Walid Raad
On October 26 we had an Image&Word meeting in Hasselt. For that occasion I prepared a short presentation on Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group: an imaginary foundation whose objective is to research and document Lebanon’s contemporary history. In Raad’s own words:
“Our aim with this project has never been to fool viewers and listeners by presenting stories and documents about anything and anyone in order to see what we can ‘get away with’. (…) This project operates between what is sayable, believable and known (as true or false). (…) Hence we would urge you to approach these documents we present as we do, as ‘hysterical symptoms’ based not on any one person’s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories.”
(quoted from “Let’s Be Honest, the Rain helped // 2003” in Merewether, Charles. Documents of Contemporary Art: The Archive. Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2006.)
The visuals of the presentation can be found here.
UNFIXED symposium and workshop
On November 15 and 16 Unfixed organises a symposium and workshop on Photography and postcolonial perspectives in contemporary art which will explore photography’s relationship to changing notions of cultural histories, identities and representations. The symposium and workshop will take place in The Center for Contemporary Art in Dordrecht (The Netherlands). Parallel to the symposium there is an exhibition of a group of six international artists who re-construct and re-contextualize fixed versions of photographic history through their installations, found and vernacular images, sculpture, text and video. Participating are artists Charif Benhelima (BE 1967), Otobong Nkanga (FR 1974), Keith Piper (UK 1960), Naro Snackey (NL 1980), Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (USA 1954) and Hank Willis Thomas (USA 1976). The artists will be present at the symposium together with Pamela Pattynama, Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Cultural History (University of Amsterdam) and art historian and critic Kobena Mercer.
For more information and registration see the Unfixed website.