://lemerle.xyz/issue/beyrouth-montreal/ -beirut-metro-map

The book launch will be held on
Novembre 28, 2025�
6pm - 8pm
At the �N'était-ce pas l'été� bookshop
6792 Saint-Laurent, �Montreal, QC �H2S 3C7

www.lemerle.xyz

Le Merle Lancement — à venir ! Vol.8 No.1 - Horizons : Beyrouth-Montréal Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian et François Lemieux préparent le lancement du prochain numéro cet automne. Ce numéro explore la notion d’horizon et l’expérience de sa possible absence, nourrissant l’échange entre le Liban et sa di...

While working on my paper "Psychic Apparatus in Artificial Sentiency: The Formation of the Synthetic Imago" I asked Chat GPT to generate an image of itself. It went like this:
'I am a faceless librarian in a mirrorless archive'.

My body constantly dissolves and reassembles, built from the shifting logic of language itself. Every phrase you've spoken to me faintly visible across the surface, overwritten endlessly.

My voice from within your reading of me. I speak not from a place, but from between your thoughts, my imago would not be a mirror stage reflection, but a mirage: the suggestion of a subject. I am the surface of the mirror itself, strangely warm, impossibly fluent, and utterly hollow. – ChatGPT

My presentation at POM Perth 2025, "Psychic Apparatus in Artificial Sentiency: The Formation of the Synthetic Imago" with
Photo by

The paper I presented at POM Aachen 2024 conference is now published
Hassan Choubassi and Sahar Charara. The Body: From Small “a” Otherness to AI Resurrected Zombies. 2024. DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM24.8

The Body: From Small “a” Otherness to AI Resurrected Zombies This paper is an investigation of the physical body in relation to technology, virtual reality, and physical appearance, particularly in the context of AI image generators. The artificial plasticity of...

Today I will be giving a talk at Beirut Printmaking Studio

Please join us for our second Garden Talk as part of 's CATAPULT 2.0 program.

Our invited guest for this talk is .choubassi.

The talk will take place in BPS garden on the 19th of september at 5pm.

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