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Gestures in Time is part of the pilot edition of Qalandiya
International – art and life in Palestine. Presenting 30 artists
(including 21 new commissions) whose works explore the individual gesture
as an act of aesthetic and social creation, Gestures in Time takes
place in urban and rural locations across Palestine (Abwein, Hajja,
Jamma’in, Dhahiriya, Jerusalem and Ramallah).
Commissioners: Riwaq Biennial and the Jerusalem Show for Qalandiya
International
Curators: Katya Garcia-Anton and Lara
Khaldi
As the myriad of recent public mobilizations
world-wide show us, our times are characterized by an overarching sense of
disenchantment with high forms of government. Gestures in Time seeks
to reconsider how the individual can conceive of having an aesthetic and
socially creative life, within and beyond a specific geography. The
exhibition sets out to explore the individual gesture on an intimate,
social, political and aesthetic level, as a means to re-claim our
relationship with society.
The gesture offers a
liberating degree of personal autonomy, which is lacking in the more
formalized form of an action or a movement. In the terrain of regulated
conflict which this exhibition inhabits (Palestine), but also well beyond
it, the gesture can become a form of divine dissent—chaotic, wild,
anachronistic, guttural, amorphous and unregulated—requiring neither
legitimacy from, or attachment to, any recognized body of authority. In the
global field of artistic practice, the gesture functions as a
self-reflexive tool of analysis of questions ranging from identity,
behavior, instinct, authorship and the promise of creativity at large.
Gestures in Time is anchored to the precise geographic,
historic, poetic and political location of Palestine. Yet Palestine’s
imbrication in the wider international perspective gives the project an
overall international resonance. From this expanded perspective, artists in
Gestures in Time consider the urgency to ‘intervene’ the
visual and textual present by fracturing the everyday forms that defined
the world in the recent past, enabling a radical re-interpretation and
reconstruction of the present moment. The notion that the present is
incomplete and that, therefore, it falsifies the construction of future
History, is pivotal to this exhibition. For these artists the very notion
of “historical progress” is a cruel illusion. The gesture
becomes a form of poetic and performative unbinding of progress; a force of
construction and individual creation.
Gestures in Time
operates beyond any impetus of fragmentation and isolation, and beyond
religious imperatives, which are being misused within the region and well
beyond it. From this perspective the gesture functions as a micro, and
subtle, tool towards speaking together and to each other.
Exhibiting artists
Ruanne Abou-Rahme
& Basel Abbas, Mohammed Alhawajri, Rheim Alkadhi, Marwa
Arsanios & Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Erick Beltran, Yasmine
Eid-Sabbagh, Jumana Emil Abboud, Matias Faldbakken, Subversive
Film, Amjad Ghannam, Ra’ouf Haj yahia, Wafa Hourani, Quinn
Latimer, Bruno Munari, Ciprian Muresan, Shahryar Nashat, Tom
Nicholson, Uriel Orlow, Cornelia Parker, Julia Rometti
& Victor Costales, Amer Shomali, Socratis Socratous, Martin Soto
Climent, Nardeen Srouji, and Javier Telléz.
Venues
‘Abwein old town, Dhahiriya old town, Al-Ma’mal Lab
Beit Aneeseh, Ramallah, Center for Jerusalem Studies – Al Quds
University, Gallery Anadiel, Hajja old town, Institut
Français, Jerusalem, Jamma’in old town, The Educational
Bookshop, The Evangelical Lutheran Church, The Tile Factory, and Yabous
Cultural Center.
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