Hanging Notes on the Red Castle is a new production in The Complete Uncredited Works series that deals with writings and poems which describe the architecture and spatiality of monuments. The slippage between word and image in such poems is mirrored in the imperfect preservation of historic texts. This series engages with that which exists outside of the historical cannon, which constitutes its negative space, and explores its implications on our understanding of literature, sources, authorship and how histories are written.These notes or mu’allaqat, assume the ability of poetry to change the face of architectural monuments, departing from a verse of Al-Mutanabbī, in which he describes the “Red Castle”. Alongside the verse, are all the pages that stayed entirely folded in the books of anthologists, except for the little parts on which the sun imprinted all what the poems could not show, establishing their connection with a history of architecture description and violence in poetry that hint at the subtle transformation of the castle, from its white color, to red.

The first iteration of “Hanging Notes on the Red Castle” was produced in Beirut in 2019, as part of Kayfa ta’s exhibition “How to Reappear” at Beirut Art Center. The second iteration was produced in Abu Dhabi in 2019 as part of the Publishing Maneuvers exhibition at Warehouse 421. The third iteration was produced in Amman in 2019, as part of the How to Reappear exhibition at MMAG foundation. Hussein Nassereddine lives and works in Beirut. His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments - some verbal, some sonic, some tactile - rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making. Nassereddine participated in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace program in 2018, and in 2020, he published How to see the columns as palm trees. the seventh book in the Kayfa ta series.