His Eyelid Taught Ghazal – Sa’ad Choeb

His Eyelid Taught Ghazal

Presented in collaboration with Shubbak Festival, the Syrian Academics and Researchers’ Network (SARN), The Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, and the University of Cambridge.

Curated by Aymen Gharbi.

Sound by Bint Mbareh.

This work is an artistic intervention at the University of Cambridge, commissioned by Shubbak Festival, and presented in collaboration with SARN network.

His Eyelid Taught Ghazal is a time-based, multimedia installation by artist Sa’ad Choeb. Following an exhibition tour in Syria and Tunisia, this iteration in Cambridge explores the entanglement of personal and collective grief, home return, and memory within transformative political landscapes.

Centring on live mould cultivated from paper recovered from the artist’s old studio in Syria alongside stones brought from his family home, the installation interweaves physical relics of displacement with the biosonification of living fungal activity, drifting audiovisual sequences, Sufi chanting, and a memory of a deceased poet mourning himself. Unfolding through an imagined cycle of lunar phases and eclipses, Choeb mobilises more-than-human allies to question anthropocentric narratives of loss, ecology, and exile.