25.03.2024
Universität / Haute École
The Symposium will explore diverse gestures, practices, and strategies of resistance through the vast landscape of S.W.A.N.A. (Southwest of Asia, north of Africa). The idea for this Symposium resonates with the urgent need for action spurred by contemporary conflicts worldwide, which reverberates within our cultural communities. We aim to explore emancipatory practices in the arts, shaping this extended region more than half a century after the postcolonial theories by figures such as Franz Fanon or Edward Said. The seminar will delve into the region's rich junction of artistic and cultural practices, investigating their emerging possibilities, ranging from activism to contemporary art.
In collaboration with Brown University, Rhode Island, USA
And Théâtre de Vidy-Lausanne
This event will be held in English
From 9 am to 5:30 pm
9.30
Welcome coffee
10.00 - 12.00
‘Ijeranka’ (les écorchures de la Terre) - Maïa Hawad
Improvised Lives - Valentin Noujaïm
My Resident Evil to Nan Goldin - Shabahang Tayyari
12.00
Lunch break - A bol of soup is offered
13.30 - 17.30
Thinking SWANA -Conflicting Ideas of a Geopolitical Space
Mohamed Amer Meziane, Sultan Doughan, Stéphanie Saadé, Anissa Touati
BEAST TYPE SONG screening and conversation
Sofia Al-Maria & Mohamed Al Musibli
Maïa Tellit Hawad is a French independent researcher based in Marseille. Trained as a philosopher, her research revolves around the imaginary of the Sahara and the intersection of colonial, racial, and geographical logics within the current administration policies of central Sahara. Her recent work focuses on nomadic becomings in contemporary Tuareg societies. She currently teaches in a research studio (RS6 - Saharian Becoming) in the Environmental Architecture program at the Royal College of Art.
Valentin Noujaïm, born in 1991 in France, graduated from the screenwriting department of La Fémis, Paris, FR (2020). Noujaïm’s work focuses on three axes: improvised lives, compressed lives, and extinct lives. He brings to life marginal and strange characters in fantasized universes while relying on research on formats, mixing 16mm, digital, special effects and performances. Marked by social and historical issues, his work questions the relationships of power and domination that are at stake in French society, through the prism of a strong ideal: revolutionary love or the love of revolution. Noujaïm took part in several group exhibitions: Salon de Montrouge, curated by Guillaume Désanges and Coline Davenne, Galerie Air de Paris by Florence Bonnefous, Getting Real Biennale by Abby Sun, Los Angeles USA; Prix Utopi·e, Magasins généraux, Pantin, FR; Festival Parallèle, Marseille, FR; in 2021, The Self and the Other, curated by Barbara Matas Moris, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; CNAC Magasin curated by Celine Kopp, Grenoble, FR; Centre Pompidou curated by Ateliers Medicis, Paris, FR
Shabahang Tayyari is a Tehran-based artist and writer based in Karaj. His practice encompasses subjects such as education, institutional power, Persian language & poetry, and contemporary subcultures that have developed within a unique strain of Shia Islam in Iran, resisting tendencies towards homogenization. He interrogates the capacity of the surface and complexity of visual data, along with the efficacy of communicative signs. What Tayyari offers ends up appearing simultaneously as both anxious and hopeful, as well as innocent and corrupt. His artistic strategies are witty and dark; they employ game tactics and manipulation of surfaces, ideas, images, and meaning, merging together the provocative and the delicate. His solo exhibitions have been featured at galleries such as Balice Hertling in Paris, Third Line in Dubai, and Delgosha in Tehran, among others.
Mohamed Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy and Intellectual History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. He recently joined Brown University as an Assistant Professor of French and Middle East Studies, after teaching for four years at Columbia University. He is the author of The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization, which won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023. His second book is titled: At the Edge of the Worlds: Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology. He is currently working on two book manuscripts: the former examines how Orientalism shaped the intertwined histories of (anti)-metaphysics and human sciences from the 19th century on, the latter on North African philosophies of decolonization.
Sultan Doughan is a political anthropologist who holds a degree from UC Berkeley. She is a Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes an MA program in Anthropology and Museum Practice from a decolonial approach. Doughan’s book project Converting Citizens: German Secularism and The Politics of Holocaust Memory (UPenn) focuses on the minority question in Europe, specifically Palestinian & Middle Eastern minorities’ engagements and interpellation with violent histories. She is particularly concerned with how the social practice of citizenship -rooted on a temporality of living after catastrophe- contribute to racial hierarchies and how do citizens resist such hierarchization through their own engagement with violent and genocidal histories. Having worked with educators on memorial sites, in museums and in the domain of education in Berlin, she explores citizenship as an embodied practice inculcated through memory, archives, and historical sites, visual and material objects.
Stéphanie Saadé was born in 1983 in Lebanon. She lives and works in Paris and Beirut. She graduated in Fine Arts from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and was an artist in residence at Van Eyck, Maastricht, and Cité des Arts, Paris. She is one of the four artists selected to be part of Centre Pompidou Paris's artist residence program Accélérations (2022.23), curated by Michel Gauthier and in partnership with BNP Paribas Banque privée. Saadé deals in her work with themes such as memory and the individual experience of time, scale, and references to place. She subtly influences existing objects with quiet artistic interventions and places them in a loose network of references. They function as personal objets trouvés that do not speak language but think it. The artist explores the nature of memory, historicity or the condition humaine, using transposition, displacement and metaphor to explore the relationship between the intimate and the universal. Her work was exhibited at Centre Pompidou Paris / Sharjah Biennal 13 / Punta della Dogana, Venice / MAXXI, Rome / MOCA Toronto / MuHKA, Antwerp / Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris / Jameel Art Center, Dubai / MISK Art Institute, Ryadh / Saudi Art Council, Jeddah / Home Works 7, Beirut / La Criée, Rennes / National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík / Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo / Ystad Konstmuseum, Ystad / Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, New York / Mosaic Rooms, London / Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon. Her first monograph, Building A Home With Time, was published following her solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland.
Anissa Touati is a transnational independent curator working between the West and the global South. Trained as an archeologist and medievalist, she takes the Broader Mediterranean as a source of inspiration for her pluriversal work. She is currently guest curator 2023-2024 of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, and a visiting scholar at Brown University, USA. Over the past decade, she has taken on the role of artistic director at several international locations, curated or co-curated exhibitions and projects in many different countries including Chalet Society (France), Paris Internationale (France), Thalie Foundation (Belgium), Contemporary Istanbul (Turkey), BEMA Museum (Lebanon), Lagos Biennial (Nigeria), Broad art museum (USA) amongst others.
Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Though her work spans many disciplines, including drawing, collage, sculpture, and film, it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures.
Mohamed Almusibli is currently the Director and Chief Curator of Kunsthalle Basel, co-founder and Director of the independently run art space “Cherish” in Geneva, and Consultant for the Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam. He obtained his bachelor's degree in art and media theory from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2018 and his Master's degree at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD).
Conceived by Shirin Yousefi
Curation and Organization: Shirin Yousefi and Lucas Erin
The symposium will be held at
Théâtre de Vidy
Salle 17 Le Pavillon
Av. Emile-Henri-Jaques-Dalcroze 5
1007 Lausanne