Artists in Dialog: Al Fadhil & Aissa Deebi
My Dreams Have Destroyed My Life. Some Thoughts on Pain
29 April - 26 June, 2011, Fri - Sun, 2-6PM and by appointment
Opening: Thursday 28. April 2011, 8PM
Round table discussion Al Tahrir: The Day After, 1 May, 2011, 3PM
Art Laboratory Berlin is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition project Artists in Dialog: My Dreams Have Destroyed My Life. Some Thoughts on Pain on 28 April.
The exhibition, the third in our ongoing series Artists in Dialog, is a discoursive dialog between the Iraqi- Swiss artist Al Fadhil and the Palestinian-American artist Aissa Deebi, and explores the complex ties between the personal and the political in the theme of loss.
My Dreams Have Destroyed My Life. Some Thoughts on Pain was first conceived by the artists during a common artist residency in Taiwan. Both artists had lost brothers in respective conflicts in their countries of origin. Al Fadhil has lost two brothers to the wars in Iraq. One brother died in the Iran-Iraq war. Fadhil's father, as the parent of a 'martyr,' were granted an audience with the dictator Saddam Hussein, which was documented with a photograph.
Fadhil's younger brother Ahmed was killed during the civil war that followed the American invasion of Iraq. After his death, Fadhil was contacted by Jason Sagebiel, an American soldier who had known Ahmed. Sagebiel is also a musician, who learned to play the traditional Arabic Oud during his stay in the city of Kut, Iraq, and composed a a musical homage. Fadhil will include a series of documentations, the photographs of his father with Saddam Hussein, Sagebiel's song, photographs of the family home by his younger brother Ahmed in the exhibition.
Aissa Deebi's younger brother Nasim died in Israeli police custody in 1999. The medical report labeled the death a suicide, something the artist and his family dispute. Deebi's works in the exhibition will trace his and his brother's connection to the land they grew up in. A series of holographic photographs will depict the route from Deebi's childhood home near Haifa to the coast, a route Deebi and his brother often took together when they were younger. The superimposition of geography, memory and historical space come together in Deebi's installation to form a palimpsest of the personal and the political.
The exhibition, a dialog of remembrance, focuses on both the artists' personal experience of loss and the cultural aspects of mourning and grief: Fadhil comes from a Shiite Iraqi family, whilst Deebi is Greek Orthodox. Yet all three deaths have taken place within the political and historical context of conflict.
My Dreams Have Destroyed My Life. Some Thoughts on Pain seeks to locate the personal within the larger historical and social currents that often overwhelm our lives.
Al Fadhil is an artist working in multimedia and performance, and is the initiator of the project 'Iraq Pavilion'. He is based in Lugano and Berlin. Aissa Deebi is a new media artist and currently an Assistant professor at the American University in Cairo.
The artist would like to thank:
Mkaboula Nassar, Project photography assistant, Haifa
Bruce Ferguson, Curator, Cairo
Osama Daowd, Producer and project manager, Cairo
Rasha Hillwi, Editing, Ramallah
Kattie Siaman, Research assistant, Haifa
Tarek El-Ariss, Editing, Austin
Bahia Shehab, Image consultant, Cairo, Beirut
Nabil Shawkat, Text editing and translation, Cairo
Adam Miller, Web, Cairo
Antar Photgraphy Studio, Cairo
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The People Want to Overthrow the Regime
At three in the morning, on February 12th, 2011 at Midan al-Tahrir in Cairo, while the Egyptian people were still celebrating the news of the stepping down of their dictator for 30 years Hosni Mubarak, newspapers fresh off the press started circulating.
The headlines were expected, but one newspaper, the government ownedAl-Ahram featured the most eye-catching headline of them all: “The people have overthrown the regime”. It was eye-catching for two reasons. The first was obviously the content, which was a direct answer to the popular chant now rocking the Arab world from Libya to Bahrain: “The people want to overthrow the regime”. The second was the design. The headline was, for the first time in almost 30 years, above the newspaper’s logo and heading, and it was in bold red.
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New York Chronicles
The Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar presents “New York Chronicles,” an international group show curated by Maymanah Farhat and Osama Abusitta, with an opening reception on 20 October, 2010.
The reception will be preceded by a panel discussion with visiting artists and one of the exhibition’s co-curators at 6:00 PM. The event is open to the public. As an international center for culture and commerce, New York City has been a destination for art since the early twentieth-century. Accordingly, it has fostered some of the most influential art movements of modern times; has been home to a number of high-profile artists; and has witnessed the establishment of a number of prominent art institutions.
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Killing Time, an idea...
The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity, exiles cross borders, barriers of thought and experience.
—Edward Said, Reflections on Exile
As I moved to Queens from rural New Hampshire, I wanted to search my new location for places that reminded me of home. Walking north past 28th Avenue I was welcomed home: the street is lined with Arabic grocery stores, sweets shops, Islamic fashion boutiques, cafés full of surly-looking men, halal meat shops, and more. I found that my homesickness was easily soothed with a plate of labaneh with olive oil and pita bread.