The exhibition GHOSTS FROM AFAR explores how political narratives produced by imperial interests have often far-reaching and multi-layered effects on subjects and their very realities.
In their video works, the artists reflect on how socio-political narratives created by events long past can across generations continue to shape our minds, bodies, as well as our individual everyday experiences, and sometimes cause a complex relationship with ourselves. Using the technique of montage, the artists reinterpret official historiography by juxtaposing and interweaving documentary archival material with personal accounts. Thus, multi-layered and non-chronological narrative strands emerge that interpret “history” from a subjective-biographical experience. The artists reveal “foundational fictions” and reflect on how trauma can be passed down through generations in a ghostly sense of being haunted.
Lodos, Mexico City – 21 August – 18 September 2021
The Things We Make presents installations by six international artists and collectives that are concerned with communal creation, are defined by it, or come into being through it in the first place. The works are participatory, performative, and process-based, in which through the collaborative activity not only the product but also the conditions of this creative process and the involved community are negotiated. In this sense, the exhibition reflects on the constructive or even deconstructive potential that lies in community. The Things We Make is the second of three curatorial exercises that respond to the theoretical concept ‘espacio-objeto: sala-jardín-bar’ developed by the Mexico City-based architectural studio APRDELESP: “A ‘space-object’ is not only a space or an object, but rather it constitutes itself in the defiant claim to both categories. It is not a space with objectual qualities, nor is it an object with spatial qualities. Neither does it find itself casually in the intersection of object and space but is deeply committed to its existence as both space and object”. This second exhibition of the series responds to the aspect of collectivity that is implied by the sala-jardín-bar concept proposed by APRDELESP: a ‘space-object’ that serves as an instrument to bring people together.
.
Genealogies in the Middle East and Latin America
Sharjah Art Foundation – 1 June–11 July 2021
With Mounira Al Solh, Francis Alÿs, Claudia Aravena Abughosh, Arias & Aragón, Guillermo Cifuentes, Ximena Cuevas, Alia Farid, Gabriela Golder, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, May Kassem, Bani Khoshnoudi, Gilda Mantilla & Raimond Chaves, Óscar Muñoz, Enrique Ramírez, Jayce Salloum (in collaboration with Elia Suleiman), Wael Shawky, Nida Sinnokrot, Elena Tejada-Herrera, Maya Watanabe and Akram Zaatari
Initiated and organized by Anna Goetz, presented by Sharjah Art Foundation
Sharjah Art Foundation presented a series of online film screenings jointly organised with curator Anna Goetz, who initiated this collaborative project featuring 21 artists and collectives from the Middle East and Latin America working in film and video. The online screening program featured 21 video artists and collectives and followed the playful format of a chain letter to explore relationships between artists in these two regions of the Global South.
