Exhibition: 1 October 2022 – 28 February 2023
A. M. Qattan Foundation Cultural Centre, Ramallah, Palestine
Participating artists: Majd Darwish, Michael Baers, Minna Henriksson, Mohammad Sabaaneh, Shada Safadi.
The long history of cultural solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, coalesced groups of artists and art collectives who perpetually engaged in cultural initiatives calling for the freedom of Palestinians and the end of the Israeli colonial dominion. Such solidarities and their socio-political stimuli can only be understood in a determined moment of their history. The focus of the historical inquiry on the topic becomes a fetish which can be read sometimes as a desperate leftist desire to reincarnate these particular histories against today’s upsurge of right-wing conservative politics, the rise of autocracy, neo-colonial modes of domination and an accelerating decline of democracy.
Mapping (Un)Solidarities is an exhibition that hinges on examining (un)solidarity as means of questioning the notion of solidarity itself and its exigency nowadays. The exhibition does not concern itself in portraying the leftist utopic desire of seeing historic art movements resurrected into today’s political and social crisis as a means of propagating change. The exhibition unpacks questions of cultural (un)solidarities in Palestine by exploring veiled stories and narratives that partake in shaping our present by means of shifting the gaze to the dysfunctionality of solidarities rather than intonating how to shape triumphant futures.
Mapping (Un)Solidarities is curated by Bojana Piškur (Moderna galerija, Ljubljana) and Yazid Anani, with Majd Nasrallah as assistant curator. The exhibition stems from a series of Southern Constellations exhibitions developed in Moderna galerija, Ljubljana in 2019.
A series of exhibitions and research projects is based on the Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned exhibition originally staged at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana in 2019.
Foto: Qattan Foundation
