Almacén de pequeñas interacciones entre grandes regiones y sus personas
 المخزن التفاعلات الصغيرة بين  المناطق  الكبيرة وشعبها
Armazém de pequenas interações entre grandes regiões e suas pessoas

As a child in Paraguay, I grew up going to two almacenes for sweets. One was around the corner from home. The other one was three flights away. My first contact with the Arabic-speaking world was in the early 2000s in Levant, where I learned that sweets, no matter the ingredients or the distance, are still sweets. This formative period of two worlds connected by a child interacting with their sugar/azúcar/as-sukkar is what brings us here today.

Almacén المخزن Armazém is a multimedia research project storing and amplifying the archives and current explorations of artists, craft makers, chefs, musicians, and creatives at large who have ties to both Latin America* and the Arabic-speaking world. Playing on the Spanish word “almacén” and Portuguese “armazém” inherited from the Arabic “المخزنal-makhzen”, meaning “storage or warehouse”, this first volume focuses on micro and powerful interactions between the two regions by way of their peoples.

‘akhi huna present their album Aleluiá, which shares subtle references to a Brazilian family history with Lebanese roots. Honduras-born Adrian Pepe introduces Entangled Matters, in which he works with Awassi wool and its millenary history in Lebanon. Ana Escobar Saavedra draws parallels between rings and marriage alliances in Dubai’s gold souq and pre-Columbian alloys. Andrea Salerno finds in Dubai the accidental culmination of her Migratory Birds cuisine project once initiated in Rosario, Argentina. Cristina Serrano revisits her college years in Abu Dhabi with a street food menu cooked in her kitchen in Bogotá. Enrique Yidi restages the arrival of Arab migrants to Puerto Colombia with his mastery of mother-of-pearl crafts in Barranquilla-based Taller Palestina. Sofia Basto Riousse visualizes her growing relationship with the Khaleeji desert as a painter longing for Colombia’s green lands of Huila. 

Almacén المخزن Armazém seeks to situate itself historically, tracing heritages, genealogies, and contemporary migratory paths by way of the creative resources presented. Equally, it responds to a history of cultural exchange that, tracing back to colonial times and their European mediators, has had modern and contemporary manifestations too. 

Over the past century and a half, the Arabic-speaking world and Latin America have come into progressively closer contact. Periodic waves of Arab, mainly Shami/Levantine, migration to the Americas have led to São Paulo, Santiago de Chile, and Barranquilla having some of the most established Arab diaspora communities in the world. With them, cities like Asunción and Mexico City have been shaped by bearers of Arab last names to the extent of lomito árabe becoming Paraguay’s de facto street food and tacos al pastor revolutionizing Mexican cuisine forever. Parallel to this, West Asia and North Africa have developed a fan base of Latin telenovelas, embraced Messi and Ronaldinho football jerseys across cities, and began listening to reggaeton and its nuances from radios to clubs. Until recently, my Arabic teacher from Sweida and I logged into our Zoom calls with the Paraguayan and Druze versions of mate, mine with boldo, hers with bits of cardamom.

With two regions in contact come their events and icons. Wikipedia has dedicated a full page to unpacking the “cultural impact of Shakira”, a performer and singer-songwriter who, singing Fairuz songs at ‘90s family events, went on to conquer the world with her mentions of Bahrain-to-Beirut and the idea that hips don’t, and perhaps won’t ever, lie. Randomly, probably as Shakira Isabel Mebarak was performing for her family, the UAE had its first FIFA World Cup match against Colombia in June of 1990.  

Before and after Shakira’s pop hits and massive football competitions, a few other voices have existed who experimented with these two seemingly distant but almost identical worlds: artists. Among them stands Bibi Zogbé “La Pintora de las Flores”, an artist of the world, who existed between Lebanon, Argentina, and also Uruguay, and Senegal – maybe she became all these places too. Her paintings, and a chance encounter with her work in Art Dubai, serve as reminders that even with months-long boat trips, the Arab world and Latin America have indeed interacted visually, materially, and humanly. 

Today, the Latin–Arab arts landscape has gained more layers. To name a few recent examples, Curator Amanda Abi Khalil and the Temporary Art Platform organized in 2020 ‘Make Yourself at Home’: Tropical Escape for Lebanese Artists, a relief residency in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, following the Beirut blast. Lawrence Abu Hamdan has recently exhibited in Guatemala City (NuMu) and Bogotá (Mor Charpentier), being joined in the latter by Kader Attia and Bouchra Khalili. Argentina-based BIENALSUR took place in two Saudi cities before and after Covid, the Jameel Prize is currently in Chile, and Colombia comes with three potent voices to the next Sharjah Biennial. Today, Barranquilla is home to Instituto de Cultura Árabe de Colombia, a grassroots platform that has joined this research project as a curatorial mentor to study and identify past, current, and foreseeable interactions between both the Arab world and Latin America. All of these cross-pollinations have happened in less than five years, mostly at an institutional level. Therefore, hoping to multiply these encounters and document them, this research project shares an intimate perspective of artists in the Arab and Latin worlds who are seeking to preserve, test, and communicate their explorations by their own means.

Overall, Almacén المخزن Armazém is a living storage space and does not have all the answers or conclusive statements. Rather, it frames its archival intention by juxtaposing large regions (and their fluid linguistic, territorial, and diasporic boundaries) with the small, curious, and deeply personal explorations of people who have physically or imaginatively experienced both places. This first volume begins with artists born in Latin America who have roots in the Arab world and/or who have been part of contemporary migratory paths that have consolidated Dubai and Beirut as creative hubs in the Arab world. With these artists, their interactions, and what they have in store, the first premise of Almacén المخزن Armazém is one and the same: that Arab–Latin and Latin–Arab are not just hyphens or “identities” but, rather, lifestyles produced, recreated, and amplified by people. By consequence, we are moving towards a shapeshifting worldview that we could baptize Lárabe, but more fittingly so: Lعtin.

_Daniel H. Rey

* Latin America is a colonial term that limits access to the layers and fluidity of a vast region and its histories.

Daniel H. Rey b. 1998, San Juan de Pasto, Colombia. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, UAE. Daniel is an independent curator advocating for #YouthCuratingYouth and Latin-Arab cross-pollinations. His work balances institutional and grassroots presence via Art Jameel, Dirwaza Curatorial Lab, and Global Art Daily, among others. An emerging writer, arts educator and public programmer, he has participated in cultural projects in South America, the Arab Gulf, Scandinavia, and the USA. Daniel feels at home in Paraguay, Norway, the UAE, and hopefully in Mars. curator@danielhrey.com; @danihrey

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The exhibition Dear Fractured Stones,  brings together a group of artworks exploring the nature of stone as material, as medium, and as metaphor. The exhibition will highlight the theme – (re)collect/(re)connect – one that demonstrates a variety of artistic strategies for repairing and re-establishing connections. Fractured stones can be understood as former parts of larger units whose connections are currently broken. A reparative attitude would thus allow these fragments to come together to form a unit, a whole.

Dear Fractured Stones, assembles nine artists from Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Although the presented works combine diverse art practices, they all share visual and content-related references to the themes of collection and archive. In this sense, fractured stones – whether depicted through installation, photography, as objects, or in painting – are transformed into condensed information carriers capable of absorbing and storing unknown narratives and, thus, of making such narratives visible. Behind each transformation lies an intention not only to not forget but also to actively remember. Such an approach shapes one’s self-image and worldview, and the selected works explore individual and collective memories, offering expanded insights into site-specific culture, history, politics, and mysticism, as well as into rituals connected with tomb culture and the occult.

What references to our present day and to our lived environment are contained within the idea (re)collect/(re)connect, and which strategies might serve as reparative in the context of an artwork?

Formal and playful in syntax, Dear Fractured Stones, refers to the standard salutation of a letter and thus suggests a communicative exchange, one in which the fractured stone now has a chance to reply.

_ Baharak Omidfard

Through video compilation, digital archival material, and moving images, Garden of e-arthly Delights forays into the dark forest of the web to look at what’s budding underneath the surface. From viral videos and memelords churning out digital arte povera to new forces that impact market dynamics and political trends, this fertile ground incubates and accelerates fringe movements and a new class of ideologues that together, test what we know.

Showcasing eight artists from, based in or around the GCC, whose works deal with memes as subject and medium, the exhibition explores wider expressions of gathering, ritual, and community to discover a new visual communicational landscape that maps out an alternative social terrain, varying definitions of being public and the terms of visibility and power.

The dark forest is a term borrowed from science fiction writer Liu Cixin and repurposed to refer to alternative spaces of consensus reality, in the wake of Web 2.0, where rigorous discourse takes place and overflows to the public in digestible formats — predominantly memes. It looks at the mushrooming of communities and the sprouting of a wide network across pockets online and out of sight, where relationships and connectivity that would otherwise take place in public, now play out in private.

Here, Gulfgraphixx draws from the pool of retro Gulf memes and comment section culture wars to bring into sharp relief what is otherwise bubbling in the gut-brain of the Khaleeji subconscious. Ahaad Alamoudi imagines a future where language is banned and replaced by a universal lingua franca that facilitates state surveillance. Basmah Felemban looks at world-building using a game engine to create a whole fictional universe where unity is not the underlying order in everything, rather duality and extreme paradoxes. Mythical creatures called ‘Jirri’ create a home out of a continuous stream of collaborative practices — playing, singing, and simply being together. Christopher Joshua Benton zeroes in on the exploitation of viral videos to foreground the invisible free labor of cultural production and the vectors that govern this market. Nadim Choufi overlays found footage with archived chats from LGBTQ+ chat forums, brought to life through Apple’s standard Arabic text-to-speech, unfolding the unrealized love of two people who never meet. Persia Beheshti presents an ethereal stage composed of compiled stock images, visual effects, and Tweets sourced from “angelicism” clone accounts on Twitter and Tumblr to recreate the “angelcore” aesthetic permeating these platforms. Fatemeh Kazemi collaborates with Chicago-based artist Maryam Faridani to take us into the secret worlds of female-only gatherings, the mirth of which is reflected on the screens of handhelds and documented in 10-second intervals on Instagram Stories. Shamiran Istifan brings together original footage and sourced imagery to spotlight the free association of posting patterns online through a fluid trickle of profound ruminations on space and theology, punctuated with altered verses from German rap culture.

Individually, these artists look at what has fallen in the crevices of the web to create dialogue trapped between the shifting policies of big tech and an institutional rejection and art market failure to invite and absorb them.

_ Ruba Al-Sweel

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Sophie Arni in conversation with Ruba Al-Sweel [Global Art Daily]

Into the Garden of e-artly Delights by Miikiina

Ruba Al-Sweel is an arts and culture writer and researcher from the Middle East with words in Art Asia Pacific, Vogue, VICE, The Brooklyn Rail, MOUSSE Magazine, among others. She holds a master’s degree in media and creative industries from SciencesPo, Paris, and takes particular interest in the emergence of internet subcultures. Al-Sweel also manages strategic, integrated, and global communications at Art Jameel, an independent organization that supports artists and creative communities.

What do forgotten or under-represented events say about historical writing and the politics of everyday life? If we trace them, where can the personal and collective memories, missing objects, or untold stories lead us today? In light of these questions, the works that comprise this exhibition irritates different forms of power structures such as institution, archive, discrimination, and state violence. Questioning the misuse of power dynamics and unsettling internalized racist structures, Unconquered Spirits brings together works by artists Ulf Aminde, James Gregory Atkinson, Hanan Benammar, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun, Cansu Çakar, Istihar Kalach, Rojda Tuğrul, and Ülkü Süngün. At a time when social, political, and environmental injustices seem overpowering, we tend to lose hope: hope for more equality, justice, and fresh air to breathe. In Hope in the Dark, a book that traces a history of activism and social change over the past decades, writer Rebecca Solnit writes, “Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don’t depend on them.” In a moment of crisis or in routines of daily life, we all seek for little escapes in safe places where we can fully be ourselves regardless of the situation we are in. When someone is being imprisoned for an unjustified, invalid reason, or when a law that you don’t support just passes, when someone is being attacked or discriminated against just for their looks or names, or when you think you have been treated unjustly, it is not enough to be a passive witness. The world needs more spaces for unconquered spirits to challenge authoritarian and oppressive structures. Although this may sound like it demands a clear and dedicated activist stance, it may be as easy as simply being yourself. At this point, the Solnit’s words open new paths, grow new branches, and encourage those who believe in any form of resistance. Whether through a journey of solidarity, an ancient mosaic from Hagia Sophia, an unwritten part of Middle Eastern art history, a juxtaposition of the Black Power fist and the white power salute, a documentation of the historical site Hasankeyf before its destruction, a mask eating Romulus and Remus, problematizing the term “desert ideology,” or a fictional monolog about the radical invention of institutions and self-governing, each work in the exhibition manifests a form of an unconquered spirit.

The starting point of Unconquered Spirits began a year ago before the founders of Sumac Space, Katharina Ehrl and Davood Madadpoor, invited me to develop an exhibition program. As an exhibition maker, one reads a poem, sees a face, talks to an artist, experiences an artwork, and there is already a beginning of a feeling or an idea for an exhibition. At the time, you may not be aware of it, but that subconscious desire to share it with the public and make an exhibition stays within you. Ever since I watched the film Set Off (2019) by Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun in 2020, I have been thinking about a possible and relevant context in which to make it public. When I saw the work for the first time in HfG (Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design), I was struck by Büyükcoşkun’s courage to handle such a sensitive topic in an immensely careful, poetic, and mindful way – not only because it is a highly politically engaged theme he is dealing with but also more importantly because it is about a journey where innocent people were killed. What remains beyond death? In 2015, thirty-three activists from different generations from across Turkey had been planning to travel to Kobane, a Kurdish town on the Syrian border, to help with rebuilding the town after it was hit by IS. It was a simple and genuine act of solidarity. On their way to Kobane they stopped in the small town Suruç before crossing the border to hold a press release at the Amara Cultural Centre in Suruç, where the tragic incident took place. Dancing on the border of documentary and art, the artist narrates a real-life story in three chapters from the perspective of the people who experienced or witnessed the event. Despite the heaviness of the topic, the work is carefully simplified. The storytelling is humble yet strong. Through a bus ride, conversations, and anecdotes, the work becomes increasingly relatable. As opposed to labeling people as radicals or terrorists, it touches a deeply humane part of the entire story.

The works by the artists Rojda Tuğrul and Ülkü Süngün all take place in specific locations and histories, and deal with underrepresented matters. Abuarafeh’s two video works including archival material came to life when she began digging into the recent art and exhibition history of Palestine. Rojda Tuğrul’s photo series are based on her long-term engagement with the ancient settlement and ecological territory of Hasankeyf along the Tigris River in Batman, Upper Mesopotamia, which is currently being left to submerge by the Turkish state as part of a dam project, despite local and international protests. Ülkü Süngün’s photo novel project narrates the delicate story of Sergo Pipia and Marina Tsertsvadze, a refugee couple from Georgia who lived in a small town near Stuttgart, Germany, before they took back their asylum application and returned, disillusioned, to their homeland. Each of the three artists focus on particular histories in the cities they have personal connection to – Jerusalem, Batman (Hasankeyf), and Stuttgart – and each of them are based on their own individual curiosities driven by overlooked topics.

The paintings of Istihar Kalach and Cansu Çakar represent a certain kind of humor, social-critique, and dream-like lightness at the same time. Kalach’s oil and acrylic paintings are not afraid of subtle uneasiness or absurdity; she modifies the objects and plays with the way we look at things. In her paintings, there is often a sense of duality. The mask paintings, for example, have four eyes: two black, referring to blindness and two melting eyes, referring to unclear visions and misunderstandings. While Stolen Tears (2021) subtly refers to legacies of colonialism, the Europemask (2021) represents a kind of blankness of dominant cultural narratives. Cansu Çakar, on the other hand, challenges the stereotypical subjects and classifications in traditional decorative drawing technique. Questioning what it means to be a woman or anyone who feels themselves a woman, or a prisoner in an oppressive regime, her drawings are fictional or based on real-life incidents. Her painting Wash your sins not only your face (2019) is inspired by a fountain mosaic at the entrance of  Hagia Sophia in Istanbul which originally reads as “Nipson anomemata mi monan opsin” (“ΝΙΨΟΝΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑΜΗΜΟΝΑΝΟΨΙΝ”), a Greek palindrome attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus (AD. 329–390). Not only is it related to resistance but the phrase also refers to the two faces of morality, religion, and authority.

In the video works Power Balance (2012) by James Gregory Atkinson and “Körper, Theorie, Poetik” (“Body, Theory, Poetics”) (2018) by Ulf Aminde, both artists have chosen to use their own body in different ways: Atkinson, his own hands and his own voice, and Aminde, his own body and voice in the style of an anonymized video. By engaging their own bodies directly, the works eventually become more personal and fiercer. Atkinson was raised in Germany by his African American father stationed in Germany in the 1980s as a U.S. soldier and his white civilian German mother. Atkinson’s biography illuminates a very distinct and important dimension of American foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century and the involvement of African Americans in those initiatives. In the genre of the conceptual video tradition, his video piece in loop narrates the political resilience and legacies of Black cultures within Western diasporas. In the wake of increasing global far-right terror the simple gesture and the strong juxtaposition of the hands, which represent the Black Power fist and white supremacy salute, question existing and ongoing power structures, using the artist’s body as a tool (This paragraph is developed in conversation with the artist James Gregory Atkinson). Similarly, in his performative film work, Ulf Aminde also deals with power structures and existing systems, first and foremost the institutions. Through the style of an undercover video with darkened body and special effect to alter the voice, the viewer is given the impression that the person talking is involved in an illegal act or for some other reason doesn’t want to be known. In a mysterious way, as this character speaks, it becomes clear that the main question being raised is whether radicality consists of initiating one’s own institutions or whether it is a matter of changing the institutions from the inside. Hanan Benammar, on the other hand, directly responds to the term “desert ideology,” which is used to describe Islamic culture by far-right circles. By naming her installation piece with the same title, Benammar turns the far-right term upside down. In her work, she brings the archival and image materials that she has collected over thirteen years of travels to desert areas into a poetical constellation. Each of the works in the exhibition has its own protest nature and distinctive language of storytelling based on personal experiences or witnesses.

_ Didem Yazıcı

Didem Yazıcı is an independent curator and writer, based in Karlsruhe Germany. Her curatorial work is inspired by thinking across disciplines in and outside of art, the potentiality of exhibitions as socio-poetic spaces, the legacy of intersectional feminism and global exhibition histories. Recently, she worked at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe (2017-18) where she co-curated exhibitions, and worked on conceptualizing and realizing the 200^th anniversary programme. In 2016, she worked as Curator for the Infra-curatorial Platform of the 11^th Shanghai Biennale invited by the curators Raqs Media Collective and Curator-in-residence at the Goethe Institute in Cairo. As a member of the curatorial team of Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2015-16), she curated group and solo exhibitions as well as video programs of ‘Schau_Raum’, and co-edited exhibition catalogues. Prior to that, she worked as a freelance curator, and curated the first solo exhibition of Mehtap Baydu in Berlin, titled ‘Tales of Shahmaran’ and a group exhibition ‘Left Unsaid’ in Kreuzberg Pavillon, Berlin in 2014. Previously, she was a curatorial researcher-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and worked at dOCUMENTA (13) as a project coordinator of Maybe Education and Public Programs (2012-13) in Kassel.  In 2009, she was the coordinator of Hafriyat non-profit art space in Istanbul. She studied B.A. in Art History at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul (2008) and M.A in Curatorial and Critical Studies at the Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt. (2012).

Selected exhibitions and projects include; “Life, Death, Love and Justice” with Peter Sit (Tranzit, Bratislava, spring 2021 upcoming), “Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind” and “Garden Conversations” (Schau_Raum, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, 2020) ‘Ulrika Jäger’ (Akku Stuttgart, 2019), ‘200 Years Young Songs: Mehtap Baydu’ (Badischer Kunstverein, 2018),  ‘Born In The Purple: Viron Erol Vert (Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien Berlin, 2017) ‘Freedom is a State of Mind’ (The 11th Shanghai Biennale, 2016), ‘Freundschaftsspiel,’ (Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg) ‘Middle Of The Path’ (Schau_Raum, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, 2015); ‘Towards The Garden of Palms’ (Polistar, Istanbul, 2013); ‘Apparatus Criticus & Locus’ (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2013); ‘Autopoiesis’ (Querungen, Württembergischer Kunstverein, 2013.) ‘Pie In The Sky’ (Platformsarai Frankfurt, 2011).