‘Century Bingo’ is the first solo exhibition by artist and writer Bassem Saad (1994, Beirut, Lebanon) in Belgium. Through film, writing, performance, sculpture, and installation, Saad’s work explores historical and contemporary forms of struggle, animating ideology with interpersonal dialogue and play. With a background in architecture, Saad often engages with urban space and architecture, in cities such as Beirut, Berlin, New York, and now Brussels. Her work comments on the dynamics of normalised crises and control through infrastructure, soft power and policing, while also exploring the potential for justice in the aftermath of imperialism. Saad’s work, marked by a humorous tone contrasting the seriousness of subject matter, offers a non-linear interpretation of history, highlighting moments of rupture and continuity across various contexts.

In ‘Century Bingo’, Saad presents a new collage-installation of the same name emulating the form of a traditional bingo game. The exhibition also includes the films Congress of Idling Persons (2021) and Kink Retrograde (2019; 2022), a vinyl text installation titled Who said fate? (2024), and an ongoing series of lenticulars called Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation (2022–present). Premiering at this exhibition is Permanent Trespass, a film installation co-produced by NW and The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), created in collaboration with writer Sanja Grozdanić. The work is based on Saad and Grozdanić’s theater performance Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century). The film installation features a dialogue between two eulogists set against a backdrop of undisclosed locations marked by the crumbling structures of a bygone era. The conversation is intermittently interrupted by a “cine-poem” that intertwines found footage with spoken word elements. All the works on view share a cyclical and expansive structure that, even when cut or interspersed, draws viewers into thought patterns akin to a memory game. Toying with elements of spy fiction while combining theatrical and experimental approaches, the film and installation on view in the main space place personal stories within broader narratives of historical injustice and the failures of international justice systems.

Throughout ‘Century Bingo’, Saad explores the epoch we inhabit, challenging the conventional notions of fate and faith, progress, conquest and teleological development in political history. The exhibition focuses on the “American Century,” a term that describes the era of American world-hegemony that began after World War II. The works explore key moments and locations from the last hundred years, touching on the Palestinian Nakba, Third World national liberation, Black Lives Matter, Arab Spring as well as the events of October 7th, combining moments of uprising and joy, with those of loss and defeat. Saad’s exploration is driven by the belief that people create events, and events, in turn, shape people, examining how revolutions and acts of resistance can influence historical processes. At its core, the exhibition poses questions about what may come next if we have indeed said goodbye to an epoch and mourned its victims, exploring what new forms of social order and power structures might emerge in a multipolar world and how we might navigate our place within it.

Permanent Trespass is co-commissioned by NW and EMPAC–Curtis R. Priem Center for Experimental Media and Performing Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.