Home Works Forum is a multidisciplinary platform that takes place in Beirut, Lebanon about every other year. Since its inception in 2002, Home Works has evolved into one of the most vibrant platforms for research and exchange on cultural practices in the region and beyond. Artists, cultural practitioners, writers, and thinkers gather for ten days in order to share their works, which take the form of exhibitions, performances, lectures, videos, artists' talks, workshops and publications. What links the forum's participants together is their approach to a common set of urgent, timely questions. Their work endeavors to create methods of critical inquiry and aesthetic form capable of conveying those questions meaningfully and proposing possible solutions. The Home Works Forum is a productive space in which political, social, economic, and cultural realities can be explored, reflected, and made manifest as visual and verbal articulations that occur with some consistency.
As a title, the term "Home Works" suggests an intertwining of public and private spheres, the outside world of work and the inside space of home. It refers to the exercises, lessons, and research problems that are worked out by students repetitively and in solitude. More broadly, "Home Works," itself an impossible plural, implies a process of internal excavation, of digging and burrowing deeper while simultaneously constructing and accumulating new practices.
Excerpt from the Preface of the Home Works I publication, 2003:
“This book contains more than 500 exercises, divided into six categories:
Warmups are exercises that EVERY READER should try to do when first reading the material.
Basics are exercises to develop facts that are best learned by trying one's own derivation rather than by reading somebody else's.
Homework exercises are problems intended to deepen an understanding of material in the current chapter.
Exam problems typically involve ideas from two or more chapters simultaneously; they are generally intended for use in take-home exams (not for in-class exams under time pressure)
Bonus problems go beyond what an average student of concrete mathematics is expected to handle while taking a course based on this book; they entend the text in interesting ways.
Research problems may or may not be humanly solvable, but the ones presented here seem to be worth a try (without time pressure).”
The publication that accompanies each Home Works Forum is launched during the following edition