I.Soldier / video still 2011 / A collective harmony is an important concept in the army. The system is putting group identity above the identity of the individual. Consequently there is only little room left for developing individuality, The trainings are organized around to make the soldiers work together collectively and to put aside own interests on behalf of the group. Later, these principles are applied to the workplace, where the group might be defined by a specific unit, so every one well be committed for unit which represents the collectiveness. The atmosphere of collectivism is very strong there. So it is very difficult to get out of that system. It is very, very difficult to be free from the atmosphere of collectivism. / 4 mn
- International Documentary Film Festival 2013 / Aribau Club / Barcelone +
The documentary reveals the daring attempts of men, women and Palestinian children to sneak past the Separation Wall in Jerusalem. They aren’t traffickers or smugglers, some are broken families, people who work or pray on the other side of the border. They all take the risk of being discovered or even breaking their legs while trying."We will continue crossing even if they build a thousand walls”, says one of the protagonists.
- ALWAN FILM FESTIVAL 2013 / ALWAN FOR THE ARTS / New York +
Infiltrators
Wednesday, May 1st - Alwan for the Arts, 7pm
Film Screening
To be screened with "In My Mother's Arms"
Khaled Jarrar, Palestine/UAE, 2012, 70 mins
The checkpoint is closed. “Detour, detour!” shouts a taxi driver announcing the beginning of a journey. The film follows various attempts of individuals in their search for gaps in the Wall in order to sneak past it.
- Sharjah Biennial 11 / Emirats Arabes Unis / Sharjah
- Refraction: Moving Images on Palestine Curator: Shaheen Merali / P21 Gallery / London +
Artists: Kamal Aljafari, Mohamed Al-Hawajri, Tayseer Barakat, Mike Hoolboom, Khaled Hourani, Khaled Jarrar, Joshua Jones,
kennardphillipps, Inzajeano Latif, Manal Mahamid, Laila Shawa,
Nasser Soumi, Tarzan and Arab
- 9th Dubai International Film Festival / MUTASALILUN (INFILTRATORS) / < +
Palestine, United Arab Emirates / 2012 / Arabic dialogue with English subtitles / Colour / Digital File / 70 minutes, won 2 awards : Special Jury Prize(Producer: Mohanad Yaqubi,Sami Said) and Best Director Khaled Jarrar)
Synopsis : The checkpoint is closed. “Detour, detour!” shouts a taxi driver and announces the beginning of the journey. The film unravels adventures of various attempts by individuals and groups during their search for gaps in the Wall in order to permeate and sneak past it.
- Art & Life in Palestine / Qlandiya International / Qalandiya
- FIAC 2012 Stand Polaris & galerieofmarseille / Grand Palais / Paris
- Where the Streets Have No Name / FOTOGALLERIET / Oslo +
Fotogalleriet is pleased to announce Runa Carlsen’s solo exhibition Where the Streets Have No Name, taking place from 23 September to 28 October 2012.
The exhibition takes as a starting point an autobiographical incident, namely Carlsen’s encounter with a group of Palestinian refugee children and adolescents visiting Norway in August 1978 by initiative of The Palestine Committee of Norway in collaboration with the PLO. Being a child herself, Carlsen met the visitors as a member of the Red Pioneers, a youth organization linked to the radical Communist movement in Norway of the 1970s that co-hosted the young Palestinian guests.
The failed attempt to establish a pen-friendship with one of the refugee children upon their departure - based on the non-existence of street names and post addresses - left a deep impact on the young Runa Carlsen and triggered her search for them in 2012, 34 years after the visit.
In Carlsen’s film shown at Fotogalleriet, the artist combines publicly available, private and autobiographical material to unravel narratives that not only represent the collective, but most importantly the individual memories of a people living in a conflict-driven area. Her work therefore becomes a general search for the personal stories of the people Carlsen encountered during her journey.
Where the Streets Have No Name unfolds as a series of presentations and events during the exhibition period.
The first event will take place with the Palestinian-born artist Khaled Jarrar and his “State of Palestine” project. For this project Jarrar has designed a postage stamp bearing the Palestinian sunbird, taking advantage of the Norwegian print-on-demand postage stamp service. The postage stamps can be bought and posted at Fotogalleriet, together with postcards designed by Runa Carlsen for Where the Streets Have No Name.
Jarrar will also perform his passport-stamping project, giving individuals the possibility to receive a stamp reading “State of Palestine” in their passport.
The passport stamping will take place at Youngstorget, Oslo on Thursday, 27 and Friday, 28 September between 15.00 and 18.00.
On Thursday, 25 and Friday, 26 October Fotogalleriet hosts a series of lectures and film screenings by the veteran filmmaker Monica Maurer and film director Marco Pasquini.
Maurer’s and Pasquini’s presentations will be complimented by the lecture of the Palestinian filmmaker Alaa El Ali, presenting “Letters from the Diaspora– A Letter to Ahmad” a project combining historical research with filmmaking. El Ali also accompanied Runa Carlsen during her visit to the refugee camps of Beirut in May 2012.
- NEWTOPIA / Cultural Centre / Mechelen / Belgium +
Curated by Kaetrina Gregos, Newtopia is a major international comprehensive visual arts exhibition dedicated to human rights. In recent years many important contemporary artists interested in social and political issues have created significant work exploring the various aspects of human rights. Many of them – some from countries where human rights are a highly contentious issue – will be included in the exhibition. Human rights are a perpetual, unfinished, ongoing project. They can be seen as the ultimate utopian project for humanity - of universal significance and value - which can never be fully attained, but whose impact and benefits are always going to be worth fighting for if we are to strive for improved living conditions and dignity for those who lack them.
- Truth is concrete / Camp Exhibition Space / Graz / Austria +
Truth is concrete
A 24/7 marathon camp on artistic strategies in politics and political strategies in art. 21/09 – 28/09/2012, Graz
The Netherlands, Hungary, Spain, Great Britain, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Japan… A list in progress of countries as synonyms for crises, hopes and disasters that are changing the world so fast that we can’t keep track: the rise of the populist right, financial devastations threatening the whole European project, fundamental destruction of economical, educational and cultural structures, democratic uprisings, Islamic fundamentalism, threats of technological and ecological catastrophes – where to start, where to end?
What is the role of art in this race of events that we can barely follow, let alone properly understand? At a time when theory and practice are constantly lagging behind reality? When art is seen rather as a mere leftist hobby than a foundation of humanity?
We have learned that there are no easy answers any more. We don’t trust ideologies, even though we follow the ideology of capitalism. We know everything is contingent and relative. We replace critique with criticality, the political with the post-political, modernity with post-modernity, and capitalism with added value. But where the answers get too complicated, the desire for simple solutions is growing. And we – perhaps indeed leftist hobbyists – seem to have lost touch with a larger base. The constant awareness of the complexity of the notions of truth, reality or politics seems to have manoeuvred us into a dead-end road: either we are too simple, or we are too complex, too populist or too stuck in hermetic eremitism. Either we include too much or we exclude too many.
- Middle East Europe / SPACE / Bratislava / Slovakia +
curated by: Tamara Moyzes a Juraj Čarný
artists: Emad Bornat (PS), Christoph Draeger (CH), Fawzy Emrany (PS), Ihab Jadallah (PS), Shahar Marcus (IL), Khaled Jarrar (PS), Anisa Ashkar (PS), Miklós Mécs & Judit Fischer (HU), Tamara Moyzes (SK/CZ) & Shlomi Yaffe (IL), Damir Nikšić (BiH)
We are all familiar with images from Israel and from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that many of us have never personally visited the Middle East. On the basis of this mediated reality, we frequently arrive at conclusions, which are characterised by oversimplification or misunderstanding. While we view images of the Middle East through the media, for Palestinian or Israeli artists these represent an actual, lived experience. In our environment, their works may remain entirely beyond comprehension due to their depth and complexity, while when we place works by European artists into the context to which they refer, there may be a complete distortion of meanings.
The exhibition Middle East Europe draws attention to this phenomenon in the context of political art. It opens up the issue of the responsibility of the artist and observes how the interpretation of a work of art is transformed if we place the work into a different cultural context.The exhibition contains works presenting both 'high politics' and personal human drama, terrorism and peace activism, generally comprehensible slogans and contextual testimonies. Whilst some artists respond to the theme ironically and propose various pseudo-solutions to the conflict, others engage with urgent problems of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in today's Europe.
Last but not least the exhibition reflects the historical and present interconnection of Europe and the Middle East. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is especially strongly bound to the destiny of Central Europe, which bears its share of responsibility for what is happening in the Middle East today.
- 7th Berlin Biennale 2012 Curated by Artur Żmijewski / KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
- NAVIGATIONS: PALESTINIAN VIDEO ART, 1988-2011 / Barbican Centre / London +
NAVIGATIONS: PALESTINIAN VIDEO ART, 1988-2011 explores the breadth of creative practices adopted by artists working in Palestine and the diaspora over nearly a quarter of a century. Over this time, generations of visual artists have enlisted a full spectrum of production techniques while engaging with diverse conceptual concerns and evincing varied aesthetic sensibilities. The fifteen works presented in Navigations offer one route into this rich creative terrain, tracing different trajectories in the work of a dozen highly distinctive artists.
- Sapere Aude. Dare to know! / Beursshouwburg / Bruxelles +
work by performing artists, filmmakers and visual artists as Julian Beck, Yazan Khalili, Tracey Rose, Rabih Mroué, Avi Mograbi, Jem Cohen, Sam Durant, Sven ‘t Jolle, John Bock, Han Bing, Santiago Alvarez and Gil Scott-Heron.
- Docile Soldier / Galerie Polaris
- International Migrants Day / Queens Museum of Art / New York +
Individuals and groups from around the world are invited to participate by visiting www.immigrant-movement.us/december18 and submitting an idea for an action—for example, a public performance, panel discussion, or community gathering—to take place on December 18 at 2pm local time. The website will enable users to track these actions as they happen in real time across the globe by presenting an interactive map of the world with a description of each action. Confirmed participants to date include: Pedro Reyes (Mexico City), Chto Delat (St. Petersburg), Ghana Think Tank (New York), Oliver Ressler and Martin Krenn (Vienna), Polibio Díaz (Santo Domingo), Monali Meher (Amsterdam), Situations + Nowhereisland (London), Dora García (Barcelona), Khaled Jarrar (Palestine), Mizuki Endo (Japan), Lauren Berlant (Chicago), Haim Soko and Ekaterina Lazareva (Moscow), Vit Havranek and Tranzit (Prague), and Ruby Chishti (Pakistan), as well as artists in Rome, Copenhagen, Basel, Zagreb and other cities around the world.
- XV Biennale de la Méditerranée - Final stage, Rome / MACRO / Rome / Italy
- FIAC 2011 Paris Grand Palais / Paris
- 49th Salon October Belgrade / Curated by Bojana Pejic , Vida Knezevic and Ivana Marjanovic / Belgrade Cultural Center / Belgrade +
Artist-Citizen
Contextual Art Practices
