The Game

Artist duo Rana Haddad and Pascal Hachem present The Game, a performance that stages the tension between control and collapse, command and chance. In this Beckettian experiment of repetition and absurd precision, sticks, chairs, trays and bodies negotiate impossible balance; instructions replace meaning, repetition becomes ritual, and equilibrium fails beautifully.

The Game unfolds within the architecture of precision, where balance, repetition, and control are tested until they fracture. Here, the absurd is not imagined; it is engineered.

Every gesture measured, instructed, delayed becomes a metaphor for systems that run on obedience and exhaustion.

Sticks, chairs, trays, sand, salt, water, equilibrium, bodies: each element negotiates the fragile line between structure and collapse. And between them all, silence.It moves like another performerstretching, folding, pressing against the air.

Sometimes it commands, sometimes it yields.It records everything that words cannot hold.

Participants follow distant voices, carry invisible weight,perform purpose without reason.

Meaning emerges by accident through friction, through stillness, through the return of silence.

Because here, silence is not absence.

It is the first instruction, and the final echo.

Neither theater nor dance, The Game operates as a living diagram, a rehearsal for inhabiting a world where repetition replaces belief, and equilibrium is the last illusion.

A Beckettian experiment in stillness and undoing.A meditation on control, entropy and the sound of everything waiting to fall quiet.

Date: 16 November 2025

Time: 2:30PM

Venue: WH50, Project Space, Alserkal Avenue (Google Pin)

Presented as part of Fall 2025 Residency Open Studios.

Bio:

Rana Haddad and Pascal Hachem are influential figures in Beirut's & international cultural scene. Operating at the intersection of activism and art, their performances, interventions and practices address overlooked aspects of places, languages and objects, offering alternative narratives. By focusing on urban contentions that affect citizens on a daily basis, they ignite debates and challenge socio-political measures through simple yet impactful gestures. Their public installations have taken them from Beirut to international stages in Mantes La Jolie, France; Fribourg, Geneva, Bern and Lausanne, Switzerland; Algiers and Bejayya, Algeria; Turin and Rome, Italy; Istanbul, Turkey; Dresden, Germany, Wellington, New Zealand, AlUla, KSA and recently Mexico. Their works have graced prestigious institutions worldwide, including Desert X ALUla 2024, KSA; the Mosaic Rooms, UK; the Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea; the Mario Merz Foundation, Italy; the Museum of Modern Art Milwaukee, USA; the Grand-Hornu, Belgium; the Mudac, Switzerland; the Dresden Kunsthaus, Germany; Venice Biennale, Italy. The works are part of several prestigious art collections, including The Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunisia, the Nadour Collection in Germany, the Farook Collection in Dubai, and the Galila Barzilai-Hollander Collection in Belgium. Their artistic endeavors have recently been acknowledged by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, which acquired notable pieces such as "Debris of Texts and Eyeglasses" and the "Stuck Stick" series.

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Host or Publisher Alserkal Arts Foundation