Gestures in Time
1–15 November 2012
Qalandiya International
Various cities, towns and villages across Palestine
www.almamal.org
www.riwaq.org
www.qalandiyainternational.org
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.
