Dua Express
→ Selected Works & Projects
The Institute for Worldmaking is a reading room commissioned by Ashkal Alwan for their Homeworks 9 exhibition in Beirut’s Sursock Museum. Rooted in the ongoing worldmaking exercise of The Perfumed Garden, it is a 1:100 scale model of the institute’s building, representing a pivotal setting from the novel.
A polymorphous social space, crafted predominantly from upcycled foam, it functions across various times, scales, and degrees of familiarity.
The space, residing between fiction and reality, not only hosts texts and projects as part of its collection, but also is a publisher of new work that perpetuates The Perfumed Garden such as Dua Express in the pages that follow.
The reading room becomes a repository for over 100 books, manuscripts, drafts, and publications, accumulating the narratives of writers and artists who have engaged with and published on Beirut since 1995. Visitors are encouraged to immerse themselves in this space, with the opportunity to photocopy excerpts for personal keeping or to create new publications to be contributed back to the collection.
The world unfolds in every gesture and engagement with the immersive installation, and acts as grounds for future development of the narrative and the world itself. The papers in the photocopy machine reveal the architectural plans of the Institute of Worldmaking printed as limited edition RISOs in Beirut. IWM’s Lab for Mythology and Alternative Intelligence publishes Dua Express.
