In conjunction with the exhibition Art Now in Lebanon at Darat al Funun, Lebanese thinker Jalal Toufic will give a talk on 'The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster'.

“We live in a block universe of space-time, where nothing physically passes and vanishes, but where occasionally things withdraw due to surpassing disasters. Palestinians, Kurds, and Bosnians have to deal with not only the concerted erasure by their enemies of much of their tradition but also the additional, more insidious withdrawal of what survived the physical destruction. After the surpassing disaster, the duty of an artist is either to 'resurrect what has been withdrawn' or to 'disclose the withdrawal'."

-Jalal Toufic