Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
For the project Through the Roadblocks for
Lebanon, curator Mayssa Fattouh and artist-curator Nesrine Khodr chose to work
with filmmaker/artist, Ghassan Salhab, whose work here essentially challenges
the understanding of borders and frontiers. This collaboration’s aim is to
dissolve in its content and format, the boundaries between audiences and
exhibitions in a preset contemporary art framework and the questioning of
overused terminologies and concepts, specifically the ones under which this project falls.
The choice of holding the screening in
“an occupied space” and the use of video as the medium, reinforced the position
of ephemerality that is at the core of the project, all the while keeping true
to its primary form as an artwork.
This diptych video was shown unannounced for
one week, occupying a space usually functioning
as a commercial store and transformed on this occasion. During the first
three days the projection has become the subject of conversations between the
artist and the curators, debating the work, how it carries itself in the
presence of unprepared audiences, the role this collaboration has played in
each other’s practice and the perception of such an artwork in an
institutionalized art world. The outcome of these conversations will be
compiled in written form and published separately as a follow up catalogue,
giving the project an extended and morphed life.
The essence of the chosen approach is best
expressed through Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion that he highlights in his book
Postproduction:
"The
contemporary work of art does not position itself as the termination point of
the ‘creative process’ but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of
activities.
While this project is independent in its
implementation and form, it will be connected in its out-scope to the platform Through the Roadblocks - an initiative
launched by NeMe www.neme.org in Cyprus -
which has invited several cultural practitioners from the Mediterranean region
to participate in a search that would explore through art and theory issues
revolving around cultural production and its movements, in its interweaving and
overlapping beyond geographical borders imposed by political mapping.
The emphasis in this platform, broadly speaking, is
in seeing how artists together with scholars create collaborative art and ideas
as a method of suggesting tactics for rethinking cultural and political
boundaries, despite democracy's battered silhouette and the heavy hand of
history especially in this region.
This project will be
presented at a 3 day “Through the
roadblocks” conference which will have as main guest speakers Gayatri
Spivak and Tariq Ali. The conference, scheduled for 23, 24, and 25 November
2012, will gather these multiple autonomous projects to foster a constructive
dialogue and debate around the proposed questions.
“The question of
alterity poses the question of borders” - known to be formulated by Herodotus -
is a question
still as valid today as it was back in the 5th century BC. Ghassan Salhab’s video raises timeless questions, such as duality shown through the use of the diptych and the idea of containment, appearing in the image of the checkpoint, where the flows of the body, language, and expressions are controlled within a defined territory. The factor of time comes to play a major role in the way it rules the body and the psyche. In his minimalist approach, Salhab’s video immerses the viewer in a reality that is known too well but often ignored, with a reference to the Lebanese political state and the abstraction in which a human being faces in such conditions, highlighted in the poignant pose of waiting, in itself a condition relating to the human essence in Heideggerian philosophy. By raising the question of otherness, Salhab also challenges the understanding of borders into all that is physically and mentally outside of oneself.
still as valid today as it was back in the 5th century BC. Ghassan Salhab’s video raises timeless questions, such as duality shown through the use of the diptych and the idea of containment, appearing in the image of the checkpoint, where the flows of the body, language, and expressions are controlled within a defined territory. The factor of time comes to play a major role in the way it rules the body and the psyche. In his minimalist approach, Salhab’s video immerses the viewer in a reality that is known too well but often ignored, with a reference to the Lebanese political state and the abstraction in which a human being faces in such conditions, highlighted in the poignant pose of waiting, in itself a condition relating to the human essence in Heideggerian philosophy. By raising the question of otherness, Salhab also challenges the understanding of borders into all that is physically and mentally outside of oneself.
Curators: Mayssa Fattouh and Nesrine
Khodr
Artist filmmaker: Ghassan Salhab
Dates and Location:
Video
Projection - May 31st to June 7th 2012, 4pm to 9pm - Plan
Bey locale, Mar Mekhael annaher, Beirut
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