Bisan Abu-Eisheh, Annalisa Cannito, Raja’a Khalid, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa
Curated by Andrei Siclodi
Opening: Fri Oct 17, 2014, 7 p.m.
Duration of exhibition: Oct 22 – Dec 18, 2014
In 2014–15 the International Fellowship Program for Art and Theory will be focusing on work projects concerned with questions of social memory, the formation of which ‒ in the global north ‒ is shaped decisively by post-colonial amnesias. The thematic emphases studied in the projects of fellowship holders Bisan ABU-EISHEH, Annalisa CANNITO, Raja’a KHALID and Emma WOLUKAU-WANAMBWA are Palestinian identity issues in the context of social norms, political language, living conditions and ideologies in the 1980s and today, the current relevance for today’s Europe of the links between Italy’s colonial and its fascist past, a striving for “physical comfort” as a paradigm of modernism and progress in the context of historical as well as present versions of the “East-West dialogue”, and western “mnemonic technologies” introduced into Africa during the colonial era and utopian projects for settling European colonies in the “empty country” of Africa. The fellows were invited to work on their projects in Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen having been selected from a total of circa 160 submissions in a two-stage application procedure by a jury consisting of Jochen Becker (director of the program “Art & Architecture” at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, member of the advisory board at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen), Ana Hoffner (artist, participant in the post-graduate program PhD in Practice, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) and Andrei Siclodi (curator, director of Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen).
The participants in the International Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2014–15 are granting insights into their projected work of the coming months. The works presented in the exhibition highlight amnesic aspects of Europe’s official memory and aim to initiate a process to overcome them.
Exhibition
Resistance and Amnesia – On the Formation of Social Memory
Bisan Abu-Eisheh, Annalisa Cannito, Raja’a Khalid, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa
Curated by Andrei Siclodi
Opening: Fri Oct 17, 2014, 7 p.m.
Duration of exhibition: October 22 – December 18, 2014
Opening times:
Wed and Thu 2 p.m. – 6 p.m.
(Outside of normal opening hours, by individual appointment.)
Additional opening times within the frame of Premierentage 2014:
Thu Nov 06, 7 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Fri Nov 07, 11 a.m. – 10 p.m.
Sat Nov 08, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
In Büchsenhausen Annalisa Cannito will continue her artistic investigations into the current relevance of the relations between fascism and colonialism in Italy and Europe as a whole. Not least, it is a matter of tracing and visualising the reasons for silence over these issues in public discourses in Italy. To this purpose, among other things Cannito will work together with first and second generation migrants from Libya, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
In her study of this material the artist’s attention is directed not only towards the unraveling of a private story, but also towards the social values, political language, circumstances and ideologies of these people, which are all regarded against the background of the ideal of freedom within a society under occupation.
In the exhibition Cannito shows an installative arrangement entitled In the Belly of Fascism and Colonialism, which illustrates the state of her activist research up until now. It is also possible for visitors to use a computer terminal to call up the website designed by the artist, which includes her research concept and the material collected to date (interviews and texts).
