EXTERNE ACTIVITEITEN ARCHIEF

12 oktober - 16 oktober 2009

(Vertaling volgt nog.)

How can a biennale want to be a biennale in a state that is not a state? In a place that is so overwhelmed with visual realities that the exhibition would almost vanish into the surrounding disciplinary excess? What if this idea can be understood as an art project itself, leaving urgent room to speculate on its own conception, validity and continuity?

These are just a few of the questions of the 3^rd RIWAQ Biennale, which forms itself first and foremost around a conceptual art project introduced by the artist Khalil Rabah. It follows the trajectory of (re)producing institutions that lie between fact and fiction, such as the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind and the United States of Palestine Times. With a touch of irony, Rabah simulates the processes of national institutionalization and the assembly of national narratives though the collective and communicative structures that drive them. In this particular context, agency, sociality, performativity, politics and animation all develop new and multiple meanings. Rabahs’ imagined institutions transgress borders, smuggling themselves into places where they can create havoc because of their ambivalent relation to the models that inspire them.

In this way, the 3^rd Riwaq Biennale took place for the first time during the Venice Biennale and functioned as a biennale in a biennale. A deliberate confluence of geographies, contexts and authorities, it has the possibility soon to metamorphose in Palestine into a kind of ‘living art’, that is an art that does not necessarily add to the environment but calls upon it as it is, in this case in a geography that we can never take for granted.

The transformation that revels itself in October is already underway. The name, starting point and aim of the 3^rd RIWAQ Biennale were taken from the Riwaq NGO based in Ramallah, an organization that works on the protection and rehabilitation of Palestinian cultural heritage. Advancing the aims of the Riwaq NGO has been the starting point of all editions of the biennial, and in this sense the biennale can be understood as continuous and ongoing, working alongside Riwaq and being present as element within their larger plans. The framework of the 3^rd Riwaq Biennale adopts Riwaq’s goal of rehabilitating 50 villages, while not being present in each of them. Instead, it chooses a number of venues and platforms in the historic center of Birzeit as well as in other villages and their surrounding landscapes. Here, temporary interventions, periods of gathering and constructions of possible scenarios for the future will be presented.

This represents a refusal of the original biennale concept appropriate to Khalil’s work and to the environmental conditions. Thus this 3rd RIWAQ Biennale will not feature any large-scale, central exhibitions, but consist of a series of journeys between fragmented and disparate locations, reflecting on and moving through the fractured territory of Palestine. As a journey between locations, the 3^rd Riwaq Biennale is conceived as a series of trails, curated multidisciplinary conversations and interactions between the people who live in these areas and invited or self-selected international colleagues. The days of the Biennale present a unique opportunity to experience and come to a level of awareness of what is possible.  They will also coincide with a variety of workshops, gatherings and cultural events organized by others that will take place in the same week, including the Jerusalem Show curated by Jack Persekian and Nina Möntmann that opens on 11^th October. 

The result will be that during the period, a shifting interplay and agglomeration of activities in which cultural producers ranging through artists, architects, historians, theorists, curators, critics, journalists and all other audiences are brought together to participate in producing and re-producing the meaning of collective biennale culture as process, with an equal emphasis on the transdisciplinary, the historical and the living.

More info on the website of the 3rd RIWAQ Biennial.

12 september - 8 november 2009 

What Keeps Mankind Alive?

Vanaf 12 september vind in Istanbul de 11e Biennale plaats onder leiding van de curatoren van What, How and for Whom? (WHW) Het Van Abbemuseum zal afreizen met een team tijdens de opening van de Biennale in het weekend van 10 september.

De titel van de Biennale komt van Bertolt Brecht's songtitel 'Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?' in het Engels vertaald naar 'What Keeps Mankind Alive?'. Het is het sluitstuk van de tweede akte in het toneelstuk The Three Penny Opera dat exact 80 jaar geleden werd geschreven door Brecht in samenwerking met Elisabeth Hauptmann en Kurt Weill.

Meer info op de website van de Istanbul Biennale.