Saturday 3 February
Ronak Rabiee, Olof Nilsson, and Tayebeh (Roz) Madadi presented new work in development and this was discussed with the group.
We then looked at some examples of works from across the Kurdish and the Iranian diaspora, as well as looking at a film-makers cooperative and self-organized academy working from Rojave, (Western Kurdistan) in North Eastern Syria. You can see the slides that we used here:
The artists we looked at briefly were. Shirin Neshat, Shirin Aliabadi, Ismail Khayat (1944-2022), Zehra Doğan, Komîna Fîlm a Rojava, and Amir Gholami. This is the Komîna Fîlm a Rojava YouTube channel.
Saturday 24 February
Gunilla Gränsbo, Masoud Yousefi, Aladdin Mofakheri, and Ksenija Gembickaja presented new work in development and this was discussed with the group.
For the next meeting we will also look at the work of some Palestinian artists working in exile, including: Mona Hatoum, Sandi Hillel, Emily Jacir, and Larissa Sansour. Here is a resource that might be of interest also: https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/10593/palestinian-visual-arts-iv
Saturday 23 March
We discussed the exhibition at Bergsjön Kulturhuset (8 June-25 August 2024) and how we would go about organising this.
Ronak Rabiee presented works by participants in a workshop that she delivered over 4 occasions, working in the forest and at Teckningsmuseet, Laholm.
We also looked at the work of four artists from the Palestinian diaspora. Några artister från palestinska och libanesiska diasporor.
Larissa Sansour (2006) Soup Over Bethlehem
Mona Hatoum (1983) So Much I Want to Say
See video work here: https://vimeo.com/262094223 Hatoum grew up in Beirut, born there to Palestinian parents, but became an exile during a visit to London in 1975 when war broke out in Lebanon. She attended art schools in London (Byam Shaw 1975-9 and Slade 1979-81), where she began to make work about her experience of cultural displacement. She has said: ‘my work is about my experience of living in the West as a person from the Third World, about being an outsider, about occupying a marginal position, being excluded, being defined as “Other” or as one of “Them”‘ (quoted in Mona Hatoum, London 1997, p.127). Her early performance works focused with great intensity on her body, which she used as a metaphor for oppression, often separated from the audience by some form of barrier, membrane, cage, cell, wall, hood or veil. (Source TATE: See https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hatoum-so-much-i-want-to-say-t07536.)
See also the work Measures of Distance (1988) https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hatoum-measures-of-distance-t07538
Emily Jacir (2005 – ongoing) Material for a film. An installation, of mixed media exhibited at the central Pavilion at the Giardini, 52nd Venice Biennial, 2007, where it won the Golden Lion award. See:
- https://universes.art/en/nafas/articles/2007/emily-jacir/emily-jacir-material-for-a-film/08
- https://electronicintifada.net/content/material-film-retracing-wael-zuaiter-part-1/7054
- https://electronicintifada.net/content/material-film-performance-part-2/7053
Artist’s statement-Emily Jacir: On Monday October 16, 1972, Wael Zuaiter left Janet Venn-Brown’s apartment and headed to his apartment at No. 4 Piazza Annibaliano in Rome. He had been reading A Thousand and One Nights on Janet’s couch searching for references to use in an article he was planning to write that evening. He took two buses to get from Janet’s place to his in northern Rome. Just as he reached the elevator inside the entrance to the building of the apartment block where he lived, Israeli assassins fired 12 bullets into his head and chest with 22 calibre pistols at close range. Wael Zuaiter had become the first victim in Europe of a series of assassinations committed by Israeli agents on Palestinian artists, intellectuals and diplomats that was already underway in the Middle East.
A thirteenth bullet pierced his volume 2 of A Thousand and One Nights and got lodged in its spine. One of Wael’s dreams was to translate A Thousand and One Nights directly from Arabic into Italian. He had been working on this project since his arrival in Italy in 1962. To this day an Italian translation from the Arabic does not exist.
In 1979, Wael Zuaiter’s companion of eight years, Sydney-born artist Janet Venn-Brown published For A Palestinian – A Memorial to Wael Zuaiter. One chapter, titled Material for a Film by Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro, consists of a series of interviews conducted with the people who were part of Wael’s life in Italy, including Janet herself. They were going to make a film, but Elio Petri died shortly afterwards and the film was never made.
I went back to Rome in 2005 to continue collecting material for a film.
Sandi Hillel (2018–2021) The Living Room
exhibition.school 