I have just finished a re-edit of the 2011 DAAR collective film common assembly for the group show Meeting Points at Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, in Belgium:
http://www.muhka.be/en/toont/event/3182/MEETING-POINTS
Meeting Points is a multidisciplinary contemporary arts festival focusing on the contextualised presentation of art from the Arab World. The 7th edition of Meeting Points is a series of successive exhibitions, taking place from September 2013 to June 2014 in several cities of Europe, Asia and the Arab world: Zagreb, Antwerp, Hong Kong, Moscow, Beirut, Cairo and Vienna.The current sequence of exhibitions takes a step out of the Arab world in terms of the cities where they take place, the list of participating artists and the general stance to refrain from national or regional representation. This gesture is to do with the timing of Meeting Points 7. It has been organised during the often ambiguous aftermath of the popular rebellions that reverberated across the Arab world in 2011, during a period that also saw various social movements across the world sparking public discussion about the existing social and economic order.
The artists are: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marwa Arsanios, Kianoush Ayari, Filipa César, Céline Condorelli, Alice Creischer, DAAR, Paul De Vree, Simone Fattal, Robert Filliou, Simohammed Fettaka, Karpo Aćimović Godina, Sharon Hayes, Adelita Husni-Bey, Sanja Iveković, Iman Issa,Maryam Jafri, Rajkamal Kahlon, Anton Kannemeyer, Kayfa ta & Haytham El-Wardany, Runo Lagomarsino, Maha Maamoun, Jumana Manna, Azzeddine Meddour, Tom Nicholson, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Artavazd Peleshian, Marta Popivoda, Kerim Ragimov, C K Rajan, Alexander Rodchenko, Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch, Luc Tuymans, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor
The title Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks is a quote from the revolutionary philosopher Franz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth (1961). His book illuminates the reality of colonial power and violence in a historical and political persepctive and has not lost its relevance half a century later.
Calibrating degrees of identity and difference between the past and the present, Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks adjusts to the specific geographies and histories in which it will be realised. It juxtaposes recent works by contemporary artists and filmmakers with historical positions. At M HKA both these aspects of the exhibition are illuminated by a selection of works from the museum’s collection. Presenting artworks within an exhibition format imagined as a possible forum for critical pedagogy, Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks believes in the explanatory power of images across cultures and times, and understands the realm of images as a social location capable of mobilising ideas.
Meeting Points is a multidisciplinary contemporary art event organized by the Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF) in collaboration with regional and international partners. The event usually takes place in several cities of the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The cities previously involved are Amman, Athens, Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, Damascus, Ramallah, Tangiers and Tunis.
Meeting Points is neither purely an art or performance event, nor an academic or theoretical forum. Each edition is an invitation to artists, other cultural producers and thinkers across all fields of culture to reflect on and present visions and works engaging with a social and political context.
For each edition a curator is appointed to create the conceptual framework of the event. The 5th edition was curated by Frie Leysen and the 6th edition by Okwui Enwezor, under the title Locus Agonistes: Practices and Logics of the Civic. The event is organised in collaboration with a local partner in each city, where the curators also work closely with independent spaces, artists and a network of organisations. The 7th edition will be curated by WHW. What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb and Berlin. Its members are curators Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić andSabina Sabolović and, in addition, designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHW organises a range of production, exhibition and publishing projects and directs Gallery Nova in Zagreb.
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Untitled Stills from common assembly, produced by DAAR, edited by Cressida Kocienski, 2013:
