search
Artists talk
Rasheed Araeen (artist) on art journals Black Phoenix and Third Text in conversation with Saira Ansari (Researcher, Sharjah Art Foundation)
Artist Rasheed Araeen talks about the history and role of the journal Black Phoenix at its founding and its transition to Third Text. Araeen sees writing as a form of resistance and a vehicle for organising thoughts, bodies and actions that open doors to another kind of authorship and agency.
Dance under cover of a fictional rhythm
Lecture: Daniel Blanga Gubbay (Researcher and Curator, Aleppo.eu)
This lecture merges theory and YouTube video clips to disclose the use of fiction as a political tool. Drawing from fictional institutions, strategies of hypercamouflage and recent works of Arab futurism and Afrofuturism, Blanga Gubbay offers reflections on fiction and revolt.
Coffee break
Conversations
Sarnath Banerjee (artist, writer and graphic novelist) and Deepak Unnikrishnan (writer) Moderator: Uzma Rizvi (Associate Professor, Anthropology and Urban Studies, Pratt Institute)
This conversation will bring together artist and graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee and writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, whose works depict the surreal realities of urban life in India and the United Arab Emirates, respectively. How can fragments of text, speech, comics, drawings, bodily gestures, humour and magical realism come to be a language?
Lunch
Hold everything dear
Performance: Hajra Waheed (artist)
This ten-minute performance by Hajra Waheed in collaboration with Clea Minaker translates elements of Waheed’s material practice into light and shadow. Set to a dedicated audio recording of an intimate letter from the artist’s sister, the work explores legacies of colonial violence.
Before, beyond, beneath
Infrastructural material and medium: Shilpa Gupta (artist), Saba Innab (architect and artist), Antonio Vega Macotela (artist)
Moderator: Aram Moshayedi (Curator, Hammer Museum)
Although infrastructure is most often viewed as networks and structures that facilitate and control the movement of people and information (e.g. roads, bridges, pipelines, airports, borders and checkpoints), this panel investigates how art might function as an infrastructural medium that can unsettle paradigms of regulatory order, rationale and efficiency. Artists engage with questions of matter and materiality to identify existing insurgent practices in ‘underdevelopment’.
Coffee break
Structural matters
Architecture and urban practices: Manuel de Rivero (Co-founder, Supersudaca), Mona El Mousfy (Founder and Managing Director, SpaceContinuum), Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Co-founder, Atelier Bow-Wow)
Moderator: Hoor Al Qasimi (Director, Sharjah Art Foundation)
This panel will discuss an expanded approach to architectural practice and urban development that includes questions of accessibility to housing and social spaces. Participants will also address the impact of conservation and rehabilitation projects on the formation of communities and cities.
The revolting talk
Presentation: Neo Muyanga (composer and musician)
Gallery 1 & 2 Courtyard, Al Mureijah Square
In this presentation, Neo Muyanga excavates and performs music from the archive of popular South African protest songs during the era of apartheid. He will make reference to songs sung in the revolutionary camps, where freedom fighters languished as exiles under the government's banning order during the 1970s and 1980s.
Tsohle – A revolting mass
Performance: Neo Muyanga (composer and musician)
Al Hamdan Bin Mousa Courtyard, Al Mureijah Square
Singer and composer Neo Muyanga interjects abstraction into South African church hymns and mines the archive of apartheid protest songs to create a performative survey that disrupts the established musical narrative of struggle. Performed by four singers and a conducting pianist, tsohle, which means ‘all things’ in Sesotho, highlights the complexities of contemporary life in South Africa in the wake of the country’s colonial experience and asks how those who govern and those who are governed can sing the same songs.