How Will We Return?

OVERVIEW

A SERIES OF THOUGHT-PROVOKING DIALOGUES BETWEEN CULTURAL PRACTITIONERS AND SCHOLARS FROM THE ALSERKAL ARTS FOUNDATION CIRCLE, BRINGING THEM TOGETHER FOR NEW DEBATE AND DISCUSSION.

As a cultural platform, Alserkal is a site of knowledge production, participation, and assembly. Adjusting to the disruption and anxiety caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic and recent geo-political events, it feels imperative to ask questions, provoke and generate thought, and to keep learning. We cannot act like nothing has happened when everything has changed. Through the experimental format of How Will We Return?, we attempt to create the space for pause within the urgencies that impact us all, allowing ourselves the time to reflect on broader cultural shifts.

The public art commission The Circle Game was installed in 2016, an iconic beacon for Alserkal Avenue, and a poetic reflection on the processes of arrival and return, transience, and permanence. The LED signs that read When did you arrive and When will you return have since become synonymous with Alserkal Avenue, a space driven by local creative ambition and collective energy.

We now regroup to consider what it will mean to gather and rebuild, to ‘return’, both during and after this time of extraordinary social anguish, and economic, cultural, and human damage. How can we make sense of this shared – yet isolating – experience, and really begin to reckon with its impact and possibilities?

In close dialogue with Mary Ellen Carroll, we paired practitioners and thought-leaders from our MEASA networks and beyond, breaking away from our own echo chambers to enable fresh conversations and new solidarities. Hailing from different disciplines and geographies, we invited them to meet online for long-form conversations. This has allowed for deeper engagement and discussion around concepts stemming from their work, focusing on critical ideas — particularly ethics, solidarity, collective practice, structural transformation, and modes of learning in the context of cultural production.

Presented in three volumes – The Ethical (Re)Imagination, Mujawaara, and Techno-Dystopia – which built up into a live round table conversation, we view How Will We Return? as an epistemic project, shaping the organisational approach and future direction of the Alserkal Arts Foundation.

We hope that this will become both blueprint and archive, as we attempt to formulate compelling responses offering real insight and intuition, and lasting well beyond the present moment.

VOLUME 1: ETHICAL (RE)IMAGINING

ETHICAL (RE)IMAGINING

With Mary Ellen Carroll and Lumumba Di-Aping

Mary Ellen Carroll’s artistic projects have involved a critical and extended scrutiny of the systems and processes that produce social disparity through public policy and civic infrastructure. Lumumba Di-Aping trained as an economist before working in international diplomacy, particularly focused on social justice and the global implications of climate change. Bringing them together, we generate new debate on the role of the state, art and culture, public policy, and public intellectuals in the wake of the present crisis. This conversation was recorded in May 2020, and was prescient in foregrounding the momentum that resurged in the Black Lives Matter movement – spilling onto the streets and spreading across cities in the United States – and reverberating across the world.

00:02:37 The Ethical Imagination
00:14:14 Infrastructure and Economics
00:33:10 The Role of Culture
00:49:29 Closing the Gap for Future Generations
01:04:42 Radical Solidarity
01:12:20 Collective Movements and Individual Commitment

VOLUME 2: MUJAWAARA

MUJAWAARA: DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE/ COLLECTIVE LEARNING

with Katya García-Antón, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti

‘How can we live, express, interact, think, and converse beyond professional terminologies, academic categories, and the logic of institutions? For Munir Fasheh, mujawaara is a form of organisation without hierarchy. Mujawaara is a medium of learning. It is a basic ingredient in stitching together the social, intellectual, and spiritual fabric of communities. Mujawaara embodies the spirit of regeneration in the most important aspect of life: learning. It demonstrates that another vision of education is possible.’

From Permanent Temporariness, Sandi Hilal and Allesandro Petti

Borrowing this notion of ‘neighbouring’, we introduced Sandi and Alessandro, currently in Stockholm, to Katya García-Antón. Her work at the Office for Contemporary Art in Oslo seeks to radically dismantle the structure of the arts institution to become a platform for underserved and politically marginalised cultural communities. Thinking from the margins, they discuss the imperative to decolonize knowledge and to produce collective space, and challenge the modes in which cultural organisations generate socially engaged and ephemeral projects through the labour of individual cultural practitioners and activists.

While we encourage you to listen to the conversation in full, you can also navigate the conversation through the themes and subjects discussed:

00:08:20 Dislocation as Method
00:15:49 Transforming Structures
00:28:00 The Guest and the Host
00:37:35 Collective Knowledge/ Collective Ownership
01:11:53 The Possibility of Multiple Returns

TECHNO-DYSTOPIA

TECHNO-DYSTOPIA: TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN

with Basim Magdy and Jahnavi Phalkey

How did we get here? In science fiction or speculative realism, dystopian and even apocalyptic futures have been imagined since the early 20th century. As fans of the genre will know, sci-fi’s themes and characterizations – climate catastrophe, the figure of the ‘alien’, hyper-surveillance, post-apocalyptic rebuilding of world systems, post-human worlds run by artificial intelligence – are often thinly veiled reality or uncanny predictions. In the present, these imaginaries, whether from novels or cinema, feel even more plausible, blurring the boundaries between the imagined and the real. Bringing together a historian of science and an artist associated with speculative realism, we considered whether conjecture is in fact a form of prophecy. If so, might we return to the utopian imagination of a fairer, healed planet, or conversely, prepare for further catastrophe?

While we encourage you to listen to the conversation in full, you can also navigate the conversation through the themes and subjects discussed:

00:02:45 Techno-isolation and the Perception of Danger
00:22:34 History Repeats Itself, or Time is a Squashed Fly on an Endless White Wall
00:35:35 Silver Linings: New Possibilities for Practice and Learning
00:49:30 Contagion – The Transmission of Ideas
01:01:50 Art, Science and Spontaneity
01:09:50 Turtles All the Way Down (with Cautious Optimism for Future Generations)

MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING

MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING: A VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Columbia University philosophy professor Akeel Bilgrami situates the discussion with a framework to integrate and address the themes that have emerged from the first three conversations. He opens the conversation with a set of key questions for our speakers: If the move to digital communication has produced a new enthusiasm for sharing knowledge, what systems or institutions do we need to ensure generosity rather than profiteering? What is the idea of ‘return’ – to the same systems that have produced inequality – or can we distinguish between a revival of the ruthlessly capital-oriented systems, and something that might be more ethical and generative?

BIOS

Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He has held the Johnsonian Professorship of Philosophy and holds the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has been the Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the South Asian Institute at Columbia. He is the Editor of the Journal of Philosophy and also the President of its Board of Trustees. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014) and well over a hundred articles on topics ranging from the nature of meaning to the relation between religion, politics, society and culture. He is due to publish two books in the near future: What is a Muslim? (Princeton University Press) and Gandhi, The Philosopher (Columbia University Press). His longer-term future work is on the relations between value, agency, and practical reason.

He has held Visiting positions at Oxford University, Yale University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Australian National University, he has held the Radhakrishnan Chair and the Tagore Chair in India, and has received a number of awards –from the New Public Library, the National Institute of the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Luce Foundation, twice from the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Scientist of the Year award in India in 2015. He has given lectures in virtually every major university and several other prestigious international venues. He has served on the Jury of the Architecture Award for the Aga Khan Foundation as well as on the Jury for the Infosys Humanities Prize for the last several years and is its current Jury Chairman.

Basim Magdy’s work subjects us to the world through a satirical eye. His drawings, sculptures, videos and installations are conceived with a taste for the absurd. They build a universe that has gone off-kilter. Like dreams, elements of a familiar landscape stem out of reality. Past, present and future exist as a single realm and depictions – often of foliage and ruins, astronauts and rockets, airplanes, soldiers, cranes and modernist structures – take on a surreal aggressive quality. Magdy’s references abound: they range from the slick veneer of advertising, the sinister tropes of science fiction and comic-strip to the documentary style of nature, science and technology shows and the apocalyptic tone of biblical stories. His videos, in particular, progress like a series of still images permeated with a haunted air that heightens our sense of suspense. In almost all his work, poetic but ambiguous titles add another layer to the narrative. Magdy stretches the boundaries of our imagination to test the logic of the truth which often lies somewhere between reality and fiction.

His films, including Turtles All the Way Down, The Dent and M.A.G.N.E.T can be viewed online at https://www.basimmagdy.com/.

Jahnavi Phalkey was appointed Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru in November 2018. Previously Jahnavi held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London. She started her academic career at the University of Heidelberg, following which she was based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, France, and Imperial College London. Jahnavi was Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin). She was also external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.

A historian of science and technology, Jahnavi is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and has co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She is the producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron.

Jahnavi read civics and politics at the University of Bombay and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She holds a doctoral degree in history of science and technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. She is the Sir Asutosh Mukherjee Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies.

Read Jahnavi’s recent article on scientific information and counter-information around the pandemic, and how publics need a more nuanced approach.

Katya García-Antón is director of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway. She graduated as a biologist, conducted two years of predoctoral field research in ecology and behavior in the Amazon and Sierra Leone, and transitioned into the arts with a master’s degree in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history from The Courtauld Institute of Arts, London. Thereafter she worked at The Courtauld Institute of Art, BBC World Service (Latin American Broadcasts), Museo Nacional Reina Sofía Madrid, ICA London, IKON Birmingham, and as director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain (CAC) Genève. She is responsible for more than seventy exhibitions of art, architecture, and design of practitioners worldwide. She curated the Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennial in 2015, the Spanish Pavilion in the São Paolo Biennial 2004 and in the Venice Biennial 2011, cocurated the Prague Biennial 2005, and cocurated the flagship exhibition Gestures in Time in Qalandiya International Biennial 2012. In 2015 she launched Critical Writing Ensembles, a platform dedicated to stimulating the research and writing of art history that extends beyond the Western canon (including South Asia and Indigenous worldviews). She devised Thinking at the Edge of the World: Perspectives from the North in 2015 as an on-going program of knowledge-building (exhibitions and symposiums) addressing the histories of the North—including Arctic and environmental questions—and specially facilitating the empowerment of Sami artistic practices and histories. In this regard García-Antón has placed particular emphasis on advocating for, and implementing, decolonial practices and programs. She is currently devising a programme addressing decolonial thinking from the perspective of the Afro-Norwegian communities in Norway in collaboration with various of its peers, that will run until 2022, and lead to a conference on the subject of Whiteness.

Read Katya’s letter in response to the challenges of Covid-19.

Lumumba Di-Aping has dedicated his career in both the public and private sectors to addressing the inequality that hinders the development of the Global South. From his early career as a strategy consultant and investment banker, he moved on to serving as ambassador and deputy head of the Sudan mission to the United Nations from 2006-2012. During that tenure, he was Lead Negotiator for Developing Countries on Energy, Environment, Trade and Global Governance and Chairman of the G77+China group of 132 developing nations and led the block’s negotiation on reform of the International Financial Institutions (IMF/WB) and at the Copenhagen climate conference. He served as chairman of the African Group and chief negotiator for developing countries. He is a member of the National Liberation Council of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and political Bureau, a group that helped end 20 years of civil war when it signed the comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. Ambassador Di-Aping is currently based in Sharjah, UAE, where he is the Chair of the Rights of Future Generations Working Group which was founded during the inaugural edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

Mary Ellen Carroll’s (MEC, studios) prolific career as a conceptual artist spans more than twenty years and primarily occupies the disciplines of architecture/design and public policy, technology, writing, performance and film. The foundation of the practice is the investigation of a single, fundamental question: what do we consider a work of art? Carroll frequently works with unsuspecting materials that range from public policy and land use (prototype180.org) to unused television frequencies as a form of 21st century land art (PublicUtility2.com), albeit the valuable and non-visible real estate of radio frequency. She is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin for 2016, a Graham Foundation Fellowship for prototype 180 and the AIA’s Artist of the Year Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pollack/Krasner Awards, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Carroll was also awarded a Pennies From Heaven Award for her contribution to New York City for work that contributes to the cultural realm and is socially visionary. Her work has been exhibited at numerous American and international institutions and galleries, including the Whitney Museum-New York, Generali Foundation-Vienna, Austria, Jacobs Museum-Zurich, Switzerland, ICA Philadelphia, the Renaissance Society-Chicago, ICA-London, Museum für Völkerkunde-Munich, MOMUK-Vienna. Her work belongs in numerous public and private collections.

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti have developed a research and project-based artistic practice that is both theoretically ambitious and practically engaged in the struggle for justice and equality. They founded Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program hosted in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem with the aims to overcome conventional educational structures by creating a space for critical and grounded knowledge production connected to greater transformations and the democratization of society. In 2007 with Eyal Weizman they founded DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) in Beit Sahour, Palestine, with the aim to combine an architectural studio and an art residency able to gathered together architects, artists, activists, urbanists, film-makers, and curators to work collectively on the subjects of politics and architecture.

Alessandro is a professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and Sandi has initiated the Living Room project, a series of spaces of hospitality that have the potential to subvert the role of guest and host. Hilal was the head of the Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Program in the West Bank at UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) from 2008 to 2014. Alessandro Petti has written on the emerging spatial order dictated by the paradigm of security and control in Archipelagos and enclaves (Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2007) and more recently Petti and Hilal co-authored with Eyal Weizman the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014) an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization.

Their latest publication Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2019) is a book, a catalog, and an archive that accounts for 15 years of research and experimentation, and creation that are marked by an inner tension and a visionary drive that re-thinks itself through collective engagement. Permanent Temporariness was published in connection with their eponymous retrospective exhibition that was inaugurated at the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in 2018, and at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2019.