Art is not in some far-off place, and neither is rapture

But how many of us are weeping at public art galleries? And if that’s not the point, then what is?

What do we want art to do to us? It is a question that is somehow both easy and hard to answer—one that shapes how we approach what kinds of art we seek out, engage with, and make.

Muriel N. Kahwagi approaches the question through a diaristic essay that is both intimate and philosophical. Through a series of journal entries, Muriel places the question within the larger context of culture, life, the world—which, after all, is where art exists. 

November 9, 2023
Toronto, Ontario

It’s been 33 days since October 7, 2023.

I’m in Toronto visiting an old lover, and an email from AAA AAA pops into my inbox, with the subject line: “Assistant Curator at BBB BBB.” For three blissful seconds, I half-forget that I’ve even applied to this job, and I allow myself, begrudgingly, to feel some semblance of relief. It’s not a good fit (is anything, though?), but AAA AAA is asking for a job interview, and I say yes, because that’s what you do when someone gives you a lifeline, even if it comes, as lifelines often tend to, with more conditions than one.

The term “cognitive dissonance” comes to mind, and I think it must’ve been coined precisely for moments like these. I may never find another job again, but “At least you’re Christian,” my mother likes to remind me—and for all her flaws and irreverent delusions, I know that she’s right. A white-passing, soft-spoken, petite-figured thing like me will likely have it more easily than others might.

By the end of the day, AAA AAA has sent me the interview questions ahead of the actual interview, which will take place in a few days. Perfectly sandwiched between an innocuous query about my curatorial interests and the classic How do you deal with conflict? is the unexpected, yet ever-dreaded non-question: Tell us about a curatorial project that moved or inspired you.

I pause; I take a deep breath; I have a sip of water; I solve a Sukodu puzzle on my phone.

This is a trick question—or rather, a trick non-question. This prompt isn’t actually about the curatorial projects that have moved or inspired me, but about the ones that I think AAA AAA will be impressed with, or the ones that I think will make them think of me as a stronger candidate. Or more accurately, as a more benign, less threatening one.

I’m brooding over what I think the response will tell them about me, and that response is different today than the one I would have given 34 days ago. We all know this by now. Still, I have to engage in this dance. It takes two to tango, but only one to tap.

This is the equivalent of rearranging the books on my shelf for the sake of having a marginally more impressive Zoom background, but I feel like I have to find it in me to form a response—a real one—to what should be a no-brainer question for a curator to answer. But it somehow leaves me completely blank.

What is a curatorial project that has moved or inspired me?

I take a nap; I brush my teeth; I go for a walk; I buy watermelon-flavored gum. Because that is what the living do.

***

December 14, 2023
Beirut, Lebanon

I’m back home for the holidays, wrapping up my curatorial fellowship at Art Windsor-Essex remotely, working odd hours to try to keep up with the time difference. My old apartment feels like a movie set, musty and unlived-in, and if it weren’t for the periodic reports of Israeli strikes in the south grounding me, I’d think this place were made up of cardboard cut-outs.

I text Emily¹ Emily McKibbon, Head of Exhibitions and Collections at Art Windsor-Essex. almost everyday, and today she reaches out to tell me about a couple who visited Sasha’s show²The London, Ontario-based artist Sasha Opeiko. I curated her solo show, pixel / dust, at Art Windsor-Essex, which opened on October 24, 2023. with their child, a starry-eyed young thing who walked among Sasha’s displaced ruins—decaying objects meant to prophesy the collapse of our world under late-stage capitalism—and, not quite knowing what any of it really meant, exclaimed, “It’s broken!” and then proceeded to cry.

I think to myself, It really is broken, and I can’t believe this child can see it, too. Frederic Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, and Mark Fisher have all been credited with saying that “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” But in the aftermath of the debilitating financial crisis that Lebanon experienced in 2019, and the social and political decay that followed, we didn’t need to imagine anything. We saw an end to both, firsthand—the world as we know it, and capitalism. They were one and the same. We just didn’t know it at the time.

If a child can be moved by Sasha’s exhibition without reading any of the didactic texts or listening to an adult’s agonizingly simplistic interpretations of her work (how might one even begin to explain the notion of “late-stage capitalism” to a seven-year-old?), surely the rest of us must have that same capacity. But how many of us are weeping at public art galleries? And if that’s not the point, then what is?

***

July 26, 2025
Calgary, Alberta

Ziad Rahbani, Lebanese playwright, composer, and musician, has died. I call my mother, the biggest admirer of his work that I know.

“Did you hear the news about Ziad?” she asks.

“I did.”

“Huge loss. There won’t be another like him. He was a communist, you know.”

I did know.

“Oh yeah?”

“That’s why the government never liked him. They would call him a radical, an extremist, even. But all he really did was make music.”

We’re both silent.

“When I was young, I would listen to Adeish Kan Fi Nas³Arabic for “So many people were there.” all the time. It was one of the first songs he ever composed. It always made me sad. I wondered if anyone would ever wait for me in the rain, like Fairuz sings in the song, or if I would be forgotten.”

“Mom, you know we’d never forget you.”

“Oh, I know you and your brothers will always remember me, my love. But before I had kids, before I met your father even, I would wonder if anyone would remember me when I’m gone.”

We’re both silent.

“But you know, it wouldn’t matter if Ziad had any kids. No one will ever forget him.”

I’m not sure if the moral of that exchange is that I should hurry up and have children or write an unforgettable song, but after we hang up, I play Adeish Kan Fi Nas on loop. If I can’t make art that will outlive me, I may as well give birth to someone who might.

***

September 18, 2025
Calgary, Alberta

I’m on my seventh date with the playwright and I’m embarrassingly lovestruck. It’s late, he’s just finished performing his show, and we’re having polarizingly dry martinis on 10th Avenue and 5th Street.

We work in “industry-adjacent” fields, as he puts it, and our intersection feels like the best of both worlds. We know enough about each other’s professions that we’re able to draw constant parallels between our work—but not so much that we’re too entrenched in one another’s social circles.

We often talk about the work that we do—whether as artists and art curators or playwrights and theatre directors. And though the nature of the work itself may seem different, it’s (un)surprisingly quite similar.

Back in Lebanon, we ask ourselves all sorts of questions all the time, relentlessly, unforgivingly. Not necessarily more frequently than we do in Canada, but certainly with a greater sense of urgency. Why do we do the work that we do? Who are we doing it for? Why do we keep doing it, even when everything around us seems to be falling apart? Does it even matter?

These questions are always nagging at us—unanswered, more often than not. We ask them anyway. Someone needs to.

The playwright tells me—half-jokingly, half-not—about a book he read years ago, Writing Fiction for Dummies.

“There’s a great line in there,” he says, “about why we consume fiction or art in general. It’s because we’re looking for an emotional experience.”

I read most of the greats, and a great deal of non-greats, when I was in university, and great literature does—as all manner of great things tend to, including great art—leave us feeling something. And whatever that feeling is—sad, angst, discomfort—it tends to stay with us.

I try to recall some of the books, films, or exhibitions that have left an emotional impact on me.

Books:

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”)
• Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles (“Unhappiness isn’t at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned.”)
• Philip Roth’s Everyman (“Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”)
• Eley Williams’ poem “Slough” (“I start and end days with you isn’t that silly?”)
• Don Delillo’s The Body Artist (“The plan is to organize time until she can live again.”)

Films:

• Steve McQueen’s Shame
• Borhane Alaouié’s Beirut, The Encounter
• Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates
• Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest
• Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy

Exhibitions:

• Jónsi: Hrafntinna (Obsidian) at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)
• Hrair Sarkissian’s constellation of works as part of Making New Time, curated by Omar Kholeif in the framework of Sharjah Biennial 14
• Beat Generation at Centre Pompidou

The list is lopsided—ungracefully so—and I wonder if that’s aggravated by the fact that Beat Generation was largely a documentary exhibition (and perhaps hardly deemed an “art exhibition” at all), and that Hrair is a close friend of mine (I gave him my annotated copy of The Odyssey; he gave me a print from his poignant Execution Squares series).

A colleague and unlikely friend once told me, “Connection is the currency of the world.” He wasn’t wrong. Human connection contours and often dictates the work that we do. As arts workers, the capital we bring into any institution comes in the form of the relationships we’ve built. Sometimes, though none of us ever really wants to admit it, it’s just about chemistry.

I’ve seen art that’s great, and art that’s less than. I’ve seen art that’s underwhelming, and art that’s made me think, “What was that?” I’ve seen art that’s stunning and beautiful and breathtaking, and it’s all been lovely, but the best art I’ve seen is the kind that makes me want to write, and those instances are few and far between.

I don’t know what it is that makes us connect with some works more than others. Maybe it really is, unapologetically, just about chemistry. And maybe it’s about affect, plain and simple, and wholly unquantifiable.

***

December 21, 2025
Somewhere along Highway 2—between Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta

I’m heading to Edmonton to see the playwright, Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories sprawled on my lap. I’m nearing the end of “Extracts from a Life,” which recounts a young man’s reflections of his own life, and I come across these two lines, beautiful and taciturn:

“I have learned what art really is. Art is not in some far-off place.”

I pause, reach for my phone, and type into ChatGPT:

“Art is not in some far-off place. Where is art?”

ChatGPT responds:

“Art isn’t somewhere else.

It’s here.

Art is in how people notice the world and respond to it:

• in everyday moments—a conversation, a mistake, a small joy.

• in attention—how you look, listen, feel, and question.

• in action—making, choosing, caring, resisting, imagining.

So if art is not in a far-off place; it’s where perception meets expression.

Where someone turns experience into meaning.

In other words:

Art is wherever humans are fully present.”

I shut the book, put my earphones on, and listen to Kid Francescoli’s album Play Me Again the rest of the way.

Footnotes:

• 1
  Emily McKibbon, Head of Exhibitions and Collections at Art Windsor-Essex.
• 2
  The London, Ontario-based artist Sasha Opeiko. I curated her solo show, pixel / dust, at Art Windsor-Essex, which opened on October 24, 2023.
• 3
  Arabic for “So many people were there.”