Young Arab Theatre Fund/ YATF
MEETING POINTS 7 - Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks
(This event has passed)

Theme:
Format:
Date:
Feb 9–Mar 8, 2014
Organized by: Contemporary Image Collective (CIC)
1
Venue: Contemporary Image Collective (CIC)
Address: 2nd Floor, 27 Talaat Harb St., Downtown, Cairo
Supported by:
Ford Foundation
Office for Contemporary Art Norway - OCA
Flemish authorities
Allianz Kulturstiftung
The Foundation for Arts Initiatives - FfAI
Event Language: English & Arabic
Website: http://www.ciccairo.com/mp7.html
http://www.ciccairo.com/mp7screening.html


MEETING POINTS 7
Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks

 

9 February - 8 March 2014
Screening Programme starts 11 February 2014

CIC - Contemporary Image Collective

Opening 9 February 2014, 7 pm
The exhibition is open Saturdays to Wednesdays, 12 - 9 pm

 

Iman Issa, Sanja Iveković, Maryam Jafri, Rajkamal Kahlon, Kayfa ta & Haytham El-Wardany, Jumana Manna, Cecilia Vicuña, Basma Al Sharif, Rosalind Nashashibi 

During the exhibition there will be weekly screenings of films by:

Kianoush Ayari, Simone Fattal, Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch, Marta Popivoda

Curators: What, How and for Whom/WHW in collaboration with Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo

Organizer: Young Arab Theatre Fund/YATF

 

Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks 

How terrible to read Shelley's poem (not to mention the Egyptian peasant songs of 3,000 years ago), denouncing oppression and exploitation. Will they be read in a future still filled with oppression and exploitation, and will people say: "Even in those days..." 
Bertolt Brecht, 1938 


The 7th edition of Meeting Points, entitled Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks, is a series of exhibitions taking place successively between September 2013 and June 2014 in Zagreb, Antwerp, Cairo, Hong Kong, Beirut, Vienna and Moscow. Meeting Points 7 was prompted by the unfinished social and political processes of the Arab revolutions and the reconfiguration of capitalism throughout the world. It is evolving into a continual dialogue whose non-linear chapters digress, take over, continue, complete and contradict each other, playing with possibilities and exploring the limits of what an exhibition can convey in testing political times across neighboring and divergent spaces. 

Borrowing its title from the revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth (1961), reflecting on Algeria’s liberation from French colonial rule, Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks forays into interlaced subjects: the role of middle classes today in revolts across different geographies, forms of neo-colonialism, counter-revolution and co-optation, as well as the various strategies employed for countering oppression. Conceived as an exhibition in time, Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks reapers anew in each iteration, realigning topics with a particular place, its specific geopolitical and historical context. It explores the ways in which a particular selection of themes, clusters of works and artistic positions emerge in response to the specificities and demands of different locales. These voices may be very loud, playful and didactic, or very subtle and cautious, a simple hint even. They are involved in an attempt to suggest and sketch dynamics that may be difficult to articulate otherwise. 

Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks was inaugurated in Zagreb, in Gallery Nova, with an exhibition featuring mostly women artists in which the feminist agenda underpinned the project. Evoking the site of the museum as a locus of the new economy but also as a place invested in its own pedagogical potential, the next iteration of Meeting Points 7 in MuHKA in Antwerp included the references to the postcolonial context inevitably related to Belgium’s colonial history. 

The exhibition in Cairo, produced in close collaboration with the Contemporary Image Collective, features a number of women artists whose works tackle a wide range of social themes examined from specific geopolitical, critical and gender perspectives. As in Zagreb, the exhibition delves into questions of representation, be it national, ethnic, or racial, taking a gendered perspective as a tool that cuts through these concerns. Feminism is not proposed as a concern for the plight of women in the Arab world only, but as a necessary device that needs to be reinvigorated to contribute to a better understanding of new forms of class struggle all over the world, aiming to avoid the usual pitfalls of identity politics and its own pacification and depoliticisation. 

The works on display at the CIC in Cairo draw together several threads which highlight the fracture between the representation and interpretation of historical and current tendencies. Through media representation it addresses various forms of contemporary colonialism and imperialism and a role of violence (Sanja Iveković, Rajkamal Kahlon); revisits historical narratives to reconfigure class, gender and political relations (Maryam Jafri, Rosalind Nashashibi); looks at the contradictions and possibilities of the middle class at various historical moments (Jumana Manna, Kayfa ta & Haytham El-Wardany, Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch); it traces contractions between revolutions and counterrevolutions (Kianoush Ayari, Iman Issa, Marta Popivoda); and it outlines the role of art and the individual in collective struggles (Basma Alsharif, Simone Fattal, Cecilia Vicuña). 

“Poetry is that wild animal that converts its song into a cry for freedom", says one of the individuals interviewed in Cecilia Vicuña’s film What is poetry to you? Offering its own collective definition of poetry opposed to racial, class and national divisions, it stands as a guide for emancipatory struggles, articulating contemporary ‘truly socialist ideas’ through art. By weaving together the threads of such attempts, the exhibitions composing Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks interchange one another, each exhibition functioning as a single knot, digression, or meeting point among many. Points may not be as interesting as lines, but they occupy no space while still guiding its direction.

 

Screening programme starts 11 February 2014
Contemporary Image Collective


11 and 13 February 2014, 7:00pm
Simone Fattal
Autoportrait
2012 (filmed in 1972)
Video, black-and-white and colour, sound (Arabic and French with English subtitles), 46’ 

17 and 19 February 2014, 7:00pm
Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch
Chronicle of a Summer
1961
35 mm film transferred to DVD, black-and-white, sound (French with English subtitles), 90’
Courtesy of Argos Films 

24 and 26 February 2014, 7:00pm
Kianoush Ayari
The Newborns
1979
35 mm film transferred to DVD, colour, sound (Farsi with English subtitles), 45’ 

3 and 5 March 2014, 7:00pm
Marta Popivoda
Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body
2013
HD video (Serbia / France / Germany), colour and black-and-white, sound (English and Serbian with English subtitles), 62’
Courtesy of the artists and TkH (Walking Theory)

 

Supported by:

Ford Foundation, Flemish authorities, Allianz Kulturstiftung, The Foundation for Arts Initiatives - FfAI, Office for Contemporary Art Norway - OCA 

 

For further information, please call +2.2396.4272 or visit www.ciccairo.com/mp7.html