MM 2018: Day 1

10:30 am

Introduction by Sharjah Art Foundation

10:45 am

This is not a programme

Institutional practice: Sally Mizrachi (Co-founder, lugar a dudas), Sharmini Pereira (Founder and Director, Raking Leaves), Abir Saksouk (Architect, Public Works), Alper Turan (Co-founder, DAS Art Project)
Moderator: Zeynep Öz (curator)

This panel discusses the drives and challenges that mobilised the formation of their respective initiatives in Cali, Colombo, Beirut and Istanbul. How has the development of certain institutional forms enabled the continuation of particular ways of working and thinking? How have decisions to establish a permanent space, work remotely, activate various sites or utilise digital platforms facilitated the elaboration of alliances and common practices that generate the social, political and artistic conditions in which artists and art practitioners want to work?

12:30 pm

Our current dwelling is fire: When air fuels the contours of practice

A communiqué: Rheim Alkadhi (artist)

An original text that explores the emancipatory potential in ‘practice’ from the standpoint of an autonomous subject, conditions of exile, displacement and dispossession as well as local and international space as symptoms of a political genealogy.

12:45 pm

What if the wind refuses to carry our words?

Lecture performance: Paribartana Mohanty (artist)

This lecture performance focuses on a video excerpt of a TV interview with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which circulated on social media as ‘anti-Modi propaganda’. The work addresses issues of caste and class suppression, institutional labour discrimination and violence in India. Mohanty uses this material as a point of departure to examine the possibilities of the notion of ‘return’.

1:00 pm

Lunch

2:30 pm

Terms of order

Artist practices and community formation: Marwa Arsanios (artist), Dale Harding (artist), Naeem Mohaiemen (artist), Zineb Sedira (artist)
Moderator: Tarek Abou El Fetouh (curator)

This group of intergenerational artists discusses their practices in relation to direct commitments to social and political organising. What possibilities are opened up through this imbrication of social and political action and artistic practice? Although artists on this panel may not necessarily identify with the position of the organiser, they are each invested in organising through sustained engagements with community, place and historical research. How might organisation be approached as a process that proliferates authorship and agency rather than consolidates these capacities in a single figure? What implications might this proliferation have for the social and political demands placed on art?

4:15 pm

Coffee break

4:30 pm

Artists talk

Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim (artist) in conversation
with Noora Al Mualla (Curator of Modern Arab Art, Sharjah Art Foundation)

Informed by his experiences in Khorfakkan, a place located between the Gulf of Oman on one side and the Hajar Mountains on the other, artist Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim speaks with Noora Al Mualla about his land art and the possibilities of working beyond formal systems of production, presentation and documentation.

5:00 pm

On mud, dams and (r)esistance

Presentation: Ali Cherri (artist)
Followed by a screening of the film Flood in Ba’ath country (2003), directed by Omar Amiralay

This presentation will examine stagnant and muddy water and the paradoxical imagery it conjures, both as a contaminated and fertile space. Cherri looks at a number of spaces invaded by mud, such as the Fukushima archaeological museum buried after the tsunami and the Louvre’s storage spaces inundated after the 2016 flood, but he focuses mainly on the flooding during the construction of the Merowe Dam on the Nile in Sudan in 2007.

Flood in Ba’ath country (2003)
This documentary focuses on the construction of the impressive Euphrates Dam and other efforts to modernise Syria by the late President Hafez Al Assad in the 1970s.

9:30 pm

The Song of Roland: The Arabic Version (2017)

Performance: Wael Shawky (artist)
Calligraphy Square

Continuing his exploration of historical narratives, Shawky’s large-scale music and theatre performance The Song of Roland: The Arabic Version is based on the French epic poem La Chanson de Roland, which has been translated into classical Arabic and is animated by over 20 fidjeri singers and musicians performing in the traditional style of Arabian Gulf pearl divers.