İpek Çınar: At first glance, our practices and outcomes may appear quite different, but I sense they stem from similar concerns and struggles. That makes me especially curious about this exchange. So let me start directly: How would you describe what you do at the intersection of art, participation, and politics?

Reyhaneh Mirjahani: I would describe my art practice primarily as a mode of critical investigation. Rather than positioning art as an end in itself, I approach it as a methodological and epistemological tool—one that enables me to examine and intervene in a socio-political situation, an issue, or a tension. Ideally, it serves as a mode of inquiry capable of activating forms of knowledge production that are embodied, situated, and relational.

I rarely begin with art as such. I tend to start with a question or conflict, using art to probe, study, re-read, and reframe a situation. I am especially curious about the entanglements between power, counter-narratives, ethics, and lived experience. I focus on how these forces shape one another and structure the conditions for participation, responsibility, or agency. Initially, my interest was grounded in theoretical frameworks. Over time, I have become more drawn to the capacity of artistic practice to generate alternative research modes. These modes resist abstraction and instead foreground affect, contingency, and embodied experience.

I try to approach art not only as a representation, but as a speculative and experimental space. Here, dominant logics can be discussed, redefined, or reimagined. Art enables the exploration of new ways of relating, the rehearsal of ethical positions, and the co-creation of shared meaning. I am interested in how these spaces can offer conditions for critical reflection that go beyond cognition. They are also embodied and effective. This brings the possibility of more nuanced and plural understandings of participation, responsibility, and the political. 

İpek: Your earlier works address identity and belonging through guest/host and self/other tensions, but later take on a more transnational, relational focus. Looking back, what questions or dilemmas prompted this shift in direction for you? Was it a gradual evolution or a response to particular challenges?

Reyhaneh: We grow up in systems that are keen to define our lived experiences through dichotomies. It is a way to simplify situations, and we are taught to think in the same terms. Over the years, I have shifted my attention toward what lies between these categories. I want to grasp the complexity of relationships and to resist static interpretations of events. 

This has transformed my practice. My work is no longer primarily about my own identity or position. Instead, I focus on how, as subjects, we navigate the contexts and systems in which we live. Dialogue and participation become essential. They create opportunities to explore and understand the diverse, dynamic experiences of others. At the same time, they help reveal the politics that shape participation and dialogue. 

İpek: From what you’ve described, art for you seems to exist as both something projected into the future (the not yet) and as a process that unfolds. In your participatory works, many elements are involved: planning, realization, documentation, participant input, unexpected encounters, and the tensions of the moment. All of these meet in a speculative space. With so many variables, how do you see your role in this process? For example, how do you position yourself in the room?

Reyhaneh: I would describe my role in participatory projects as a facilitator. During the preparation and development phases, I established a framework with specific elements and cues. These questions or concerns are what I want to explore with participants. These elements act as subtle guideposts, not strict instructions.

Once the work begins, I try to step back and leave space for participants to interpret and respond on their own terms. I consider this openness essential. It allows the unexpected to emerge in both content and group dynamics. Sometimes I intervene during the activation phase, usually by asking a question or subtly shifting the group’s attention. My aim is to stay responsive rather than directive. I try to inhabit a space between author and participant. This lets me guide without closing possibilities, and to unfold relationally, shaped by the moment—whether social, political, or interpersonal.

But this brings me to a key question about your own practice: How do you define your role within the Orta Okul project that you initiate? In your view, how does your positioning affect dynamics, openness, and the potential for unexpected outcomes?

İpek: Initiate is the correct word. I usually describe myself not as an artist, but as an initiator. Even this role can influence a project’s dynamics more than I expect or want to admit. My solution is to carefully specify which groups I work with and spend more time with them. I dedicate time to understanding the community’s dynamics and learning about them. Whenever possible, I exchange ideas with them before the project begins. This helps my vision align with the community’s reality and wishes.

This approach involves compromises. Instead of working in galleries, museums, or staging public interventions, I often work in spaces where the community feels safer. Sometimes, I commit to longer-term collaborations. For example, in a recent project with Orta Okul, we spent several months meeting with the community every Friday. Sometimes, we did nothing more than ask, How do you perceive what we are doing together? Ultimately, we did not produce exactly what we had planned. But the process taught us about participation, empowerment, and building connections. Some women began referring to it as our project rather than your project. A few even wanted to take the initiative to continue it independently. This was an unexpected, yet deeply valuable, outcome.

I would like to specifically focus on your upcoming work, An Experiment on Agency #8, which will be part of Acts of Conflations and is the reason we met. This project continues a series that has already engaged diverse geographies, including Latvia, the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden. Could you discuss the overall framework of this work and how you have adapted it to various contexts? 

Reyhaneh: This work is designed to create a space where friction, disagreement, and discussion are not only possible but necessary. I have noticed that conversations around agency often get trapped in rigid dichotomies: either one has agency or one does not. In An Experiment on Agency, I seek to disrupt these binaries by foregrounding contexts in which agency is ambiguous, unstable, or constantly shifting. The work invites participants to explore subjective understandings of power and responsibility, rooted in lived experience rather than abstract definitions.

While I actively shape each version of the work based on its context, the project itself also evolves. The context not only informs the realization of the work, but also transforms it. Each iteration responds to dilemmas specific to the setting. These may relate to geography, sociopolitical conditions, or the group’s composition. During the activation phase, participants further shape the work, often steering discussions toward their own concerns and group dynamics. For example, in Riga, one participant group consisted of humanities secondary school teachers. In the Netherlands, it was a group of artists and researchers in socially oriented and academic practices. Each setting brought new questions: What kind of language emerges around the concept of agency? How do we discuss responsibility in a group of nations in conflict? What does it mean to claim neutrality? What happens when the agency shows up as refusal, withdrawal, or silence rather than action? And how do aesthetics operate in this participatory format?

İpek: Sharing agency is as challenging and risky as political, often feeling like the subject investigates you as much as you investigate it. Why is it so central to the series?

Reyhaneh: At first, I approached the agency as something granted, and I was interested in how we could exercise it. Later, during research phases, I began to question that premise entirely. Some scholars argue that agency can be imposed, involuntary, or even illusory. This was a turning point for me—not only for the project, but also for my own understanding of the concept. From there, the focus shifted toward examining different forms of agency and the structures that either limit or enable it, as well as the dilemmas and liminal spaces in between that we need to navigate.

I personally had the privilege of growing up around some activists and civic actors in my hometown of Tehran. That environment initiated many questions about our agency, responsibility, and ethics, situated between an authoritarian regime and imperial powers. For me, these questions are inseparable from my lived experience, regardless of where I am or the privileges I hold. I believe that engaging with this subject reveals much about our own subjective positions, standing in contrast to purely empirical research on the topic and challenging the binary frameworks through which the world is so often understood.

İpek: And what will you be exploring specifically in the Berlin context?

Reyhaneh: In Berlin, I am particularly interested in continuing this investigation at a time when violence is intensifying. Specifically, in the context of the ongoing genocidal acts and the immense human suffering of the civilian population in Gaza, the response we’ve seen in Germany—mirroring similar trends in some other Western countries—reveals a growing repression of protest and political movements. Within this climate, a central question emerges: how can we hold space for conflict without collapsing into consensus? And how can we meaningfully engage with the notion of agency when speaking out becomes a risk, and visibility itself can be weaponized?

I am not sure that it will open up new ways in a radical sense, but it will emphasize the already existing resources in our society: the capacity to share and to listen. I do not mean this passively; rather, it is a deliberate engagement with doubt, dilemmas, and insecurity, creating a space where these tensions can be acknowledged and discussed. The aim is not necessarily to provide answers, but to trace and understand the different structures at play in shaping experience and agency. This is what I hope to realize in the exhibition.

At the same time, I also want to acknowledge my own doubts. To what extent can conversation alone generate alternative approaches to entrenched situations? How much space can we truly give to antagonism in a context where we are still confronting the very real legacies of oppression and violence? Under what conditions, and when, are we allowed to engage in agonism, and when must we prioritize care, listening, or safety? 

I’m curious about your perspective on working in Berlin today. How do the specific conditions, tensions, and opportunities here shape the way you think about agency in your own projects? And how does this affect your work with Orta Okul or similar participatory initiatives?

İpek: What you say is extremely important and a pressing issue in Germany, one that we all face in different ways. We are confronted both with the complicity of the country we live in regarding genocide and with the hypocrisy of institutions that have benefited from post-migrant, anti-colonial, and feminist discourse, which remain silent and try to silence us. Yet we remain here, because there is no other place to go.

At Orta Okul, we have dedicated our first three years to topics related to this: Urgency (2024), Community (2025), and Resilience (2026). Our aim is to strengthen collective bonds and allocate the limited resources we or our fellows have. I find both ease and political engagement in empowering individuals, using the methods you mentioned: care, listening, and creating safer spaces, especially for those in more difficult positions. It may sound simple, but after seeing how institutions complicate these topics, I believe we need a bit of simplicity and directness. And more spaces to discuss. Perhaps for this reason, we need An Experiment on Agency now more than ever.

Reyhaneh Mirjahani is an artist working at the intersection of visual art, curating, artistic research, organizing, and publishing, focusing on participatory art. She uses collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to create dialogic spaces exploring agency, participation, counter-narratives, and spatial politics. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University, and has completed the postmaster programs Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art at HDK-Valand and CuratorLab at Konstfack.

İpek Çınar is an artist and researcher working predominantly with participatory and socially engaged art practices. She uses play, joy, and unexpected encounters as means of expression. She studied Political Science at METU Ankara and Art in Context at UdK Berlin, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Alongside her artistic production, she also works in the field of anti-discrimination and social justice. İpek Çınar loves the word “Orta” (Middle): She is co-editor of Orta Format and is a co-founder of Orta Okul.

The post Holding the Dilemma, Sitting with the Question—Reyhaneh Mirjahani in conversation with İpek Çınar appeared first on Sumac Space.

Yaqeen Yamani’s work Checking In—a collection of eighteen text messages sent to Palestinians amid an unfolding genocide—transcends sociological critique, evolving into a meditation on language as both witness and accomplice to erasure. These messages, phrased in the rhetoric of care yet hollow in their affect, invite viewers to navigate the architecture of the Symbolic Order: a structure that polices truth, conceals complicity, and transforms human suffering into ritualized performance.

Through the lens of French feminist thought, this essay explores how Yamani’s work illuminates the quiet complicities embedded in language. It reveals the mechanisms by which Western discourse enacts Abjection—the casting out—of the Palestinian subject. The critiques that Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous directed at Phallogocentrism—that paternal, logic-bound tongue—resonate with the colonial narratives that continually attempt to erase Palestinian identity and pain. In this light, Checking In is not merely an artwork but an intervention—a confrontation with the ways language itself can be weaponized, sanitized, or rendered inert.

Julia Kristeva: The Rhetoric of Performance and Political Abjection
In Kristeva’s theory, Abjection names the primal force that assaults the boundaries of the self, demanding expulsion to preserve the illusion of psychic coherence. It is not a matter of filth alone, but an existential rupture—an unthinkable presence that threatens the fragile separation of “I” and “Other.”

On a geopolitical scale, the explicit acknowledgment of genocide, the affirmation of Palestinian subjectivity, and the confrontation with systemic complicity destabilize the Western Symbolic Order itself. These truths are the political abjects of our time. The brief “checking in” message operates as a defensive mechanism—a linguistic anesthetic—that allows the complicit subject to maintain distance from this disturbance. The query “How are you?”, uttered amid catastrophic erasure, functions as a shield against unbearable reality. By omitting “Palestinian” and refusing to name the violence precisely, these messages exile both subject and suffering to the margins, absolving the sender of responsibility while preserving the illusion of ethical concern.

Kristeva defines the Symbolic Order as the domain of law, custom, and language that regulates the untamed forces of the Semiotic—rhythm, emotion, instinct. Within Checking In, the language of care emerges as a symptom of this order’s collapse. Grammar and syntax remain intact, yet affective depth has been drained. The Semiotic pulse that animates authentic empathy is absent. What remains is a hollowed-out ritual: the performance of empathy without its substance, a gesture designed to maintain social composure and avert acknowledgment of moral collapse.

By collecting and exhibiting these eighteen messages—and framing them explicitly as a critique of complicity in genocide—Yamani reinjects the abjected real into the public sphere of art. The work fractures the veneer of serenity maintained by the Symbolic, forcing the viewer and the complicit subject alike to confront what had been expelled: real suffering, lived experience, and ethical accountability. This is a Semiotic rebellion, a return of the repressed, revealing the quiet power structures embedded within language.

Luce Irigaray: The Politics of Denied Difference and Critical Mimicry
Irigaray’s critique of Phallogocentrism—the patriarchal logic that recognizes only one subject, the masculine One—extends to political discourse as an indictment of the denial of difference. In Checking In, this critique is rendered vividly: the refusal to name “Palestinian” is not incidental, but central to the work’s examination of systemic erasure.

As patriarchy permits only a single gendered subject, global discourse often permits only a single narrative of power. By failing to name “Palestinian,” the messages participate in this denial, reducing a particularized struggle into abstraction. The Palestinian, as a subject defined by historical specificity and political identity, is denied recognition. This linguistic flattening transforms a complex colonial reality into a neutralized humanitarian story, where suffering is generalized and history obscured.

Irigaray theorized mimicry as an insurgent strategy: the deliberate over-performance of the role assigned by the dominant order to expose its hollowness. Yamani enacts this principle through the exhibition itself. By re-presenting these phrases of hollow empathy, the artist mirrors the language of power to reveal its emptiness. In Acts of Conflations, mimicry becomes an act of resistance: the repetition exposes the mechanisms of erasure embedded in everyday communication, transforming passive compliance into a critical intervention.

Irigaray’s emphasis on the materiality of the body resonates in Yamani’s choice of medium: text on glossy paper. This materialization transforms abstract messages into objects of presence. The gloss, the weight, and the tactile quality of the paper restore the Palestinian subject where language had imposed absence. Within the exhibition space, the texts assert themselves as objects demanding recognition, reminding viewers that language, when materialized, carries accountability.

Hélène Cixous: Reclaiming the Body’s Voice and Narrative Sovereignty
Cixous’s notion of Écriture Féminine—writing from the body, from instinct, from breath—sought to dismantle the sterile grammar of the paternal tongue. In Checking In, this principle manifests as the reclamation of the Palestinian voice, reviving a silenced narrative.

The “checking in” dispatches are echoes of a disembodied tongue, stripped of emotion and instinct. They sever the link between word and lived suffering. The sender, unwilling to inhabit another’s pain, shelters in a rhetoric of composed detachment. This mirrors the paternal tongue Cixous critiques: rational, coherent, but emptied of human resonance.

Cixous emphasizes the power of silence, the force of the unsaid. In Yamani’s work, the truth resides in what is omitted: the erased words—“Palestinian,” “genocide,” “occupation”—carry more weight than the phrases that remain. These silences are not passive voids but instruments of suppression, sustaining systemic erasure. Yamani turns these absences inside out, transforming silence into presence, and demanding that viewers acknowledge what language refuses to name.

Emerging from dialogues with Palestinians in the United States, Checking In is inherently communal. It assembles dispersed experiences into a chorus of voices, transforming individual narratives into a shared language of resistance. Through these eighteen fragments, the Palestinian lived experience becomes palpable, political, and plural—insisting upon recognition, refusing isolation, and asserting sovereignty over its own narrative.

Across the work, the interplay of silence and speech, absence and presence, reveals the ethical stakes embedded in language. By foregrounding the empty gestures of empathy, Yamani’s artwork calls attention to the ways linguistic structures maintain complicity. It demonstrates that language is never neutral: it shapes, erases, and validates, and it is within this field that resistance must operate. Checking In compels viewers to confront not only what is said, but how it is said, and what remains unspoken.

The juxtaposition of minimal material—text on paper—with maximal ethical and affective force allows the installation to operate on multiple registers simultaneously: aesthetic, linguistic, and political. The exhibition space becomes a site where the unseen machinery of erasure is revealed, where the abjected subject returns, and where the viewer is implicated in the act of witnessing.

Where Words Return: Echoes of Presence
With the simplest of tools—text and paper—Yaqeen Yamani excavates the structures of linguistic violence that silently sustain erasure. Through the lens of feminist psychoanalysis, Checking In reveals how the dominant language—the Phallogocentric Symbolic Order—erases the Palestinian subject even while claiming to convey care.

Yet the work does more than reveal: it restores. By making visible the mechanisms of complicity, Yamani brings presence, materiality, and voice back into the space where absence once prevailed. Through mimicry, through silence, and through the return of the abjected real, Checking In transforms the gallery into a space of ethical and critical engagement. Here, language itself becomes a site of reclamation, a vessel for witnessing and bearing responsibility.

The Palestinian subject, once removed and silenced, reemerges—not as abstraction, but as a living, speaking presence. In this careful return, each word, each absent word, each deliberate silence resonates. The exhibition Acts of Conflations is no longer merely a site of display; it becomes a crucible where language, presence, and witness converge. Through this act, Yamani restores not only what was lost to erasure but also the possibility of recognition, justice, and the enduring affirmation of identity.

Safoora Seyedi is a writer and researcher exploring art, literature, and memory through a feminist lens. She holds an M.A. in International and World History from Columbia University, with a thesis titled “Narrative as a Historical Document.” Seyedi contributes essays and art reviews to various journals and engages in collaborative reading projects, examining how stories and images shape collective memory.

The post The Word Dismantled to Compose a Single Silence—Safoora Seyedi appeared first on Sumac Space.

The text will be published in Italian in the upcoming issue of Arabpop—Contemporary Arab Arts and Literature magazine.

Wafa Hourani’s work does not just imagine futures: it builds them, piece by piece, often in miniature. Born in 1979 in Hebron, Palestine, Hourani grew up as one of 21 siblings in a refugee household shaped by displacement and history. His art crosses boundaries—sculpture, photography, poetry, painting, film, and sound—but at its core is the act of building worlds: not imagined escapes, but worlds rooted in present conflict, shaped by both personal loss and shared memory. He works at the edges of perception: between physics and poetry, memory and myth, war and imagination. Based in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, his work holds the contradictions of life under occupation without reducing them to slogans.

Hourani believes fiction can tell the truth in ways reality cannot. In his work, different pieces come together to create scenes that are both real and unreal. A flower might become a fighter jet. A gun might contain an impressionist landscape. The medium matters less than the method: rearranging what already exists to show what else could. His approach is deeply tied to science; not in terms of data, but in the urge to understand how things relate. Quantum physics, superposition, and systems theory all influence his visual logic. He draws from math as easily as from myth. 

Wafa Hourani builds futures that are political, personal, and unfinished—not to offer answers, but to make space for new ones. He does not make art to explain Palestine to the world. He makes art that asks the world to look at how it describes itself. His art does not close stories; it opens them. Through layers and contradictions, he creates new ways of feeling: a world that has not arrived yet.

Cinema Dunia once was a vibrant cultural space in Ramallah, hosting events from screening Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah to jazz concerts and bodybuilding competitions. It was a central gathering place that attracted audiences not only from Ramallah itself but also from nearby Al-Bireh, Jerusalem, and surrounding villages. This rich mix of cultural programming made Dunia a unique place of collective experience. However, its life was disrupted during the First Intifada in 1987, when Palestinian chose to close down cinemas as a strategic decision to prioritise resistance over entertainment. The building was eventually demolished, its land first converted into a parking lot and now replaced by a commercial tower housing international fast-food chains, marking a stark shift from a communal cultural space to a site of global consumerism.¹

Wafa Hourani’s artwork, a meticulously crafted model of Cinema Dunia, is far more than a miniature replica of a demolished building. Inside the model, he places Mirror Garden, an imaginative public plaza where viewers confront their reflection; mirrors here function politically (the Mirror Party) as a way to make social accountability visible and to prod internal critique and resistance to external occupation. Cinema Dunia is a dense, layered object that functions as a site of political critique, a vessel for collective memory, and a trigger for the imagination. He also reads Dunia’s closure as an internally driven rupture in Palestinian cinematic life. He stages this loss in the model through an 11-minute looped montage of Palestinian fiction fragments, which gestures toward the archive’s unrealised potential. Still, in The Historical Timeline of Qalandia 1948-2087, he refuses total erasure: Cinema Dunia endures in his future narrative, folded into the Mirror Party timeline where walls become mirror-surfaces and the site is repurposed as a space for reflection and political imagination.²

Hourani’s Cinema Dunia operates at the intersection of two poles, simultaneously critiquing the world’s desire to contain and beautify the Palestinian narrative and extending a profound invitation to reconstruct what has been violently erased poetically.

Susan Stewart, in her work On Longing, argues that the miniature appeals to us because it offers a world over which we can exert total control. It creates a relationship of power where the viewer becomes a giant, a god-like figure gazing down upon a self-contained, manageable universe. From this perspective, Hourani’s Cinema Dunia is a profoundly political and critical object. It takes the painful history of a public place—a history of cultural flourishing, political resistance, closure, and eventual submission to global capitalism—and transforms it into an artefact. The complex reality of cinema is miniaturised into an object that can be displayed in a pristine gallery, observed from a safe distance, and even possessed by a collector. The body of the viewer is necessarily excluded: one cannot enter this cinema, but from a controlled distance one can hear its films. This act of creation is a sharp, implicit critique. Hourani presents the world with what it seems to want: a Palestinian story that is contained, beautiful, and possessible. He grants viewers a sense of mastery over a history they might not truly comprehend, but which enables them to become a tourist of trauma, able to appreciate the form without feeling the full weight of its content.³

However, the work goes beyond Stewart’s lens of control. We should not miss its poetic power, knowing that Wafa´s book of poems might be published soon. At this point one should move to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. For Bachelard, the miniature is not an object of control but a catalyst for reverie. It does not shrink the world; it expands the imagination. He posits that a small object, when contemplated, can unlock a universe of intimate immensity. From this vantage point, Hourani’s Cinema Dunia is not a contained object, but an explosive one. It is a machine for generating daydreams.⁴

Looking at the model in 1 x 2 x 1.7m scale, the viewer’s imagination is not subdued but ignited. It invites us to join the vivid life of cinema and its surroundings. We are prompted to inhabit the space mentally, to reconstruct the scenes that the historical fragments describe. The architectural details—the privileged penwar⁵ seats, the mezzanine, the narrow stage—cease to be mere formal elements and become stages for forgotten human dramas. Hourani populates these stages with figures and Houses: anonymous whites that stand as the audience, coloured characters that mark the people of Ramallah, and houses with varied antennae that double as a critique of mass media and propaganda.

Bachelard’s idea speaks to the power of the human mind, particularly through imagination, to grasp and interact with the world profoundly, going beyond mere perception or scientific understanding: it is not an act of political domination, but one of intimate, tender care. We do not possess the story; we are entrusted with it. The model becomes a sacred space where the ghosts of a community’s past are invited to gather in a future. At the same time it allows for a poetic journey, a way of feeling the immensity of the loss precisely because of the smallness of the object that represents it.

Wafa Hourani’s Cinema Dunia flickers between two states: an object of critique and a receptacle of imagination. It confronts us with our gaze, forcing us to ask whether we are consuming a tragedy or participating in an act of remembrance. It is a statement about how memory is packaged for an external audience, and simultaneously a deeply personal invitation to rebuild a lost world within the vast theatre of the mind. Hourani does not simply mourn a demolished building: for him, Cinema Dunia is still there. He claims that while a physical space can be erased and paved over, the world it once contained—its dreams, its fears, its culture, its life—can be resurrected, immense and powerful, within the quiet confines of a box.

¹ Yassin, Inas. 2010. Projection: Three Cinemas in Ramallah & Al-Bireh. Institute for Palestine Studies. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/78362
² Hourani, Wafa. The Historical Timeline of Qalandia 1948-2087. The Broken Archive. https://www.brokenarchive.org/artist/wafa-hourani
³ Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984
⁴ Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated into Farsi by Maryam Kamali & Mohammad Shirbacheh. Tehran: Roshangaran, 2013
⁵ The penwar seats, regarded as the most exclusive, were situated in the front balcony. They were reputed to be more comfortable and were enclosed by a modest barrier, resembling private boxes

Born and raised in Tehran, Davood Madadpoor is a Berlin-based curator and photographer. With a background in visual arts and curatorial studies from Florence, his practice explores speculative artistic strategies—particularly fictioning—as ways of reimagining contemporary realities shaped by transition, constraint, and shifting socio-political landscapes. He co-founded Sumac Space, an ongoing project dedicated to contemporary art in West Asia. It develops exhibitions and dialogues that emphasize critical thinking in art practices.

The post The Return of Wafa Hourani’s Cinema Dunia—Davood Madadpoor appeared first on Sumac Space.

The adaptation of science fiction codes by certain artists from the Arab geocultural space has enabled them to present innovative and imaginative visions of the future within an original representational regime in contemporary art. Whether through fantastic archaeology coupled with military SF in In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015) by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, or through biotechnological anticipation bordering on absurd dystopia in Party on the CAPS (2018) by Meriem Bennani, certain works offer a rich and diverse perspective on the possible transformations of contemporary societies. The multiplication of artworks by Arab artists exploring the question of the future has been accompanied by a multitude of events in the form of writings, exhibitions, and cultural programs highlighting the phenomenon of “Arab futurisms,” a label with unstable contours, difficult to define, more or less autonomous, and oscillating between dreamed unity and forced grouping.

Taking as a starting point the exhibition ARABOFUTURS, this essay aims to retrace the presence of certain events that brought together varied bodies of work and discourse, all driven by a shared interest in contemporary Arab art and reflection on the future. We will here attempt to explore the genesis of these artistic events, to return to the key moments that catalyzed the emergence of these clusters of works, as well as the discourses that accompanied them. By tracing the thread of time backward, we will be better able to understand how these dynamics were born, how they evolved, and how they nourished the phenomenon of “Arab futurisms.” So, fasten your seatbelt and prepare for a journey through a four-dimensional art history!

HOW TO “EXPRESS…
ARAB FUTURISMS”

Our first journey takes us to Brussels four years ago, specifically between December 2020 and June 2021. It was at Bozar, the Centre for Fine Arts in the Belgian capital, that Arabfuturism was presented in collaboration with the Mahmoud Darwish Chair: a videographic polyptych accompanied by a session showcasing the performance. Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival was entirely reimagined in a hybrid format, attracting a worldwide audience. It spanned five dates and featured videos by Larissa Sansour and Monira Al Qadiri, and by Mariam Mekiwi and Bassem Yousri. There were also performances by Monira Al Qadiri and Malika Djardi. The link between this selection of works was justified by the fact that they explored “future beyond Arab uprisings and their de/illusions, beyond militarized territories and borders, beyond recent geopolitical narratives within on going civil protests,” but also because they “aim[ed] opening other narratives and critical thoughts on contemporary Middle east and beyond.” Focusing on the theme of “Arab futurisms,” this broad selection revolved around a reflection on science fiction resources to reimagine a notion of Arabness adaptable to the contexts of artistic creation in the early 21^st century. Thus it is to be understood as an artistic constellation advocating emancipation from various contemporary forms of violence and oppression through the use of science fiction.

This curatorial approach of bringing together different artists around a theme was not limited to the context of exhibitions and screenings. It is also observable in the press. Nevertheless, while the articles do not provide detailed analyses of the works or the notions invoked, they inscribe this phenomenon within the framework of an artistic movement. Such is the case of “Arabfuturism: How Arab artists are building the world of tomorrow” (2023), published by Farida Ali for Middle East Eye. The author does not hesitate to speak of a “cultural movement” aimed at “reimag[ining] the world of tomorrow,” mixing contemporary artworks, cinematic and literary works, and supporting her argument with historical facts. This article can be read as a mirror to the text “Afrofuturism and Arabfuturism: Reflections of a Present-day Diasporic Reader” (2016) by journalist Lama Suleiman for the Israeli magazine Tohu. There, Suleiman articulated Arabfuturism as a new form of Afrofuturism, one proposed by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones as a genre of Afro-diasporic cultural production and a framework for analysis and critique in various fields of Black technocultural studies. Also citing artworks and videos, such as those by Sophia Al-Maria and Larissa Sansour, Suleiman questioned the potential relevance of the concept to elaborate discourse on the cultural production of Arab diasporas, particularly Palestinian ones, with regard to the prospect of a future. Between these two articles, which crystallized the notion of Arabfuturism, Perwana Nazif published in the British magazine The Quietus the article “Arabfuturism: Science-Fiction & Alternate Realities in the Arab World” (2018), in which she stated that “Arabfuturism is a new and necessary artistic movement for countering the xenophobia and racism of Europe and America.”

Beyond the fact that she positions Arab futurisms within an artistic movement—as Farida Ali had done—Perwana Nazif also inserts them into a form of expression specific to the Arab diaspora—as Lama Suleiman had supposed—while adapting it to the various forms of racism present in the West. This article differs from the previous two in that the journalist met with Larissa Sansour and Sulaïman Majali to gather their views on the concept. Larissa Sansour clearly expressed her refusal to define, or even be associated with, the notion. As for Sulaïman Majali, who wrote Towards a Possible Manifesto, proposing Arabfuturism/s (Conversation A) (2015), he does not contest it, but emphasizes the importance of the impossibility of precisely defining Arab futurisms, asserting that this is precisely where its relevance lies: “Because defining is conquering and this is a way of pushing against that. Creating ambiguous versions of oneself. Right now, that’s the most subversive political act we can do.” I contributed to this discussion by adding that “the future of Arabfuturism therefore depends on this subversion,” words that concluded Arabfuturism(S) – Un Phénomène Passé À La Loupe, in ONORIENT (2019). Along similar lines, a review of Bozar’s programming published in La Boussole de la Gorgone (2021) remarked that “labeling has always been a colonial and conquering activity par excellence”, which may explain why “the instigators themselves blur the tracks.” Beyond this dialogical space established through these various writings, it is undeniable that the event organized by Bozar adopted a title that carried within it the weight of these exchanges and reflections. Yet it skillfully avoided the trap of categorization by refraining from offering a rigid definition, instead encouraging the invited artists and the public to forge their own conceptions.

THE STAKES OF “GULF FUTURISM”
BETWEEN APPRECIATION AND ASSIMILATION

Let us now move to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where numerous parallel initiatives have fostered forms of futurisms. If only a few are to be named, we could cite the biennial and international symposium “Tasmeem” in Doha in March 2022, themed “Radical Futures;” in January 2021, the launch of the Emirati Futurism Award by the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and the Dubai Future Foundation; the appointment of artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan as artistic director of the Museum of the Future in Dubai in 2020, as well as the collective exhibition Speculative Landscapes (2019), bringing together Emirati artists Areej Kaoud, Ayman Zedani, Jumairy, and Raja’a Khalid at New York University Abu Dhabi’s gallery (NYUAD), to represent imagined territories.

Though very different from one another, highlighting different actors and overseen by distinct institutions, these initiatives are, overall, the result of the reception of Gulf Futurism. In the Gulf context, the term “futurism” has been used by artists to define a concept related to the region’s modernist ideology and its consequences in the contemporary period, as well as within the context of its artistic globalization. Gulf Futurism as an aesthetic was officially introduced in an interview published in the British magazine Dazed & Confused in November 2012, in which Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Al Qadiri were interviewed. This interview was accompanied by a series of images—presented in ARABOFUTURS—featuring the two artists in futuristic stagings. In another jointly written text in the same magazine in 2012, they explained that Gulf Futurism documents the Gulf’s futuristic ideology. The latter is characterized by a phenomenon of rapid growth where substantial revenues, mostly from hydrocarbon reserves, are directed toward ambitious urban projects, forward-looking technological advancements, and consumer goods. This sudden change was fully experienced by the two artists as children and teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s, in Doha for one and Kuwait City for the other. Their approach, and more specifically that of Sophia Al-Maria, was therefore to reassess, from 2008 to 2016, certain hegemonic narratives of modernity and the effects of retro culture by engaging in extended interactions in the Gulf on specific subjects through a variety of media (music, writing, video, and contemporary art), deliberately blurring the lines between reality and imagination, tangible science and science fiction, the realization of a utopia and a plunge into dystopia. It is precisely this intermediary position—what Sophia Al-Maria calls the “threshold”—that gives the notion its power, even its critical potential, aesthetically, politically and socially.

SCIENCE FICTION AS A LABORATORY FOR ARTISTIC AND CURATORIAL EXPERIMENTATION

Let us move to Beirut in 2015. In that year, British curator Rachel Dedman brought together the works of Jananne al-Ani, Ali Cherri, Fayçal Baghriche, Ala Ebtekar, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Assad Jradi, Mehreen Murtaza, and Larissa Sansour for an exhibition exploring the theme of space and SF. Entitled Space Between Our Fingers, the event was spread across five venues in Beirut (The Hangar UMAM, the Arab Image Foundation, Mansion, and the libraries of Ashkal Alwan and Dawawine), thus forming a kind of urban “constellation” situated in a zone of research and documentation where productions of Arab SF—in literature, cinema, and visual arts—were brought together for deep reflection.

In this exhibition, outer space appeared as a formidable tool for developing alternative pathways, not only to terrestrial spatial controversies but also for rethinking new historiographical strategies. In this vein, she sought to continue the reflection by inviting American-Lebanese screenwriter and director Darine Hotait, filmmaker and founder of the Lebanese comic collective Samandal Fadi Baqi (also known as The Fdz), and journalist Yazan al-Saadi to Ashkal Alwan in May 2015 to discuss the perspective of possibility that Arab science fiction might underpin. The discussion attempted to examine questions related to SF’s critical potential, its experimentation with the Arabic language, and the power of the genre’s marginal status in a regional context. Among the topics raised were various platforms and events, such as the Islam and Science Fiction blog (active between 2005 and 2022) by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad in the United States of America, and the Sindbad Sci-Fi platform (active between 2013 and 2018) run by Yasmin Khan in the United Kingdom.

When Khan founded it, her goal was to materialize her desire to research and disseminate this theme to a broad British public, contributing to establishing cultural and artistic links on a European scale. Its activities took shape through a variety of panels held at several festivals to promote the study of SF produced in North Africa and West and South Asia while also focusing on real technological developments in society. This British platform was a key player in the rediscovery of Arab SF, its attempts at definition, and its associated discourses. It was during one of these panels in 2014 that Larissa Sansour presented the early stages of In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain as a premiere. In 2017, Yasmin Khan notably oversaw a section devoted to Arab SF as part of the exhibition Into the Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction, first presented at the Barbican in London before touring two other European cultural institutions (2017–2019).

The participants of the roundtable coordinated by Dedman unanimously expressed the need for such a platform in an Arab country, emphasizing interdisciplinarity so that no medium would be favored over another. This did not happen. In continuity with these two events and the reflections addressed, Dedman organized a second exhibition linked to SF and North Africa and West Asia entitled Halcyon, which took place in August 2016 as part of the Transart Triennale in Berlin. The aim of this event was to bring together a group of artists, writers, and filmmakers (Mirna Bamieh, Tom Bogaert, Francis Brady, Darine Hotait, Muhammad Khudayyir, Lynn Kodeih, Mehreen Murtaza, Lea Najjar, Arjuna Neuman, and Larissa Sansour) to explore video and text exclusively, the media of choice for SF.

SCATTERING “ARAB FUTURISMS”

This curatorial formulation follows in the continuity of our most recent journey through time, which takes us to the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands during the Impakt Festival. It was October 28, 2012 when, in a small room at the Kikker Theater, an independent curator by the name of Nat Muller gave a lecture called Arab Futurism. According to her, nostalgia had permeated the Arab world for far too long, casting its veil over contemporary artistic production. However, she had observed that during the first decade of the 2000s, young artists from the Arab world had appropriated elements and temporal structures of science fiction, thereby creating alternative realities and innovative social narratives. Their intention was to weave a critical narrative by evoking themes of territory, history, geopolitics, identity, colonization, occupation, nationhood, alienation, but also possibility, hope, and resistance. What distinguishes the work of these artists is their desire to represent futures. Indeed, most of their works are tinged with dystopia, with dark, oppressive, undesirable, or chaotic societies or worlds. However, glimmers of hope pierce, here and there, the representations they depict. Nat Muller illustrated her argument with analysis of four works. 2026 (2010), by Maha Maamoun, is a short film featuring a time traveler who recounts his vision of Egypt in the year 2026 and his desire for revolution. The videos A Space Exodus (2009) and Nation Estate (2012) present Larissa Sansour’s vision of the Palestinian future, through a space exodus in the first and a futuristic skyscraper housing all Palestinians vertically in the second. In their documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige provide an overview of Lebanon’s past space exploration efforts. Yet, in the final part of the film, animation takes over and imagines what the city of Beirut might have become had the Lebanese space project not been interrupted by the Six-Day War (1967) and then the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Collectively, these films address the contexts of Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon projected into the near future in order to inject them into a referential illusion produced from pre-existing realities. They are very different from one another in terms of aesthetics and working methods; what unites them is their call for awareness of the future while inviting viewers to reflect.

This lecture appears to be the first time the term Arab Futurism was officially introduced. Ten years separate it from the Bozar program, which bears the same title. While the two terms appear identical, a typographic space sets them apart. Yet this particular character, which inserts an empty interval into the text, says much about its formulation. This can be explained by its frequency of use in English—a language known for its organic quality, constantly absorbing new words to create an endless stream of neologisms. If the first question raised here is whether the term Arab-futurism—with or without a space—should be accepted within the history of art, a second question concerns the language in which it is not used—Arabic—though its geography is clearly referenced in its name. Al-mustaqbal al-‘arabi does not, however, sound out of place. While artists such as Wafa Hourani, Larissa Sansour, Maha Maamoun, and Sophia Al-Maria were among the first to adapt science fiction within the register of contemporary art in the latter half of the 2000s, the subsequent arrival of this notion in English reveals the ambition of certain foreign cultural agents to assemble bodies of work in order to establish a space of differentiation. On what basis can this be determined? It could be interpreted as an attempt to deconstruct the notion of a monolithic Arab contemporary art. Indeed, this field progressively took shape at the beginning of the 21^st century, not only within the framework of the emergence of an art market in Europe and the Gulf but also in the context of a desire for dialogue between civilizations stemming from cultural diplomacy, and in the wake of the Arab revolutions and conflicts which profoundly reshaped regional geopolitics by creating new borders. These borders also carry an ideological dimension that has continually fueled a process of neo-Orientalist categorization, perpetuating a canon of otherness.

Should the reading of this art history thus begin with the study of the works themselves, or rather with the analysis of the discourses generated by the events that bring them together? A transnational and comparative approach would offer a perspective for rethinking the modes of perceiving the arts of the Arab geocultural space and their relevance to questions of the future. By placing this approach at the heart of institutional and artistic practices, it would become possible to deeply question the dynamics between knowledge and power. Contrary to Sulaïman Majali’s assertion that the strength of Arab futurisms lies in their indefinable nature, it seems rather to manifest in the recognition of the diversity of the individual voices involved—each contributing to the weaving of unique narratives, both in artistic creation and in its promotion by criticism and institutions. From this perspective, the exhibition ARABOFUTURS arrives at a timely moment. While it is one of the first events of its kind to take place in France, it also brought together three worlds of Arab futurisms: the artists, the institutional discourse, and the academy. Consequently, it opens new perspectives for discussing a phenomenon that will remain a subject of debate for some time to come.

“What if…” for Arab futurisms in art history? That is the question!

Joan Grandjean is an art historian specializing in contemporary art from the Arab world. He completed his PhD at the University of Geneva with a thesis on “Arab futurities” in contemporary art. From 2017 to 2024, he served as an academic assistant in Geneva and is currently a lecturer at the University of Rennes 2. His research explores the intersections of contemporary art, globalization, and imagined futures. His recent publications include co-editing “Photographe et Politique,” a double issue of the journal Tumultes(2023) with Prof. Dr. Christophe David, and the exhibition catalog Arabofuturs: Science-fiction et nouveaux Imaginaires (Institut du monde arabe, Paris, 2024) with Élodie Bouffard and Nawel Dehina. He is currently completing a book on Arab and Iranian artwork donations to the United Nations with Prof. Dr. Alexandre Kazerouni and Prof. Dr. Silvia Naef (2026). He is actively involved in several academic associations, notably ARVIMM and the Laboratory of Imaginaries, and co-founded the Manazir platform.

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post A Journey Through Time is a Must! Events and Advent of Arab Futurisms (2024-2X%ø)—Joan Grandjean appeared first on Sumac Space.

The explosion of futurisms in the last three decades as transmedial movements that engage in processes of futuring (i.e. imagining and visualizing new futures) can be termed CoFuturisms. CoFuturisms include, for instance, Afro- and Africanfuturisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Aadivasi Futurisms, Chicanafuturism, Latinxfuturisms, Gulf-futurism, Arabfuturism, Sinofuturism, Desifuturism, South Asian Futurism, Dalit Futurism, Asia Futurism, Andean Futurism, Ricepunk, and Silkpunk, among many others. If one is to define CoFuturisms, it would be as follows. CoFuturisms are the assertion of three rights of equality and vision: the right of everyone to exist, the right to imagine one’s own future, and the right to difference. Such assertion is key to self-representation and a marker of separation from other identities which one might share. Self-representation is particularly important for those whose futures have been (and continue to be) colonized in various ways. Colonization may take the form of continued economic dependence resulting from the machinations of global capitalism, or the continual cycle of wars and coups resulting from geopolitical interventions by foreign powers, or, quite simply, cultural colonization that erases and obliterates other forms of thinking and being in the world.

Hence these futurisms are not tied geographically; they belong to the world as ways of being in the world. Generating their own manifestos, these CoFuturisms now resonate around the world, emanating from the cultural and artistic sphere and transforming into social and political phenomena. These futurisms engage in worldbuilding, imagining possible futures as well as rewiring historical knowledge to recognize what has been erased or left out of history. The philosophy of history as a political project has always recognized future histories as a speculative project, but in CoFuturisms futures are already historical. The apocalypses of the future, such as those resulting from planetary ecocide, are not futures to come but futures that have always been here for people living in the reality of the devastation. There are Arabfuturisms in Europe and elsewhere, just as there are Eurofuturisms in the rest of the world because these futurisms are all constitutive of the other. Difference is carving out a space of existence between worlds: to find a space for some identities that constitute us by separating us from others that constitute us, even if we belong to multiple ones.

Beyond these continuing colonizations, as many formerly colonized states and peoples transform into hegemonies and colonizing forces of their own, the explosion of futurisms is only inevitable, and likely to continue, to the point where futurisms will arise wherever human beings seek to mark their own existence. Other CoFuturisms, such as LGBTQIA2S+ Futurisms, Queer futurisms, Xenofuturisms, and Crip-Futurisms, are for that reason just as inevitable as geopolitically or ethnically oriented ones, since they too emerge from the same basic principles: the right to exist, the right to imagine, and the right to difference. CoFuturisms resist unity and are fundamentally unstable. This is necessary if they are to retain their political potential and charge, since no single movement can be a new form of unifying discourse that erases other identities to assert itself. Beyond and within CoFuturisms, which refer to these movements, lie certain fundamental ethical propositions: propositions that are referred to by the philosophical concept of CoFutures. CoFuturisms are simply an instance of these propositions. These ethical propositions termed CoFutures are generative and motile and permanently in a state of unfolding into instances such as various futurisms.

What propositions are these? To some extent, our unruly capitalization gives us away: in the “Co” of CoFutures. The “Co” of CoFutures stands for six different ethical propositions, of which three are most relevant in the discussion of CoFuturisms: complexity, coevalness, and compossibility.

Complexity is the principle of diversity, and it unmasks uniformity as a totalitarian project. This means that any form of thinking or system-building that seeks to unwrap itself into a new form of totality and unity is inherently suspect. Complexity thrives on the proliferation of identities, values, knowledges, languages, ideas, and constantly seeks new forms of becoming. Uniformity is the totalitarianism at the heart of the political project of nation states, as well as the prison of ideas: it seeks to make everyone look, act, speak, believe, eat, and think the same, and be the same in mind, body, and spirit, rather than support the proliferation of identities that we really are as beings in the world. Therefore, the prisons of totality and uniformity always contain within them the seeds of their own dissolution. Looking at CoFuturisms, it is easy to see why the constant proliferation of new movements has become a defining trait of our times: it is because even CoFuturisms suffer from the risks of being monolithic and totalitarian. As movements, they work only as long as there are temporary conditions of coming together to achieve certain political ends, but they are easy to dissolve and dissipate into ever new forms of togetherness, new futurisms, afterwards. True diversity exists in a philosophical and ethical acceptance of the death of things we consider fundamental, including our values and identities themselves.

Coevalness is the state of things being in the same time, which is perhaps only a principle of respect that challenges the spatialization and weaponization of time. Coevalness means the rejection of a value system that has long colonized the world, whereby some cultures, some people, some nations, some technologies, some religions, some gender, some species, some ways of living and being are futuristic and progressive as compared to others. Such a value system automatically privileges some over others: for instance, one religion (or lack of one) is more progressive because of its espousal of some values while another is backward because it believes in something else, or one part of the world is more advanced and futuristic than another because it has greater technological or financial resources, etc. This value system is the lifeblood of colonialism, which forces the same understanding of teleological progress to the whole world and is backed by international financial instruments, as well as military and political muscle. Coevalness does not force us to suspend our understanding of what is more efficacious or useful, or what one might simply prefer over another. It rather demythologizes time to make us recognize that everything is in the same time, rather than in different times, and values do not stem from things being in different times. It also makes us recognize that what we consider values might just be a function of the resources or the privileges we have.

Compossibility, the third co, is the principle of balance. As a term, it refers to two things being together possible. Many futures are possible, but not all futures are together possible. Some futures, say, ethnically and culturally homogenous, supremacist, and bloodline or purity-oriented futures, are just as possible as futures that aim for diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity. Without making a value judgment on which future is preferable, compossibility simply asks us first to recognize that both these futures are equally possible. However, these futures are not possible together since they tend to cancel each other out due to their varying demands on the future. If one is to maintain complexity and coevalness, then compossibility makes it happen by directing us to futures that are together possible. Compossible futures are where different kinds of being and becoming can thrive, where diversity is not merely skin-deep but truly open to infinite kinds of proliferation and combinations, ever evolving more layers of possibilities.

CoFuturisms, as an instance of these propositions, are in the world to proliferate rather than to contain futures. Thus, instead of thinking of CoFuturisms themselves as some sort of coming together of various futurisms, which risks turning CoFuturisms into a monolithic concept and designation, the ”Co” disrupts this coming together except as a temporary state of political affiliation, achieving certain ends and moving on to becoming something else.

Take for instance, Arabfuturism, which is a central theme of this exhibition. In his “Towards a possible manifesto; proposing Arabfuturism(s) (Conversation A),” Scotland based artist-poet Sulaïman Majali conceives of Arabfuturisms in the plural and gestures toward CoFuturistic visions rather than outlining a monolithic futurism movement. Framing Arabfuturisms as a proposition and the manifesto itself as a possibility, Majali refrains from defining the principles and guidelines of an aesthetic or political project. Indeed, in a reinterpretation of the manifesto published in 2015, an extended note explicitly delinks Majali’s conception of Arabfuturisms from its connotations of “movement” and defines futurism as a mode of “anticipating a future,” “a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narratives.” Rooted in counter-cultural challenges to hegemonic definitions of identity, belonging, and futurity, Arabfuturisms call for an examination and activation of alternate possibilities latent in the present to envision and create diverse futures.

In their invitation to explore different pathways to possible presents, Arabfuturisms’ propositions encapsulate CoFuturistic concerns with complexity, coevalness, and compossibility. One way in which Arabfuturisms aim at complexity is through the sustained critique of reductive and homogenized definitions of identity and belonging. Such critique addresses all forms of othering that seek to suppress the complexity and movement of diverse, entangled, and proliferating identities—or in Majali’s words, “the emergence of an autonomous hybrid sedimentation of identities” (151). Written in a polyvocal and patchy style as an ongoing conversation, the manifesto resists closures, definitions, and completion also in its form. With its emphasis on complexity and breaking down established boundaries, Arabfuturisms are more concerned with proliferating forms of becoming than with defining an ethnofuturist vision.

Searching for new forms of representation “beyond the logic of the state,” Arabfuturisms are as critical of Eurocentric and colonial discourses and Orientalist stereotypes around Arabness as they are of Arab nationalist discourses, which welcome certain identities while suppressing others (151). Moving beyond the logic of the state requires a thorough questioning and dismantling of nationalist discourses through the critical re-examination of history. Such discourses often mobilize restrictive conceptions of origins and teleological conceptions of time to claim the superiority/futurity of a group while relegating others to an insurmountable state of belatedness, backwardness, or lack. Arabfuturisms reject such hierarchical and essentialized divisions between peoples and highlight instead their coevalness. The futures are many; they are everywhere; and they are for everyone to envision and build, even if hegemonic value systems adhere to a hierarchical organization of futurity. The principle of coevalness does not accept such hierarchical divisions at face value and calls instead for an acknowledgement of the histories of dispossession and oppression that underlie power inequalities. This is why the re-examination of history and the unearthing of neglected histories are central features of many Arabfuturist works which imagine the future by rewriting the past. These works often demonstrate how hegemonic claims to the future are founded upon violent and dismissed histories of colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Arabfuturisms underscore the necessity of envisioning futures in conversation with these histories to produce new conceptions of futurity.

As an artist based in Europe, Majali’s Arabfuturist imaginary may have been inspired primarily by the experiences of discrimination faced by diasporic Arab communities in Europe. He writes, “There is something happening in Europe,” and adds “It is a citadel of illusion that has collapsed” (153). Yet, such citadels and their accompanying colonial and nationalist ideologies are not unique to Europe, and they are being challenged across the Middle East and globally by CoFuturisms. Particularly in the past decade, there has been a considerable growth in the number of authors, artists, and filmmakers who employ speculative and futuristic storytelling not only in Arabic speaking countries but also in Turkey and Iran, and their diasporas. Although the discussions around Arabfuturisms have so far focused predominantly on the work of visual artists in the diaspora, Arabfuturisms find expression also in the literature and music produced in the Middle Eastern and North African contexts. Arabic literary criticism often situates texts with Arabfuturist concerns within genre discussions on science fiction, utopia, and dystopia. Yet, many Arabfuturist texts cross genre and media boundaries; they merge classical and modern genres, colloquial and formal registers of language, and combine oral, visual, and performative modes of storytelling with writing. Arabfuturisms are CoFuturistic both in this transmediality and in the sense that their concerns extend beyond Arab identity and Europe toward a more global outlook. In seeking “collaborative genealogies” (153) that can establish solidarities with decolonization and social justice struggles elsewhere, Arabfuturisms invite us to envision different forms of becoming possible together.

References
Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2021. “Manifestos of Futurisms”. Foundation vol.50(2), no.139. 8-23.

Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2022. “Speculative Futures of Global South Infrastructures.” In  Urban Infrastructuring: Reconfigurations,  Transformations and Sustainability in the Global South. Ed. Deljana Iossifova et al. SpringerNature: Sustainable Development Goals Series. 297-208.

Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2020. “The Pandemic That Was Always Here, and Afterward: from Futures to CoFutures.” Science Fiction Studies 47.3. 338-340

Majali, Sulaïman. 2015. ‘Towards a Possible Manifesto; Proposing Arabfuturism(s) (Conversation A)’. In Cost of Freedom: A Collective Enquiry. Ed. Clément Renaud. No publisher. 151-3. http://costoffreedom.cc (accessed 01 December 2023). [The reinterpretation is available on  https://futuresofcolour.tumblr.com/post/161897827578/towards-arabfuturisms-manifesto-words-artwork]

Tabur, Merve. 2021. Ends of Language in the Anthropocene: Narrating Environmental Destruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone Speculative Fiction. Pennsylvania State University, PhD Dissertation.

Tabur, M. 2024. “Settling the Desert, Unsettling the Mirage: Urban Ecologies of Arab and Gulf Futurisms in Ahmed Naji’s Using Life.” Utopian studies, 35(1): 187-208. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.35.1.0187

photo: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘CoFutures Motif 3: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank’. Ħal Tarxien, 2018

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post CoFutures—Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Merve Tabur appeared first on Sumac Space.

Mojtaba Amini explores the dual roles of artists as creators and social commentators, highlighting the tension between artistic freedom and societal pressures and the influence of political power on creative expression. His work is closely connected to his personal experiences and the violent histories of the materials he uses, which serve as metaphors for larger societal issues. Amini also critiques the ignorance and absence of serious curators in Iran’s art scene, pointing out that the dominance of galleries and commercial interests stifles true artistic expression and hinders significant artistic movements.

Davood Madadpoor: One of the concerns that have recently occupied my mind, and I would like to know your perspective on this, is the concept of being an artist. We who work and live in the Middle East, focusing on its social and political geography, might see our artistic activities take on a different hue, whether for me as a curator or you as an artist. Considering that this region is constantly undergoing social and political changes, how has your relationship with art evolved over time?

Mojtaba Amini: An artist’s beliefs and ideologies compel them to interpret and analyze political and social conditions. They then try to align these beliefs with their academic background, compare them with the realities of society, and ultimately intervene in their path forward. These alignments and contradictions can lead to growth, change, and evolution in the art and the artist’s character. Changes in society stem from the policies of power, and the citizen-artist, depending on their relationship with power, can present a form of art that constantly needs to evolve.

Pariya Ferdos[se]: Is this structural belonging a necessity? And if belonging to this structure limits the audience, can the artist find a way to overcome this limitation in presenting their work, both in the manner of presentation and in the scope of the audience?

Mojtaba: It would be better to answer this series of questions with Mikhail Bakhtin’s view on the artist, the audience, the artwork, and society. Bakhtin believes that Art is inherently and intrinsically social; when the external social environment influences art from the outside, it encounters an immediate and internal resonance within it. These two factors (art and society) are in no way alien forces that influence each other: the structure of one influences the structure of the other…Even that internal part of the artist that manifests in their work still has a social root in the artist’s subconscious, and the political or social situation of the environment provokes the artist to react in various ways. There will be no specific obligation, but there will be resistance from the artist regarding the form of presentation and the content of their works concerning environmental influences. Suppose the social conditions impact the artist as an individual in society, resulting in an artistic work and the construction of meaning. In that case, the reception of this meaning is completed in the same context where the work is created. The effort to transcend these limitations is somewhat subject to becoming fashionable.

Davood: By accepting the artist’s role, do you think we are caught up in a system that forces us to engage with it and consequently question and address it? Do you think the artist now, beyond the “traditional” role of being an artist, also assumes other roles?

Mojtaba: I think artists oscillate between the role they choose for themselves and their assigned role. Where society gives them meaning and credibility, compulsion will also be present in their work.

Davood: So, if I understand correctly, we should pause again to discuss the freedom and limitations of artists, correct? And have you, as an artist, accepted this compulsion from society? Should we call it compulsion, or perhaps a term like responsibility would better capture the sense of obligation?

Mojtaba: Artists are free, and no one has the right to tell them what to do or not do. However, when the artist, as Albert Camus says, becomes temporarily famous and derives their credibility from society and the people, they are compelled to stand with the people.

Pariya: Accepting that the artist, in your view, should stand with the people, to what extent is this possible, and if achieved, how impactful, inspirational, and effective can it be? Should the artist feel obligated to be influential?

Mojtaba: A famous artist with social capital can be influential to some extent by raising awareness and intervening in society.

Davood: Can you explain the nature and manner of these influences? Do these influences follow a particular direction?

Mojtaba: I think one of the best examples of intervention in power and the social influence of an Iranian artist is Mohammad Reza Shajarian due to his correct stance concerning the political-social events of recent years, which led to the banning of his works from state television and, more specifically, the removal of Rabbana from Iranian radio and television. His act raised many questions among the people, especially the religious part; it’s an example of the most accurate form of awareness-raising by a socially influential and well-known artist.

Pariya: Given that we have discussed the influence of political and social context and the dominant structure on the artist, how do you think, besides these factors, the intrinsic nature of the artist as a human being and their lived experience (in the form of psyche and body) impact the creation of their work?

Mojtaba: Any form of personalization in the artist’s work and the creation of art is something in continuity with others and resembles others. I mean that the creation of artistic work takes place in dialogue with others and under the influence of others in society. The “self” of the artist is not an independent existential entity; moreover, the artistic work is produced within a medium with history and past influences.

Pariya: In addition to the role and presence of the artist as a socio-political and artistic figure whose content is derived from the environment, in your work, the nature of the material and its becoming (in interaction with the environment and other materials) is evident. Where does this perspective and attention to the importance of the passage of time and the subjective nature of the material come from?

Mojtaba: I have previously answered this question elsewhere, in the book “It Transpired” Material and language have a nearly equal serious presence in my work. The material in my work has two aspects: personal and impersonal. Skin, fat, soap, and wool have a connection to my past and childhood as someone who lived in a rural farming family and witnessed the violence inflicted on animals, all of which these materials in my work are exactly “the remnants of violence” from the bodies of animals. In conjunction with the linguistic aspect of my work, which is a form of “language of violence” for me, they create that critical and socio-political meaning I intend from art. The other part of it is impersonal materials, similar to oil and tar, which are directly influenced by our political and social life, and it’s clear that no further explanation is needed here.

Pariya: And continuing, is it only the artist in this geography who should be expressive, or should other artistic roles like gallery owners, curators, dealers, etc., also be directly involved and function as an influential group or puzzle? How should this juxtaposition be?

Mojtaba: Certainly, all these elements that you mentioned are important and influential because for the three aspects of the artwork, the artist, and the audience to function correctly, the presence of all of them is necessary. However, in Iran, this coexistence does not work properly. There is no serious concept of a curator because galleries’ absolute dominance and the market’s logic do not feel the need for a curator’s presence. As a result, the artist has also lost their role and importance in this dominance. This is why we do not witness serious and specific art trends, and artists mostly produce commodities for this economic cycle.

Davood: In your opinion, what is the solution to break this flawed cycle? How can we create real convergence among artists, curators, gallery owners, and other factors to witness the formation of serious and meaningful trends?

Mojtaba: Breaking this cycle depends on the existence of independent and governmental institutions that support artists who are not inclined towards the market’s demands and tastes, as well as the existence of experimental, artist-run, and collaborative spaces.

Paria: In this process and interaction between local and global art, where do you see Iranian art in the big picture of global art?

Mojtaba: Due to the significant dispersion of the Iranian population worldwide, what is seen and presented as Iranian art is mostly within the realm of economy and market, and among this migrant population, there is nothing beyond that.

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

The post Artist’s Dilemma: Authorship, Power, and Social Responsibility—Mojtaba Amini in conversation with Pariya Ferdos[se] and Davood Madadpoor appeared first on Sumac Space.

[Scroll down for Farsi Version]

Mitra Soltani shares how her experiences with instability, lack of agency, and being a woman have shaped her projects. The conversation explores the evolving roles of the artist, the unique imprints they leave, and the intersection of gender, embodiment, gesture, and indigenous context in her work. The conversation not only addresses the duties and limitations of artists in society but also emphasizes the crucial role of the artist in shaping societal narratives, the power of juxtaposition, and the role of art professionals in bridging the local and global art scenes.

Davood Madadpoor: I want to start the conversation with a general question about being an artist. The concept of being an artist differs in local and international contexts. Coming from the Middle East (with a focus on its social and political geography), we may add a different flavor to the concept of being an artist through our artistic activities. Considering living in a region constantly undergoing social and political changes, how has your relationship with art evolved?

Mitra Soltani: In recent projects like Showing Transparency and A Number of Monuments, my direct experience with the subject has been central to my work. The daily experience of insecurity and lack of any form of stability is a state that deprives the human/artist of any sense of “agency.” For me, art’s function is a way to fight or resist the feeling of being objectified in such a situation. My work involves collecting archives, working with low-value or ephemeral materials, and exploring the lifestyle and art of local tribes and nomads.

Davood: Mitra, you made an interesting point! How can we reconcile the contradiction between the lack of agency for the artist and using artistic methods as a form of struggle?

Mitra: The example is local women’s way of life and art, inspiring this project. These women live in challenging conditions with countless restrictions imposed by society, family, and nature. However, all these limitations do not result in them being passive; instead, they impact their surroundings by employing art and rituals bit by bit. This impact deepens and spreads to the point where it even infiltrates their society’s most challenging and male-dominated structures. For me, defining agency is something like this.

Davood: By accepting the artist’s role, do you think we are engaged in a particular situation and system that compels us to interact with it, thus questioning and addressing it? Do you think the artist now has other roles beyond the “traditional” role of being an artist?

Mitra: I find this question challenging. I don’t fully understand the concept of an artist’s “traditional” role. Perhaps it means that the role of art in its traditional form was static and has changed over time. However, I’m afraid I have to disagree with this idea. Every example that comes to mind, whether historical or traditional, shows the artist constantly asking questions, challenging assumptions, and transforming. Therefore, the artist has not assumed a new role; what has changed is the way of thinking and expression, which has evolved with the times.

Regarding the first part of the question, since I consider freedom the most essential characteristic of art, I don’t think the artist is “compelled” in any field. However, I feel trapped in a system and am trying to find a way out.

Pariya Ferdosse: Given that you mentioned being trapped in a system, I will rephrase Davood’s first question differently: is this contextual attachment a necessity? And if this attachment to the context limits the audience, can the artist overcome this limitation in presenting their works? (Both in presentation and the audience)

Mitra: For me, the work was created within the context of my living environment, making it impossible to think or develop detachedly. Essentially, this compulsion and a sense of helplessness shaped the idea of the work. Regarding the audience limitation, it is natural for each work to have its audience. I have created many projects in nature, Indigenous environments, and public and urban spaces that have attracted a wide range of audiences, and works like this project probably have a more limited audience. In other words, I am not particularly insistent that all my works have the same or a broad audience.

Pariya: In this context, how does the intrinsic nature of the artist as a human being and their lived experience (in the form of a posture – both mental and physical) impact the production of the work, considering that some of your works remind me of Hannah Wilke and particularly Ana Mendieta? (I ask this question in line with your discussion about the lifestyle of nomadic women and how gender and embodiment have entered your methodology and working style.)

Mitra: It is hard to imagine an artist who can think about art or create something detached from their lived experience. The only question is how tangible this impact is. Essentially, this work and most of my projects are based on my lived experience in a native and ritualistic culture, both in subject matter and working method. I am inclined toward a form of conceptual art that relates to ritualistic actions, literature and nature are other essential components of my artistic practice. All these elements directly arise from the life of my mind and body in such a context. A specific example is works entirely based on ritualistic behaviour, and ritual cannot be understood from the outside. This topic underscores the importance of the body and gender in my works, as the relationship between body and gender and their dialogue with nature gives rise to rituals.

Davood: What differentiates an artist who feels responsible towards society from groups like politicians or social scientists who seek to imagine and create a new future?

Mitra: It is more logical to think about the similarities rather than the differences because this distinction is fundamental. An artist uses their freedom, sensitivity, and creativity. They can internalize issues and present intangible aspects. They move independently of the boundaries and limits of any discipline and thus deal not with explaining issues but with perceiving disasters or ideal situations. For example, my experience with some artworks with socio-political concerns (amid the constant flow of world news and information, which quickly trivializes every important matter) has been like a pause or break. This pause suggests different ways of seeing and thinking and keeps the hope for change alive through creativity.

Pariya: Assuming that you believe the artist should stand by the people, how feasible is this, and if achieved, how impactful, inspiring, and functional is it? Should the artists consider themselves obligated to be impactful?

Mitra: I believe the artist should not necessarily stand by the people, and I can’t define a “should” for the artist. I only know that art is closer to freedom than anything else, or at least it should be. Therefore, in a dictatorial society, the side of freedom is likely the opposite of power in most cases.

Regarding obligation, as I said, I cannot impose a duty on the artist; I think more about the commitment to art itself. I am still determining its functionality, which significantly depends on the social conditions in which we are active. Still, regarding inspiration, I agree that artistic endeavor is fundamentally inspiring, and we can think about its quantity and quality.

Pariya: In this context, is it only the artist who should be expressive, or do other artistic roles like gallery owners, curators, dealers, etc., also have a direct impact and function as a group or puzzle? How do you see this juxtaposition?

Mitra: Any form of expression or impact in art results from a set of choices. Naturally, in these choices, other players in the art field, such as gallery owners, curators, dealers, critics, etc., play an important role. As we have often seen, artists with prominent discourses have been marginalized while less significant productions have been highlighted. In the case of my projects, this juxtaposition has usually not been very successful because in such projects, the roles of others, including gallery owners, curators, etc., are more significant in presenting the work, and many challenges make them less inclined towards such projects.

Pariya: In this process and the interaction between local and global art, where do you see modern (contemporary) Iranian art in the big picture of global art?

Mitra: I am not very optimistic about works that have a closer connection to indigenous contexts. I only know a few successful examples of such art. By success, I mean being recognized in the global picture, as you mentioned. Because I think the global/Western view of other societies is still negligent and colonial in that they always pay attention to easily accessible and exotic images and ideas, not those that require a deeper understanding.

Mitra Soltani is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the relationship between literature, culture, and everyday life. She always uses objects that reflect the history and identity of the culture. Her work seeks new experiences of dealing with material and concept by exploring indigenous art practices and literature. She received a bachelor’s degree in painting from Shahed University of Tehran and a master’s degree in graphics from Tehran University of Art. Soltani has participated in more than thirty group exhibitions and art festivals and biennials and has made a number of projects in urban spaces and nature. Instagram

Pariya Fedros[se] is a curator, researcher, writer, and architect working on intersectional curatorial methodology and practices based on comparative methods, discourses, and texts. She started her career in art as an art director at age 26. After being cofounder and art director of two galleries, and because of her background in studying computer science, architecture, and philosophy (especially Eastern), she decided to extend her experiences to interdisciplinary research/text–oriented curating and architectural projects. She curated and designed Tehran’s Trilogy in three different exhibitions in Tehran’s central and ancient neighborhood (2017-2018). She was a researcher in the project exhibited in CAAM [Contemporary Art Museum in the Canary Islands]. Named Human All Too Human based on the ideas of the Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi (2018-2021). She curated an exhibition called Melencolia I with nine artists from four countries following comparative methodology and bridging art history inspiration, cinema, and psychology; this project took nine months (2022-2023). She was one of the writers in the book Rethinking the Contemporary Art of Iran by Hamid Keshmirshekan (2023). Recently, she’s been working on curational and publishing projects on different topics, such as Iranian literature, mysticism and immigration.

Sumac Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. If you would like to share a collaboration proposal, please feel free to write us. We warmly invite you to follow us on Instagram and to subscribe to our newsletter and stay connected.

عاملیت، فعل (یا رویه‌های) روزمره به مثابه مقامتی در برابر حذف شدن

میترا سلطانی چگونگی شکل‌گیری پروژه‌هایش براساس تجربیات خود  از بی‌ثباتی، فقدان عاملیت و زن بودن را به اشتراک می گذارد. این گفتگو به بررسی نقش‌های رو به تکامل هنرمند، اثر منحصر به فردی که از خود به جا می‌گذارند، و تلاقی جنسیت، بدنمندی، ژست و بافتار بومی در آثار او می‌پردازد. این گفتگو نه تنها به وظایف و محدودیت‌های هنرمندان در جامعه می‌پردازد، بلکه بر نقش حیاتی هنرمند در شکل‌دهی روایت‌های اجتماعی، قدرت هم‌نشینی و نقش متخصصان هنر در پل زدن میان عرصه‌های هنری محلی و جهانی تأکید می‌کند.

داوود مددپور: می‌خواهم گفتگو را با یک سوال کلی درباره مفهوم هنرمند بودن آغاز کنم. من معتقدم که مفهوم هنرمند بودن در دو بافتار مختلف؛ محلی و بین‌المللی، متفاوت است. ما که از خاورمیانه (با تمرکز بر جغرافیای اجتماعی و سیاسی آن) می‌آییم، ممکن است با فعالیت‌های هنری‌مان رنگ و بویی دیگر به مفهوم هنرمند بدهیم. با توجه به زندگی در این منطقه که دستخوش تغییرات اجتماعی و سیاسی مداوم است، چگونه رابطه‌ی شما با هنر در طول زمان تکامل یافته است؟

میترا سلطانی: در پروژه‌های اخیرم مانند Showing Transparency و A Number of Monuments، تجربه‌ی مستقیم از موضوع کارم بوده است. تجربه‌ی روزمره‌ی ناامنی و فقدان هر شکلی از ثبات، وضعیتی است که انسان/هنرمند را از احساس هر گونه “عاملیت” خالی می‌کند. در حال حاضر، کارکرد هنر برای من راهی برای مبارزه یا مقاومت در برابر احساس شیء شدگی در چنین وضعیتی‌ست که این راه شامل جمع‌آوری آرشیوها، کار با متریال کم‌ارزش یا کم‌دوام و همچنین جستجو در شیوه‌ی زندگی و هنر اقوام و عشایر می‌شود.

داوود: میترا نکته‌ی جالبی را مطرح کردی! به نظرت چگونه می‌توان این تناقض بین تهی بودن از عاملیت هنرمند و بهره‌گیری از شیوه‌ی هنری به عنوان راهی برای مبارزه، را کنار هم قرار داد؟

میترا: مثال‌ش همان شیوه‌ای است که در شکل زندگی و هنر زنان محلی می‌بینم که در این پروژه نیز الهام بخش من بوده است. این زنان بیشتر در شرایطی بسیار دشوار و با محدودیت‌های بی‌شماری از سوی جامعه، خانواده و طبیعت زندگی می‌کنند. اما همه‌ی این محدودیت‌ها باعث نمی‌شود که آن‌ها از عملکرد انفعالی برخوردار شوند، بلکه با به‌کارگیری هنر و آیین‌ ذره‌به‌ذره، تاثیرگذاری بر محیط اطراف خود دارند. این تاثیرگذاری عمیق‌تر می‌شود و به گسترش می‌پیوندد تا جایی که حتی بر سخت‌ترین و مردانه‌ترین ساختارهای جامعه‌شان نیز نفوذ می‌کند. برای من، تعریف عاملیت یک چنین چیزی است.

داوود: با قبول و پذیرش نقش هنرمند، آیا فکر می‌کنید که درگیر یک شرایط و سیستم خاصی شده‌ایم که ما را مجبور به ارتباط با آن و در نتیجه، به پرسش کشیدن و مورد خطاب قرار دادن‌ش می‌کند؟ آیا فکر می‌کنید که هنرمند اکنون خارج از نقش “سنتی” هنرمند بودن، نقش‌های دیگری را نیز بر عهده دارد؟

میترا: خود این سوال به نظرم ایجاد چالش می‌کند. من مفهوم نقش “سنتی” هنرمند بودن را به‌طور کامل درک نمی‌کنم. شاید منظور این باشد که نقش هنر به شکل سنتی‌اش تنها کارکرد استاتیکی داشته باشد و در طول زمان این کارکرد تغییر کرده باشد. اما من با این ایده موافق نیستم. هر مثالی که به ذهنم می‌آید، هرچند ممکن است تاریخی یا حتی سنتی باشد، هنرمند را همواره در حال طرح پرسش، به چالش کشیدن فرضیات و تغییر و تحول می‌بینم. بنابراین، فکر نمی‌کنم که هنرمند اکنون نقش جدیدی پذیرفته باشد؛ آنچه تغییر کرده، شیوه فکر کردن و بیان است که به اقتضای زمان تغییر کرده است.

درباره بخش اول سوال، از آنجایی‌که مهم‌ترین ویژگی هنر را آزادی می‌دانم، فکر نمی‌کنم که هنرمند در هیچ زمینه‌ای “مجبور” باشد. اما به شخصه، احساس می‌کنم در یک سیستم گیر افتاده‌ام و در حال تلاش برای یافتن راهی به بیرون هستم.

پریا فردوس: با توجه به اینکه از سیستمی نام بردی که در آن گیر افتادی سوال اول داوود را طور دیگری مطرح می کنم؛ آیا این تعلق بافتاری یک امر الزامی است؟ و اگر تعلق به این بافتار، جامعه‌ی مخاطب را محدود کند آیا برای هنرمند راهی وجود دارد که این محدودیت را در ارایه ی آثار خود کنار بزند؟ (چه در ارایه و چه در جامعه‌ی مخاطبان)

میترا: دست کم برای من و در شرایطی که اثر مورد بحث ساخته شده، بله من ناچار بودم و امکان اینکه منفک از بستر زیستم فکر یا خلق کنم را نداشتم . اساسا همین ناچاری و یا احساسی از درماندگی ایده‌ی اثر را شکل داد. در مورد محدودیت مخاطب به نظر من طبیعی است که هر اثر محدوده‌ی مخاطب خود را داشته باشد. من پروژه های زیادی را در طبیعت، محیط های بومی و فضا های عمومی و شهری ساخته‌ام که طیف گسترده‌ای از مخاطب را در بر داشته است و آثاری شبیه این پروژه، که احتمالا مخاطب محدودتری دارد. به عبارت دیگر چندان اصراری ندارم همه‌ی آثارم مخاطب یکسان یا گسترده‌ای داشته باشند.

پریا: در این راستا خود ذاتی هنرمند به عنوان یک انسان و حیات زیسته‌اش (در قالب یک ژست -روان و تن-) چه تاثیری بر تولید اثر دارد با توجه به اینکه برخی از کارهای برای من یادآور هانا ویکله و به خصوص آنا مندیتا است؟ (این سوال را در راستای صحبت خودت در مورد شیوه‌ی زیست زنان عشایر مطرح می‌کنم و اینکه چه‌طور جنسیت و بدنمندی در روشمندی و شیوه‌ی کاری تو ورود کرده است)

میترا: تصورش برای من سخت است که هنرمندی بتواند فارغ از تجربه‌ی زیسته‌اش به هنر فکر کند یا چیزی خلق کند. شاید تنها این مساله باشد که تا چه میزان این تاثیر ملموس است یا نه. اساسا ایده ی این اثر و بیشتر پروژه های من کاملا بر اساس تجربه‌ی زیسته‌ام در یک فرهنگ بومی و آیینی پدید آمده است، چه از نظر موضوع و چه از لحاظ شیوه‌ی کار. من به نوعی از هنر مفهوم گرا که در ارتباط با کنش های آیینی است گرایش دارم و ادبیات و طبیعت دیگر مولفه های مهم در تمرین هنری من هستند. همه این موارد مستقیما از حیات ذهن و جسم من در چنین موقعیتی ناشی میشود. مثال مشخص آن آثاری است که کاملا بر اساس رفتار آیینی شکل میگیرد و آیین مساله ای نیست که بتوان بیرون آن ایستاد و درکش کرد. همین موضوع به اهمیت مسئله تن و جنسیت درآثار من اهمیت می‌دهد چرا که نسبت میان تن و جنسیت و همچنین نوع گفتگوی این دو با طبیعت است که آیین‌ها را پدید می‌آورد.

داوود: از منظر شما چه عامل یا عواملی باعث تفاوت بین یک هنرمندی که احساس مسئولیت در قبال جامعه می‌کند با گروهی مانند سیاستمداران یا دانشمندان علوم اجتماعی که در پی تصور کردن و ساختن آینده‌ای جدید هستند، وجود دارد؟

میترا: به نظرم حتی منطقی‌تر است که به شباهت‌ها فکر کنیم تا تفاوت‌ها، به این دلیل که این تفاوت بسیار اساسی است. هنرمند آزادی، حساسیت و خلاقیتش را به کار می‌گیرد. او می‌تواند مسائل را درونی کند و جوانب غیر قابل لمس را به نمایش بگذارد. او مستقل از حدود و مرزهای هر دیسیپلینی حرکت می‌کند و از این رو نه به تشریح مسائل بلکه به ادراک فاجعه یا موقعیت ایده‌آل می‌پردازد. برای مثال، تجربه‌ی خودم از بعضی آثار هنری با دغدغه‌ی سیاسی-اجتماعی (در حرکت مدام میان اخبار و اطلاعات جهان امروز؛ موقعیتی که هر مهمی را به سرعت به امری پیش‌پا افتاده فرو می‌کاهد.) شبیه به یک وقفه یا مکث بوده است؛ وقفه‌ای که شیوه‌های دیگر دیدن و اندیشیدن را پیشنهاد می‌دهد و با کمک به خلاقیت، امید به تغییر را زنده نگه می‌دارد.

پریا: با پذیرش اینکه از نظر تو هنرمند بایستی سمت مردم بایستد تا چقدر این امر شدنی‌ست و در صورت تحقق چقدر تاثیر گذار، الهام‌بخش و کارکردی است؟ و آیا هنرمند بایستی خود را موظف به تاثیرگذار بودن بداند؟

میترا: نظر من الزاما این نیست که هنرمند باید سمت مردم بایستد و اساسا نمی توانم بایدی برای هنرمند تعریف کنم. من تنها می‌دانم که هنر بیش از هر چیز به آزادی نزدیک است یا بهتر است باشد. بنابراین در جامعه‌ای دیکتاتوری احتمالا در بیشتر موارد سمت آزادی سمت مخالف قدرت است.

در مورد موظف بودن هم چنان که گفتم نمی‌توانم وظیفه ای برای هنرمند قائل باشم، در مورد خودم می‌توانم بگویم بیشتر به تعهد نسبت به خود هنر می‌اندیشم. در باره‌ی کارکردی بودن آن مطمئن نیستم و خیلی بستگی به شرایط اجتماعی که در آن فعال هستیم دارد اما درباره‌ی الهام بخش بودن، موافقم که تلاش هنری اساسا الهام‌بخش است و می‌توان درباره‌ی کمیت و کیفیت آن فکر کرد.

پریا: و در ادامه آیا تنها هنرمند هست که در این جغرافیا باید بیانگر باشد یا باقی سمت‌های هنری مانند گالری‌دار، کیوریتور، دیلر و … هم تاثیرگذاری مستقیم و به شکل یک گروه و یا پازل را دارند؟ یا با تعبیری این کنارهم‌قرارگیری (juxtaposition) به نظرت چگونه باید باشد؟

میترا: فکر می‌کنم به هر شکلی از بیان‌گری یا تاثیرگذاری در هنر فکر کنیم حاصل مجموعه‌ای از انتخاب‌هاست. در این انتخاب‌ها طبیعتا بازیگران دیگر عرصه هنر همچون گالری‌دار، کیوریتور، دیلر، منتقد و.. نقش مهمی دارند. چنانکه بارها دیده‌ایم هنرمندانی با گفتمان برجسته به حاشیه رفته و تولیداتی نه چندان مهم در معرض توجه قرار گرفته‌اند. در مورد پروژه‌های من معمولا این کنار هم قرارگیری چندان موفق نبوده است، زیرا در چنین پروژه‌هایی هم نقش‌های دیگر از جمله گالری‌دار، کیوریتور و.. اهمیت بیشتر در ارائه اثر دارند و هم چالش‌های بسیاری وجود دارد که آنان را کمتر به چنین پروژه‌هایی متمایل می‌کند.

پریا: در این روند و تعامل هنر محلی و جهانی، هنر مدرن (امروز) ایران را کجای مختصات تصویر بزرگ هنر جهانی (big picture) می‌بینی؟

میترا: در مورد آثاری که به زمینه‌های بومی تعلق بیشتری دارند، من خیلی خوشبین نیستم. یعنی چندان نمونه‌های موفقی از نوع هنر را نمی‌شناسم. موفقیت منظور به رسمیت شناخته شدن به قول شما در مختصات تصویر جهانی. چرا که به نظرم نگاه جهانی/غربی به جوامع دیگر سهل‌انگارانه و همچنان استعماری است. به این معنا که همواره به تصاویر و ایده‌هایی سهل‌الوصول و اگزوتیک توجه نشان می‌دهند نه ایده‌هایی که به شناخت عمیق‌تر وابسته است.

The post Agency and Quotidian Practices as Resistance Against Omission—Mitra Soltani in conversation with Pariya Ferdos[se] and Davood Madadpoor appeared first on Sumac Space.

In “Transversal: Commons Tense & Antihegemonial Tactics,” Fatih Aydoğdu examines how art, media, and activism intersect to influence contemporary socio-political conditions. He argues that art’s visual language is deeply connotative, embedding cultural semantics that extend beyond mere representation. Digital arts, distinct from traditional forms, engage audiences actively, transforming art into a platform for socio-political critique. Aydoğdu highlights mass media’s role in shaping public opinion and emphasizes networked societies as new public spaces for communication. He situates art within broader socio-economic changes, advocating for its role in challenging hegemonic structures and fostering alternative social visions.

“The limits of my language…, the limits of my world …” ¹

An art practice, which operates by means of individual criteria and frame conditions, does not necessarily establish lasting (museal) merits, but creates a proper aesthetics of communication. Categories of analysis, tactical media, activist interventions react upon and/or influence the current social conditions. Via its pragmatics, swift or uncomplicated media produces a modality, which embraces the implementation of different procedures – aesthetical, activist or partly theoretical ones.

The connotative level of the visual, from the point of view of its contextual reference and positioning in different discursive meaning and association realms, denotes the point where al- ready coded signs meet the depth of the semantic code of a culture and adopt additional, more active dimensions. Here, there exists no pure objective (denotative) – and least of all natural – representation. Each visual sign (in a specific language) connotates a characteristic – a value or a conclusion – which is present depending on its connotating position as implication or implicated meaning.

The fields of preferred concepts hold social structures in the form of meanings, practices and opinions: the popular knowledge of social structures, of how all practical concerns function within this culture, of the ranking of power and interest and of the structures of legitimating, limitations and determinations. Thus, the chosen signs have to be related by means of codes to the order of the social life, to the economic, political power and the ideology, in order to make them readable. The term “reading” does not merely point at the capability to identify and decode a special number of signs, but it also addresses a subjective ability to relate these to other signs in a creative approach: a skill that is a precondition for conscious acting within an environment.

As long we can reflect upon ourselves through the world of art and reflect upon art through our world, the meaning of art can take on various forms and purposes, such as counter-balancing political conditions in the form of an upside-down-pissoir. Digital arts, takes the network society as its plane of resonance. Different than traditional/modern art, digital arts invites the audience to actively take part in the art work rather than merely provoking them. This quality is, of course, contained in the very nature of art. In a way, art functions to re-invent itself, time, and environment by responding and commenting on the socio-cultural and political contexts. By so doing, it creates other alternate visions while incorporating various available medium and technologies in order to achieve this goal. Here, politicization is not just an attitude operating through practices of production but it is an essential component of a concrete structural positioning. Art consists of a platform, which blends its field of interaction with creative, technical, and social energies by which it resolves and redefines such forces. It functions to pinpoint and question the contradictions and inconsistencies that operate within such forces that falls in its scope of analysis.

The strategies used or described in art are not limited to innovation or tradition. In this sense, each artwork may function as a ‘shifter’ among other artworks, meaning, it comments on the world on the basis of its differentiation to other artworks. From a societal perspective, this differentiation does not only function to ‘label’ the work of art according to its form (such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘innovative’, ‘epigonal’). Rather, art attains its meaning on the basis of its positioning within a certain social context, which entails artworks that are not as strongly related to the public domain such as Art in Public spaces, Street Art, mobile- applications or participatory art. Top- down-art is art that we obtain one way or another, bottom-up-art is art that we need to obtain one way or another. Each artwork is a question addressed at society at large.

Despite the common association of network society with omnipresent control and surveillance (which could perhaps explain why traditional arts tend to lean towards individualization and a-socialization), social media, network structures, and the Internet are perhaps the final “public space” that we possess as individuals today.

Massmedia (as a passive consumption device), which have rapidly influenced our everyday life since the second half of the 19th century, play a strong role in determining our agenda at present. Since the decrease in the political and social connotations of “public space” in a modernist, transparent, and cognitive society, “massmedia” has taken on a central role in the creation and dissemination of meaning, taking public opinion under its hegemony and replacing “knowledge” -so important to cognitive society- with metaphors of “meaning” and “opinions”.

Here, “public” denotes a passive monitoring formula. On the one hand, “public” designates the impossibility of going beyond the internal operations of the system; on the other hand, it points to the possibility of new types of communication with other external systems. Hence, the meaning and ideas produced by the media do not actually represent the opinion of the public.

The rapid rise of the turbocapitalist system resulting from the fall of the iron curtain in 1989 and the cold war, the loss of public commons as a result of the privatization necessary for “economic growth”, the crises of participatory democracy, the dilemma between transnationalism and nationalisms, the decrease of individual rights after 9/11 under the banner of protection from terror, religion wars, our irresponsible consumption of world resources, financial crises, bankruptcies emerging from the management of democratic states as private companies released from social responsibilities, the diminishment of working rights and essential social structures of a society, moving towards (social, political, and economic) erosion as a result of the growing gap between different classes, in society: although we may have become accustomed and insensitive to the daily catastrophic images imposed on us by massmedia, we believe that this description of our current situation is not exaggerated.

¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico-philosophicus

This text is published before, in the catalogue of the Exhibition “Commons Tense/Müşterekler Zamanı” (amberTXT/BIS), Curated by Fatih Aydoğdu and Ekmel Ertan, Den Haag/NED 2012
In frame of the Todays Art Festival 2012 

By connecting social media with discussions on ecology, society, and participatory democracy from a social organizational perspective, “Commons Tense/ Müşterekler Zamanı” establishes an alternative platform for re-constructing urgent societal questions, to search for solutions to existing and future crises, to advocate the need for self-organization within the hegemony of market economy, which privatizes all aspects of everyday life.

Digital Commons are platforms offering tools, information, theory, art, and culture that are open for public and are free. Commons are what we share with others. Commons/ Müşterekler is a new form of expression that goes beyond the hegemony of the market and centralized modes of control and, therefore, it is a kind of language.

“Commons Tense / Müşterekler Zamanı” designates a hypothetical language that goes beyond local and national data to discuss certain problems, and to produce alternative options within the current social, economic, and political systems in which we live in.

It establishes a foresight to think beyond borders physically and intellectually, within and without the system.

https://issuu.com/ekmelertan/docs/commons_tense

Fatih AYDOĞDU (b. 1963 | Turkey) lives and works in Vienna and Istanbul. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Aydoğdu is a conceptual visual artist, designer, curator, writer, and sound artist, focusing on concepts of media aesthetics, migration & identity politics, and linguistic issues. He participated in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia, and the USA. He was the publisher of Turkey’s first media art magazine, “hat” (1998). He worked a.o. as a member of the Curatorial Board of ‘amberPlatform,’ an art & technology platform based in Istanbul, between 2011 and 2019.

The post Transversal: Commons Tense and Antihegemonial Tactics—Fatih Aydoğdu appeared first on Sumac Space.

Milad Odabaei: Parham, the images of Asymmetrical Authority are at once familiar and strange to the imagination imprinted with the political history of contemporary Iran. They recall the 1979 Revolution that deposed the Pahlavi monarchy and brought about the Islamic Republic as well as the eight years of war with Iraq (1980-88) that immediately followed. But the colors, folds, shapes, and cuts that give form to your photographs make the familiar a bit strange. Can you tell us about the images?

Parham Taghioff: As you know I was born just a couple of months before the Revolution. Like yours, my childhood memories are of a highly uncertain and extreme ideological atmosphere of the post-revolutionary decade during the war. During those years I developed a game with my grandfather. I would wait for him to read the newspaper, which I remember him doing with an extremely worrisome and disheartened look on his face. We would then play with the paper, fold it, cut it, and make it into different shapes and forms. This was the origin of Asymmetrical Authority, and really, all of my experimentations with history and image. In my game, the documented history of the earlier generations’ struggles and achievements, became the raw material for creation. Today, over three decades later, I have started a new game with the similar images of the past but, this time, as an author.

In the last few years many books of documentary photographs have been published in Iran. Books, for example, of the archival news images of the Revolution or the Iran-Iraq War. A noteworthy example is a book modeled on the 2002 volume “Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering, and Hope” published by Phaidon (London and New York). The history of these books goes back to the publications of bilingual, English and Persian, books of documentary images of the war. Three decades later, these books still serve various ideological purposes and reproduce orthodox narratives of our lived history of the Revolution and the war. They emphasize, for example, the popularity of the Revolution or that the war was internationally imposed on Iran and the Iranian response was a “holy defense.” [The war with Iraq is often referred to as jang-e tahmili (“the imposed war”), and defa-e moqadas (“the holly defense”) in Iran.]

The sources of my images are drawn from such books and similar archives of Iranian documentary and news photography. In our time when an academic and critical interpretation of photography is not entirely accessible to the general public, rapid reproduction and circulation of images provide answers to difficult historical predicaments. Images, along with other forms of easily accessible information, function as an authoritative source and dispel other forms of interpretations. In Asymmetrical Authority, I have reproduced historical images but have tried to empty them of their signification and excavate other possible interpretations.

Milad: In what you are saying I hear echoes of not only critical reflection on art and modern reproducibility, but also post-revolutionary Iranian debate on national historiography. Asymmetrical Authority, it seems to me, breaks with the doxas of both leftist and Islamic narratives of the Islam and the Revolution and poses national (meli) history and historiography as an unresolved problematic in the form of a question. Can you speak about the capacity of photography to confront a political world saturated with ideology and myth? How do you mobilize photography for critical historiographic exploration?

Parham: Transforming our understanding of time, the camera has the capacity to challenge our understanding of the past. Through reproduction, as Walter Benjamin notes, photography undermines the authority of the original and the sanctity of the author. Popularization of photography has enabled everyone to confront the world through the mechanical or digital eyes of the camera, and to tie together being and time in a click. Citizen journalists, with the capacity of both capturing and circulating “the news,” have challenged the monopoly of traditional news makers as well as the national and international jurisdictions of traditional journalism. Today, news media often follows the images that appear on social media by lay image-makers.

At the same time, however, the sheer volume of the images in our daily lives diminishes our capacity to discern the historicity of the past. Everyone has acquired the power to establish the meaning of images and by extension, the meaning of history. Digital photography challenges traditional regimes of citationality, facticity, and authority and instead, emphasizes discursivity. Today, more than ever, the meaning and significance of images are established in the context of their circulation and reception. The truth of images, in other words, lies beyond their genealogy in a particular time and place. The question is how we locate images in historical narratives and memories, and how do we draw on living images to tie together the past, the present, and the future. In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag emphasizes an important point: “Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.”

Milad: The tension between traditional and professional forms of authority on the one hand, and democratic authority as well as populist dissolution of authority on the other, is central here. Can you speak about the title of the collection, Asymmetrical Authority?

Parham: When I started to work on this collection I came across an article by Lutz Koepnick titled “Photographs and Memories”. I found a deep resonance between what I was doing to the images of the past in the studio and Koepnick’s attention to time and history in photography. Koepnick draws on Sontag and her Wittgensteinian approach to photography to move beyond a purely representational analysis of photography. He writes:

The most essential question is therefore not how different technological inventions cause different representations of temporality, but how we place certain images—digital or analog—in larger narratives of history and memory; how we make use of both their formal inventory and exhibition in order to connect different pasts and presents; how we rely on different strategies of naming, description and inscription, of discursive en-framing, in order to infuse them with temporal texture or pass them off as souvenirs of frozen time; and last but not least, how we engage older myths of reference, objectivity, and truth in order to define the relationships between image-makers, photographic subjects, and viewers as relationships of either asymmetrical authority or mutual recognition. No image, whether computer-processed or not, has an existence or memory of its own. It is what we do with them that decides over their life and afterlife. It is how we situate them against the backdrop of other narratives, discourses, images, and strategies of representation that enables them to speak in various ways about the past and its bearing on the present. [Citation: Koepnick, Lutz. “Photographs and Memories.” South Central Review 21.1 (Spring 2004): 94-129.]

My photographic practice tries to confront the force of technological representation and reproduction and explore possibilities of creative intervention.

Milad: Central to questioning of authority is a kind of distancing. Asymmetric Authority, and your previous collections that it builds upon, all perform a form of photographic distancing.  Let’s talk about your last collection, Hands On Hands Off, which was produced in 2014 at the height of negotiations between Iran and the G5+1 over Iran’s nuclear program, you produced images of hands and gestures of politicians who were negotiating the fate of the deal and with it, supposedly our collective existence. Can you address your use of distancing, zooming in and out, and what it achieves technically and otherwise?

Parham: During the negotiations between Iran and the G5+1 we were experiencing a very complex situation. Any exchange between the two sides had a direct effect on our lives, not simply socioeconomically, in terms of easing of economic sanctions, but also politically. The international negotiations were deeply tied to highly divisive domestic political contestations. The images of negotiations saturated the Iranian and international news. For the first time after the Revolution, the foreign ministers of Iran and the United States were part of the same conversations, along with other G5 leaders and Germany. In these images the gestures of politicians had attracted my attention. Under the attentive gaze of the camera, the bodily gestures of politicians provided the disempowered viewer with important information. Using a macro lens, I focused on the news media images of the negotiations and reproduced the gestures of politicians as they appeared on the camera monitor. Printing the result in large frames, I then challenged the viewer ability to discern the representational content of the image in the exhibition. In close proximity, the viewer would only be able to see the LEDs lighting behind the image. He or she would have to step back to be able to see the image. My aim was to create a theatre of my own, and through techniques of separation, combination, magnification and rearrangement, bring to the viewer’s awareness the work of power in news media and in the mediation of our lives.

How do you think of your images as working within and against a national imagination? How do you think the reception of your photographic response to the Revolution and the war is generationally mediated?

We all have different imagination of our respective national identities. But are all born into particular histories. We might think that what has happened in the past is in the past and unchangeable. But every historical examination shows of a different image of the past, and as a result, the past, the present, and the future are reconfigured anew. Iranian national ideology is largely steeped in myth and ideology. In my opinion, we urgently need to pose new questions of our pasts and develop our engagement with the images of our history toward critical cultural and historical studies.

Indeed, Asymmetrical Authority has received different responses from our generation and those before and after us. But history, perhaps in a Hegelian sense, is the synthesis of different and at times conflicting interpretations and pursuits and irreducible to any one account or project. 

Milad Odabaei is a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. His research brings together anthropological and critical methods for the study of modern Iran.

The post History and Image as National Memory Beyond Nationalism—Parham Taghioff in Conversation with Milad Odabaei appeared first on Sumac Space.

[Scroll down for the Italian Version]

In the Greek language, dialogue comes from διά-through and λογος-speech, it is a conversation, a movement through an open space between distant dimensions of feeling, thinking, acting, where everything could happen. We developed another space and dynamic seeking our own format: a trialogue, a meeting of us three, who were in a continuous conversation without a specific goal known beforehand. Holding space and time together in regular online convenings, we tested how we can take and give space to each other in exchange free from assigned roles, expectations and structures. 

Through the following map, we, Anahita Razmi (artist), Jaroslava Tomanová (curator/researcher) and Fabrizio Ajello (writer/artist) set up a confrontation, triangulating our research and processes of thought and artistic experiences about stereotypes, deconstruction, decolonisation, translation and the figure of a Trickster, completed by a series of stringent questions on the topics addressed. Including links to resources such as articles and books, the presented map can be seen as a curated library visualising the relations between topics we discussed. We hope it will be a starting point for further growth, an ever-changing creature of thought which can hopefully take the form of a tetralogue, pentalogue, and so on.

Link to the Map

The following questions can be understood as flexible nodes prompting a discussion when needed. They do not determine any structure or form; they can be left alone and invited back when we forage for thoughts and intuitions together. 

• What relations do we see between practices of deconstruction and decolonisation today? What possibilities does the notion of deconstruction hold regarding present-day cultural stereotypes? 

• How do sites of power (institutional, economic, academic…) operate and choose today?

• What are figures that can propose alternatives and subvert systems of representation and power?

• The Meme? The Trickster? The Fool? The Fake Account?

• Trickster as an alter-ego: how can she confuse, destabilise, shake the ground of white privilege and Western modern, patriarchal gaze?

• How can appropriation be deployed to dismantle cultural stereotypes and ideological constructs?

• What relationships exist between tradition, translation and originality in contemporary art and aesthetic languages?

• Can irony form a kind of ‘critical intimacy’? (see Spivak on map)

• Is cynicism/nihilism the opposite of ‘critical intimacy’?

• What is a misunderstanding? 

• What does “lost in translation” mean? How can accidental slippages of one’s unconscious bias reveal an ideological grip?

• What happens when grammar, the system of rules of one language, is applied in another language? 

• Can it tell a story of past trauma? Can it give a testimony of a colonised mind?

Link to the Map

Fabrizio Ajello graduated from the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in Palermo with a thesis on Contemporary Art History.
In the past, he has actively collaborated with the magazines Music Line and Succoacido.net. Since 2005 he has been working on the public art project, Progetto Isole. In 2008, together with the artist Christian Costa, he founded the public art project Spazi Docili, based in Florence, which in recent years has produced explorations of the territory, interventions, workshops and lectures in public and private institutions, exhibitions and artistic residencies.
He has also exhibited in Italian and international galleries and museums and participated in various events such as: Berlin Biennale 7, Break 2.4 Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Synthetic Zero at BronxArtSpace in New York, Moving Sculpture In The Public Realm in Cardiff, Hosted in Athens in Athens, The Entropy of Art in Wroclaw, Poland. He teaches Literature at the Liceo Artistico di Porta Romana in Florence.

Anahita Razmi studied Media Art and Sculpture at the Bauhaus-University Weimar and the Pratt Institute New York before studying Fine Arts at the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart under Rainer Ganahl and Christian Jankowski.
Working with installation, moving image and performance, her practice is exploring contextual and geographical shifts – with a focus on shifts between an ‘East’ and a ‘West’. Using her own Iranian-German heritage as a reference, Razmi’s works are testing grounds for possibilities of import/export, hybrid identities and in the constructions and ambiguities of cultural representation.

Jaroslava Tomanová is a researcher and a writer currently based in Kassel, Germany. Alongside ongoing voluntary and informal art-related activities, her professional background is a combination of working in the visual arts, contemporary dance and performance, academic research and writing. In the past she worked as Curatorial Assistant at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) and as International Collaborations Coordinator at Tanec Praha. Her commitment to art and politics of solidarity, equality and justice drives her motivation to develop curatorial research, writing and practice alongside an overarching long-term research interest in the connection between language and power. Her university education has primarily focused on the relation between the arts and the state, and her PhD research at the University of Leeds is a critical study of neoliberal cultural policy discourse. As a writer and art critic she has contributed with reviews and essays to Corridor8, This Is Tomorrow and Freedom News.

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Frames Cracked by Lines of Doubt–Un Trilogo

Anahita Razmi / Jaroslava Tomanová / Fabrizio Ajello

Nella lingua greca, dialogo viene da διά-attraverso e λογος-parola/pensiero, è una conversazione, un movimento attraverso uno spazio aperto tra differenti dimensioni di sentire, pensare, agire, dove tutto può accadere. Cercando un format adeguato, abbiamo sviluppato un’altra tipologia di spazio e un’altra dinamica di confronto: un trialogo, un incontro a tre,  una conversazione continua senza un obiettivo specifico predeterminato. Dialogando e lavorando insieme attraverso spazio e tempo in regolari sessioni online, abbiamo testato come sia possibile condividere ed collaborare insieme in uno scambio libero da ruoli assegnati, aspettative e strutture. 

Attraverso la seguente mappa, noi, Anahita Razmi (artista), Jaroslava Tomanová (curatrice/ricercatrice) e Fabrizio Ajello (scrittore/artista) abbiamo impostato un confronto, triangolando le nostre ricerche e i processi di pensiero ed esperienze artistiche su temi quali: stereotipi, decostruzione, decolonizzazione, traduzione e la figura del Trickster, il tutto corredato da una serie di domande stringenti sui temi trattati. Includendo link a risorse come articoli e libri, la mappa presentata può essere vista come una biblioteca che mostra in un unica visione le relazioni tra gli argomenti trattati. Questo progetto vuole essere così un punto di partenza per un’ulteriore crescita, una creatura di pensiero in continua evoluzione che presto prenderà la forma di un tetralogo, pentalogo, e così via.

Link alla Mappa

La mappa presentata serve come pietra angolare della nostra conversazione in evoluzione e continuerà a cambiare durante il processo collaborativo. Se vuoi unirti ai nostri incontri liberi, irregolari, informali e non moderati che ruotano liberamente intorno alle domande proposte, invia una richiesta di modifica della mappa o mettiti in contatto via email: editorial [at] sumac [dot] space.

Le seguenti domande possono essere intese come nodi flessibili, tese a stimolare una discussione e un confronto in fieri. Non determinano o precludono alcuna struttura o forma; possono essere affrontate singolarmente, o utilizzate come punto di partenza per focalizzare e processare insieme pensieri e intuizioni.

• Quali relazioni vediamo oggi tra le pratiche di decostruzione e decolonizzazione? Quali possibilità ha la nozione di decostruzione rispetto agli stereotipi culturali attuali? 
  
  
• Come operano e scelgono oggi i luoghi del potere (istituzionale, economico, accademico…)?
  
  
• Quali sono le figure che possono proporre alternative e sovvertire i sistemi di rappresentazione e di potere?
  
  
• Il Meme? Il Trickster? Il Matto? Il Fake Account?
  
  
• Trickster come alter-ego: questa “figura” è in grado di confondere, destabilizzare, scuotere il terreno del privilegio bianco e dello sguardo occidentale moderno e patriarcale?
  
  
• Come può l’appropriazione essere impiegata per smantellare stereotipi culturali e costrutti ideologici?
  
  
• Quali relazioni esistono tra tradizione, traduzione e originalità nell’arte contemporanea e nei linguaggi estetici?
  
  
• L’ironia può formare una sorta di “intimità critica”? (vedi Spivak sulla mappa)
  
• Il cinismo/nichilismo è l’opposto dell'”intimità critica”?
  
  
• Cos’è un malinteso? 
  
  
• Cosa significa “lost in translation”? Come possono gli slittamenti accidentali del proprio pregiudizio inconscio rivelare una forzatura ideologica?
  
  
• Cosa succede quando la grammatica, il sistema di regole di una lingua, viene applicata in un’altra lingua? 
  
  
• Questo fenomeno può raccontare la storia di un trauma passato? Può dare una testimonianza di una mente colonizzata?
  

Link alla Mappa

The post Frames Cracked by Lines of Doubt—A Trialogue appeared first on Sumac Space.