Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj Of-site project in Ramallah

Shifting Ground: The Underground Is Not the Past Symposium, Performances and Artist Publications Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center and Al Masrah Al Baladi, Ramallah and Khashabi Theatre, Haifa

10 - 14 August, 2017

THURSDAY, 10 AUGUST

7:00 pm–8:00 pm Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center

Lawrence Abu Hamdan Bird Watching An audio essay on the acoustic investigation of Saydnaya prison in Syria. The artist will present the performance live by phone from Berlin. Simultaneous translation is provided *seats are limited

8:00 pm Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center Garden

Book Launch Reception Artist publications produced and commissioned for the SB13 Ramallah project will be disseminated. The publications are the work of Noor Abuarafeh, Benji Boyadgian, Inas Halabi, Ma’touq, Nicola Perugini, Samir Harb and Mimi Cabell, Yara Saqfalhait, Subversive Film (Reem Shilleh & Mohanad Yaqubi) and The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind.*

FRIDAY, 11 AUGUST

10:30 am–4:00 pm Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center

Subterranean Sites Large portions of the landscape in Palestine have been claimed by burial spaces and the matter that circulates through them or remains buried indefinitely within them. The sessions on this day explore places and acts of burial, the variety of actual and symbolic meanings constructed around them and their political, historical and folkloric agency.

10:30 am–11:00 am Opening Notes by Curator Lara Khaldi and Reem Shadid, Deputy Director, Sharjah Art Foundation

11:00 am–11:30 am Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh (Philosophy/ Cultural and Arab Studies) I Die, Therefore I Am: The Palestinian Living Cemetery

Only in the vicinity of their living cemeteries are Palestinians capable of crossing the threshold of dying by potentia into dying by energia, returning, entirely and eternally, to land. Under ongoing Zionist settler colonialist rule, the Palestinian cemetery is not only a heterotopia, but also a heterochronia, which bears witness to a ‘Subterranean Nakba’ yet to be uncovered.

*An additional publication by artist Maria Thereza Alves and art students will be launched in late September after a workshop. 11:30 am–12:00 pm Suhad Daher Nashif (Medical and Social Anthropology/ Gender Studies) Secret Cemeteries of Numbers: Imprisoning Palestinian Corpses in Buried Historical Archives This presentation tells the stories of Palestinian martyrs’ bodies kept by the Israeli military forces since the late 1960s in death prisons known as the Secret Cemeteries of Numbers.

12:00 pm–1:00 pm Respondent: Rami Salameh (Cultural and Critical Studies)

1:00 pm–2:00 pm Lunch break

2:00 pm–2:30 pm Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Anthropology/ Middle Eastern Studies and Human Rights) Waste Underground This video presentation explores how waste infrastructure interacts with the underground in Palestine. By examining the physical features of waste infrastructure, it reveals the relationship between futurity and storage.

2:30 pm–3:00 pm Inas Halabi (Visual Arts) Lions Warn of Futures Present Based on Halabi’s research around chemical waste burial sites in the southern West Bank, this lecture performance attempts to capture and represent the ungraspable threat of radiation.

3:00 pm–3:30 pm Yara Saqfalhait (History and Philosophy of Design) Subterranean Cavities This presentation takes the multiplying sinkholes dotting the landscape around the Dead Sea as a point of departure to investigate the relationships and gaps between systems of prediction (e.g. geophysical, economic and political) and the reality they help materialise.

3:30 pm–4:00 pm Benji Boyadgian (Architecture/ Urban Sociology) Clogged This presentation is part of an installation, video and publication on the urban story of Jerusalem, its relationship with water and the long historical temporality of a ‘thirsty city’. In the ruins of a clogged pipe we find a metaphor for Jerusalem.

Simultaneous translation is provided for all presentations and performances

8:00 pm Al Baladi Theatre, Ramallah Municipality

Rabih Mroué presented by Asmaa’ Azaizeh Make Me Stop Smoking (2006) A Non Academic Lecture (Arabic Only)

SATURDAY, 12 AUGUST

6:00 pm–8:45 pm Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center

On the Underground: Earth as Medium While land has been a highly charged theme in anti-colonial struggles, this session focuses on earth as a substance that can function as a medium for opposition. Exploring earth as a means and a material for folk tales compels the question of whether the earth preserves the lore, or the story preserves the earth. The scientific study of soil itself becomes an epistemology that can shape an anti-colonial political consciousness. 6:00 pm–6:30 pm Keller Easterling (Architectural Design and History/ Urbanism) Medium Earth This presentation is a contemplation of the word ‘medium’, which has historically referred to everything from elemental air, fire and water to milieu, magic, the growth medium of the environment, and contemporary technologies of communication.

6:30 pm–7:00 pm Filipa César (Visual Arts/ Filmmaking) It matters what matters matter matters This presentation unearths Amílcar Cabral’s double agency as a state soil scientist and a ‘seeder’ of African liberation movements. It considers how such duality may constitute a militant soil semantics for a proliferent liberation epistemology.

7:00 pm–7:45 pm Respondent: Lana Judeh (Architecture/ Cultural Identity and Globalisation)

8:00 pm–8:45 pm Jumana Emil Abboud (Visual Arts) Out of the Shadows Out of the Shadows is a performance on water brides, ghouls and enchanted creatures who inhabit wells and springs. The stories are drawn both from Palestinian folktales and contemporary life-stories collected by the artist. With performer Salma Misyef.

Simultaneous translation is provided for all presentations and performances

SUNDAY, 13 AUGUST

10:00 am–6:00 pm Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center

Before the Museum The museum has been commonly compared to a cemetery: a place where objects meet their death and where this death is exhibited. However, the graveyard and the museum are diferent. While one remains a mystical site of potential ghostly return, the other institutionalises radical, revolutionary violence as the irredeemably dead past by displaying its material corpse as evidence of the impossibility of resurgence. In this light, how can one read museums in Palestine? Palestinian material culture is either confiscated, destroyed or lies in colonial museums or secret military archives. Under current circumstances – an unrealised state, a people under military occupation – what is the function of the museum and how has the institution of the museum been afected by the specificity of the Palestinian context? Looking at historical case studies, archival documents and slightly unusual museums, the sessions on this day will address these questions and also examine why certain art objects are resurfacing now.

10:00 am–12:00 pm Fugitive Objects and their Return

Kristine Khouri (Art History) and Rasha Salti (Film Studies) read by Hanan Toukan Four Stories of Museums and Art Collections in Exile

This presentation ofers an introduction to four case studies of art museums in exile from the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on Palestine, Chile, Nicaragua and South Africa, the presentation will reflect on the political need to build ‘national’ art collections and consider the international solidarity networks which enable them.

Nasser Soumi (Visual Arts) Striving to Re-establish the International Exhibition for Palestine This presentation is an account of the research process instigated to locate and document missing artworks from the International Exhibition for Palestine (1978) and ways to preserve them until a Palestinian Museum of Contemporary Art can be established in a free Palestine. Subversive Film (Reem Shilleh & Mohanad Yaqubi, Filmmaking and Visual Arts) The Syllabus The Syllabus is a research project and publication based on the archives of filmmaker and co-founder of Fatah’s Palestine Film Unit, Hani Jawhariyyeh. This presentation explores the contemporary relevance of this archive as both educational tool for filmmakers and documentary account of the Palestinian revolution.

Moderator: Hanan Toukan (History of Art and Architecture)

12:00 pm–12:30 pm Samir Harb (Human Geography) Morbid Symptoms: Interregnum and Loops of Authority in the Muqata'as This presentation reports on a research project tracing the literal and symbolic history of the Tegart forts in Palestine through multiple systems of design. The research project and publication is authored with Mimi Cabell and Nicola Perugini

12:30 pm–1:00 pm Respondent: Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh

1:00 pm–2:00 pm Lunch break

2:00 pm–2:30 pm Khaled Hourani (Visual Arts) Oil on Canvas: Searching for Jamal Al Mahamel This lecture performance is based on Hourani’s recent novel inspired by Jamal Al Mahamel, a painting by Palestinian artist Suleiman Mansour. Hourani investigates the unknown destiny after successive political events both in Libya and the Arab world.

2:30 pm–5:00 pm The Museum and the Illusion of the State

Reluctant Archives Rana Anani (Visual Art and Communication) Throughout our tumultuous history, numerous art works, films and accounts disappeared from the public domain along with their records. Like ghosts, some of these archives resurface from their hiding places from time to time.

Chiara De Cesari (Anthropology & Cultural Studies) Impossible Memories This paper explores the peculiar history of museums in post-Oslo Palestine. It considers how the Palestinian quasi-state has tried, but failed thus far, to create such a key institution of national representation as a museum, and how artists and cultural practitioners have created alternative modes of national artistic institutions.

Doreen Mende (Visual Cultures) The Struggle of Exhibition Making Conceived with Baha Jubeh and Suhair Jubeh, this presentation will discuss notes from a workshop on the Abu Jihad Museum for Prisoner Movement in order to articulate a theory of curating from within the struggle.

Respondent: Lara Khaldi (Visual Arts)

5:00 pm–5:30 pm Cofee Break

5:30 pm–6:00 pm Noor Abuarafeh (Visual Art) The Last Museum: Museum of all Museums In this performance, the artist proposes that museums will become obsolete in the near future. The Museum of Museums will be the last standing monument dedicated to preserving and documenting the existence of museums.

Simultaneous translation is provided for all presentations and performances 8:30 pm Al Baladi Theatre, Ramallah Municipality

Rabih Mroué presented by Asmaa’ Azaizeh The Inhabitants of Images (2008) A non-academic lecture (Arabic Only)

MONDAY, 14 AUGUST

2:00 pm - 4:00 pm Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center

The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind Collection Draft Handbook Closed workshop Sharjah Biennial 13, of-site project in Ramallah, is collaborating with the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind to edit a handbook on their collection. Respondents will present their notes to the editors, initiating a discussion on the first draft of the handbook.

8:00 pm Al Baladi Theatre, Ramallah Municipality

Rabih Mroué presented by Asmaa’ Azaizeh Pixelated Revolution (2012) A non-academic lecture (With English subtitles)

FRIDAY, 18 AUGUST

8:00 pm Khashabi Theatre, Haifa Art Publications Launch

Rabih Mroué presented by Asmaa’ Azaizeh Make Me Stop Smoking – Presentation of Ideas Under Study (2006) A non-academic lecture

FRIDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER

8:00 pm Khashabi Theatre, Haifa

Rabih Mroué presented by Asmaa’ Azaizeh Pixelated Revolution (2012) A non-academic lecture (Arabic Only)

FRIDAY, 6 OCTOBER

8:00 pm Khashabi Theatre, Haifa

Rabih Mroué presented by Asmaa’ Azaizeh The Inhabitants of Images (2008) A non-academic lecture (Arabic Only)

The symposium programme is in collaboration with the Ramallah Municipality, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center and Khashabi Theatre, Haifa Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj Off-site project in Ramallah

Shifting Ground: The Underground Is Not the Past Symposium, Performances and Artist Publications 10 - 14 August 2017

Shifting Ground

The theme of ‘underground’ is not an attempt to claim or find the truth underneath the surface, as one can find that under, above, on and over the surface in Palestine. Nor is it a historical endeavor to explore the historical layers of the past, as the underground is not the past. The underground is explored here in relation to burial grounds, and what burial may connote at different instances and contexts. The relationship we hope to make clear here is between the museum and the graveyard. The museum has been commonly compared to the cemetery: a place where objects meet their death and where this death is exhibited. However, the museum and the graveyard are different. While one remains a mystic site of potential ghostly return, the other institutionalises radical, revolutionary violence as the irredeemably dead past by displaying its material corpse as evidence of the impossibility of resurgence.

The project is in collaboration with Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah Municipality and Khashabi Theatre, Haifa and co-curated by Lara Khaldi. The symposium is co-organised with Rana Anani and Yara Saqfalhait.

Abstracts and Biographies of Speakers and Performers (in alphabetical order)

Jumana Emil Abboud Out of the Shadows Performance With performer Salma Misyef

Jumana Abboud’s performance at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (KSCC) builds on experiences and stories from her most recent project, Maskouneh, which is a video inspired by the book Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine (1920) by the ethnologist Tawfiq Canaan. Her performance brings that project to life by weaving Palestinian folktales with contemporary life stories collected by the artist from friends, acquaintances and strangers alike. Invoking water brides, ghouls and enchanted creatures, Out of the Shadows will be performed around the water well in the KSCC garden.

In her drawing, videos and performances, Jumana Emil Abboud has consistently reflected a Palestinian cultural landscape, in which the struggle for continuity amid the wider political context necessitates a constant process of metamorphosis and ingenuity. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstraum, London (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle, UK (2016); Venice Biennale (2009, 2015); Galeri Manâ, Istanbul (2013); Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011); Acción! MAD-Festival, Madrid (2010) and Istanbul Biennial (2009). Born in 1971 in Galilee, she currently lives and works in Jerusalem.

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Lawrence Abu Hamdan Bird Watching Lecture Performance

Bird Watching is the latest in a series of Abu Hamdan's audio essays that examine the contemporary politics of listening and the importance of the earwitness. The central focus of this 'hearing' is Abu Hamdan’s collaboration with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture on an acoustic investigation into the prison of Saydnaya, located 25 km north of Damascus. The prison is inaccessible to independent observers and monitors. The memories of those who survive it are the only resource available from which to learn of and document the violations still taking place there. However, the capacity of detainees to see anything in Saydnaya was highly restricted as they were mostly kept in darkness, blindfolded or made to cover their eyes. As a result, the prisoners developed an acute sensitivity to sound. Through dedicated and new techniques of earwitness interviews created by Abu Hamdan, the witnesses reconstructed the architecture and events of the prison they experienced through sound.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist, ‘private ear’ and fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York. His projects have taken the form of audiovisual installations, performances, graphic works, photography, Islamic sermons, cassette tape compositions, potato chip packets, essays and lectures. Abu Hamdan’s interest in sound and its intersection with politics originates from his background in DIY music. He has made sonic analyses for legal investigations at the UK Tribunal for Immigration and Asylum and cases at advocacy organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International, where he presented evidence about the murders of Nadeem Nawara and Mohamad Abu Daher by the Israeli Occupation forces through research audio recordings. His forensic audio investigations are conducted as part of his research for Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, College of London, where he is also a PhD candidate.

Noor Abuarafeh The Last Museum: Museum of All Museums Performance

In her performance, Noor Abuarafeh predicts that museums will become obsolete in the near future. Such buildings dedicated to everyday and now useless objects will be deemed a curse all over the world and will start closing down. The Museum of Museums will be the last standing monument dedicated to preserving and documenting the existence of museums. The visitor will be able to see exhibits that show the genealogy of the museum, from its origins as an animal zoo to its expansion into huge city buildings full of objects preserving the withering past.

Abuarafeh’s novel ‘The Earth Doesn’t Tell Its Secrets’ – His father once said, which was launched during the programming for Sharjah Biennial 13 in Sharjah, has been translated and published in Arabic. The translation is launched as part of Shifting Ground, Sharjah Biennial 13, Ramallah. The novel revolves around the narrator’s fascination with the myth of Palestine’s first museum.

Noor Abuarafeh uses multiple mediums including video, installation, performance and text and considers each project as a form of novel. Her work has been exhibited at Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Palestine In & Out Festival, Paris (2016); Kunsthal NORD, Aalborg, Denmark (2016); Maxxx, Sierre, Switzerland (2016); The Mosaic Rooms, London (2016) and Milan Expo (2015), amongst others. Abuarafeh received an MFA from the Arts in Public Spheres Department, École cantonale d’art du Valais, Sierre, Switzerland (2016). She was also shortlisted for the FT

2 Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Award, New York (2016). Born in Jerusalem in 1986, she currently lives and works between Cairo and Jerusalem.

Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh I Die, Therefore I Am: The Palestinian Living Cemetery Paper

Compared to other postcolonial spaces, the Palestinian cemetery is a fertile ground for alternative religious, cultural, social, political and ontological chronicles. Only in the vicinity of their living cemeteries are Palestinians capable of crossing the threshold of dying by potentia into dying by energia, returning, entirely and eternally, to the land. Given the ongoing colonialism of Zionist settlers, the Palestinian cemetery is not only a heterotopia, but also a heterochronia that bears witness to a ‘subterranean Nakba’ yet to be uncovered. Such a morbid chronicle within the graveyards defies conformity with the conventional politics of memory and amnesia, be it Zionist or Palestinian, as well as defying the ordinary ontological hierarchies within the ‘living yards’. Hence, the cemetery holds emancipatory potential for an alternative history that reverses the power relations of the politics of life and death within the settler colonial context. When the self-proclaimed ‘democracy’ of the Zionist settler colonial state fails to realise a state for all its citizens, the Palestinian democracy of death takes over to realise a cemetery for all its citizens, where each Palestinian (re)claims a place in geography by the power of death after a longstanding struggle to claim a place in history by the power of life. This paper demonstrates that Palestinian cemeteries have become liminal spaces through which Palestinians cross the threshold from death by potentia into death by energia, embracing their (im)possible chant: ‘I die, therefore I am.’

Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cultural and Arab Studies at Birzeit University, a fellow at the Institute of Palestine Studies and a poet. His focus is on cultural representation and the politics of Palestinian identity, and he has published many works on Arab poetics, art criticism and translation. His latest works include a translation of Hussein Al-Barghouthi’s The Other Voice: An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Metamorphosis (2017); a collection of poetry titled Being Healed of Delight: A Secret (2017) and The Political Darwish: In Defense of Little Differences (2017). I die, therefore I am is part of the ongoing project The Palestinian Living Cemetery, an investigation of Palestinian modes of counter-memory started in 2011, in which epitaphs preserve a vivid cultural identity. He was born in Jerusalem in 1948 to a refugee family from Ramallah.

Rana Anani Reluctant Archives Paper

Throughout our tumultuous history, numerous artworks, films and archives have disappeared from the public domain along with records of their existence. Be it the continuous erosion of identity carried out by the Israeli occupation or individual and collective errors, the whereabouts of these records and collections have become unknown with few traceable remnants. Like ghosts, some of these archives resurface from their hiding places from time to time only to disappear again, leaving behind a trail of stories and endless rumours. This paper examines the relevance of the reluctant resurfacing of objects in the present in light of the transformations that have occurred in the years of their remaining underground.

Rana Anani is a freelance writer and researcher of visual arts and culture. She is a communication specialist who has occupied several positions in the field of art and culture in Palestine, including Head of Communications at the Palestinian Museum and Coordinator of

3 Qalandiya International. She is involved in several research projects on arts, documentation, museums and archives. She lives in Palestine.

Benji Boyadgian Clogged Presentation and SB13 Ramallah Commissioned Publication

The publication Clogged is a study of three ancient aqueducts in Jerusalem. A ruin of a clogged pipe, becomes a metaphor for Jerusalem. Abandoned and nearly devoid of romantic projections, residues, deposits in the riddle that is archaeology. Writing a story for the second aqueduct, a collage of projected fragments is collected along its path, dowsing the ghost of the water that flowed in this pipe. This water channel ceased to function about fourteen centuries ago, probably due to recurrent clogging of the pressure pipe, the best-preserved trace of the higher-level aqueduct.

The publication on view here is a draft. The final copy, with a print run of 500 copies will be finalised during the first week of September.

Benji Boyadgian works on research-based projects that explore themes around heritage, territory, architecture and landscape. He works with multiple mediums and spatial installations, but drawing and painting remain essential instruments in his working process. He studied architecture at L'École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris La Villette (ENSAPLV), specialising in urban sociology in post-conflict areas. Boyadgian was born in 1983 in Jerusalem, where he still lives and works.

Filipa César It matters what matters matter matters Presentation

Amílcar Cabral’s prism, refracted by shrapnel, looks at a soil composed of composted weaponry. Sliding down through his agronomic writings exposes the substrata of a syntax for liberation later performed in guerrilla language and armed struggle. It is a timely reminder in troubled times, a commoning of humility—the word ‘humble’ derives from ‘humus’— reclaiming soil as a rhizosphere rich in animated beings and inscriptions of oppression. A place to return in order to repair a future multitude that was divided through the violent engineering of the Capitalocene. This take on Amílcar Cabral’s agency as agronaut ventures through his soil cosmologies, mesologies, meteorisations, atmos-lithos conflict zones, celluloid compost, violence of imperial consumption—the sugar question.

Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the fictional aspects of the documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and the politics and poetics inherent to moving image. Since 2011, she has been looking into the origins of the cinema of the African Liberation Movement in Guinea Bissau as a laboratory of resistance to ruling epistemologies. César premiered her first feature length essay-film Spell Reel at the Forum section of the 67th Berlinale (2017). Other exhibitions and screenings have been presented at MoMA, New York (2017); Mumok, Vienna (2016); Tensta Konsthall, Spånga, Sweden (2015); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011–2015); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2014); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2013) and Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012).

4 Chiara De Cesari Memories: On the Predicament of Creating Palestinian National Museums Paper

This talk explores the peculiar history of museums in post-Oslo Palestine and especially the story of the Palestinian Museum. It addresses the ways in which the Palestinian quasi-state, the Palestinian Authority, has tried but thus far failed to create a national museum that serves as a key institution of national representation. In the place of such an institution, Palestinian artists and cultural producers have experimented with different museum formats, creating virtual museums and nomadic museums in exile and thus producing national institutions in transnational spaces.

Chiara De Cesari is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor with a double appointment in European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has published articles in numerous journals, including American Anthropologist, Memory Studies and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. She is currently finishing a book titled Heritage and the Struggle for Palestine, under contract with Stanford University Press, and is co-editor of Transnational Memories: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (with Ann Rigney). Her research focuses on memory, heritage and broader cultural politics as well as the ways in which these themes change under conditions of globalisation, particularly the intersection of cultural memory, transnationalism and current transformations of the nation-state. She is also interested in the globalisation of contemporary art and related forms of creative institutionalism and statecraft.

Keller Easterling Medium Earth Paper

No one ever said it. It is not a saying. It hasn’t been handed down. It doesn’t make sense because no sense has been made of it. There are no familiar stories that explain it. It doesn’t govern characters who dash about received plot templates from epics and folktales and fables. It would be the punchline to a non-story that inverts expectations, and, if formulated aphoristically, it would go something like this: Never beware strength; always beware weakness. Maybe it makes sense in the negative of the story’s content or in its milieu—not in folktales but in folklore or the matrix of practical knowledge picked up over time in order to survive. The milieu or mise-en-scène is the medium in which storied characters and events are suspended. What the milieu conveys without overt declaration is that strength surrounds you all the time like air, and weakness is the puny thing with a gun and knife that is afraid of that strength or that hasn’t been allowed to breathe it in. That lore, about processes for which there are no stories, often centres around the most basic encounters with the material and psychic stuff of the earth. And it encourages a deeper contemplation of ‘medium’: a word that has historically referred to everything from elemental air, fire and water to milieu, magic, the growth medium of environment and contemporary technologies of communication. This medium thinking—on the flip side of some dominant habits of mind—opens onto expansive territory and tutors a cosmopolitan occupation of the planet.

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University, New Haven, US. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Other books include Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Her research and writing were included in the Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition (2014), and she lectures and exhibits internationally.

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Inas Halabi Lions Warned of Futures Present Lecture Performance and SB13 Ramallah Commissioned Publication

The publication Lions Warn of Futures Present attempts to capture and represent the ungraspable threat of radiation, both natural and manmade. Many stories are told about illegal burials of chemical waste in the south of the West Bank, sealed in caves and underneath layers of cement. Much like radiation, the stories and rumours around these burials permeate and spread. While this waste is made invisible as evidence, the stories and rumours are as real as the radiation emitted. Through a combination of stories and visual material, this lecture performance considers the material effect of radiation, which is not as invisible as one imagines.

Inas Halabi works primarily with video, sculpture and interventions in archival material to explore historical and political narratives related to collective memory, myth-making, national identity and various hierarchies of power. Her process is fundamentally research based and involves collecting data and visual material that eventually come together in the form of installation. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (2011) and an MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2014). In 2016, Halabi received the A M Qattan Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award (first prize) for her video installation Mnemosyne. Her work has been exhibited in venues across Palestine, Jordan, India, Greece, Switzerland and the UK. Born in Jerusalem in 1988, she currently lives and works in Palestine.

Samir Harb Morbid Symptoms: Interregnum and Loops of Authority in the Muqata’as Presentation and SB13 Ramallah Commissioned Publication

Morbid Symptoms is a project and publication by the researchers and scholars Samir Harb and Nicola Perugini and the artist and writer Mimi Cabell. The project traces the literal and symbolic history of the Tegart forts in Palestine through multiple systems of design. These militarised forts, known today as Muqata'a, were planned in the 1930s by British engineer and police officer Sir Charles Tegart to suppress the Palestinian revolt. After the end of the British Mandate and the creation of the state of Israel, the forts faced different destinies. Many are still in operation today as Israeli prisons, administrative offices and national heritage sites. The Muqata'a in Ramallah houses Yasser Arafat’s tomb and the Yasser Arafat Museum, serves as the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority and acts as the official West Bank office of the President of the Palestinian Authority. The project is an archaeology of these different historical trajectories and an attempt to understand what maintains their heterogeneity.

Architect/cartoonist Samir Harb combines cartoons and architectural research to explore and criticise the processes of territorial transformation in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). Harb’s work has been shown in exhibitions in Rome and Ravenna, Italy; Oslo, Norway and Amman, Jordan and was featured in We Have Woven the Motherlands with Nets of Iron, Apexart Franchise programme, Amman (2011) and Decolonizing Architecture’s project The Red Castle and The Lawless Line, 0047, Fourth International Triennale of Oslo (2010). He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Architectural Engineering, Birzeit University, Ramallah (2006) and a master’s degree from Goldsmiths College, London (2011). He is currently a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the University of Manchester, UK.

6 Khaled Hourani Oil on Canvas: Searching for Jamal Al Mahamel Lecture Performance

Khaled Hourani’s lecture performance is based on his recent novel Jamal Al Mahamel. In the novel, Sliman Mansour’s painting of the same name is the protagonist through which Hourani explores the conditions of art creation in turbulent times. Examining the relationship between art and politics on the one hand and art and collecting on the other, he traces the destiny of Jamal Al Mahamel from the 1970s, when the painting was sold to former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, through successive political events in Libya and the Arab world.

Artist, curator and art critic Khaled Hourani is a storyteller at heart. He places the process of art at the core of his practice, using it to exchange ideas, collaborate and engage in dialogue. His work has been exhibited across the Middle East, Europe and the US. He is the founder and former director of the International Academy of Art, Palestine as well as the founder of Al Matal Gallery in Ramallah. From 1998 to 2009, he was the designer for Al Karmel Magazine, which was founded and directed by Mahmoud Darwish, and from 2004 to 2006, he served as General Director of the Fine Arts Department, Palestinian Ministry of Culture. Hourani lives and works in Palestine.

Kristine Khouri (Art History) and Rasha Salti (Film Studies) read by Hanan Toukan Four Stories of Museums and Art Collections in Exile Presentation

This presentation will offer an introduction to four case studies of art museums in exile from the 1970s and 1980s for Palestine, Chile, Nicaragua and South Africa. These museums grew out of a political need to form collections in support of causes or people who wished to return ‘home’. This presentation will reflect on ways that national art collections are built in exile and the international solidarity networks that enable and support their itinerant nature.

Kristine Khouri is an independent researcher and writer whose research interests focus on the history of arts circulation and infrastructure in the Arab world. She most recently co-curated Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2016). Research for this project was presented at the 2014 Sharjah Art Foundation March Meeting. Khouri is based in Beirut.

Rasha Salti is a curator, writer and researcher. Her curated projects include Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2016) and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2015) as well as Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s to Now (co-curated with Jytte Jensen), MoMA, New York (2010–2012). Her essays have appeared in publications such as Afterall, The London Review of Books and Naqd. Salti lives and works in Berlin.

Doreen Mende The Struggle of Exhibition Making Presentation

What if the curatorial is a hub of languages, geographies and time zones, as if it were an international airport, a non-place in supermodernity, in which the horizon of locality collapses into the abstraction of global networks? This presentation proposes the curatorial as a condition for exhibition-making emerging as a practice from a condition of struggle. That struggle comes with dual interpretations: Socially, it can mean to search for a vocabulary, to be

7 lost and disoriented, to miss friends, to realise one’s own alienation in being defined as human, to think a new thought. Politically, the struggle can mean to take a position, to speak up, to organise a movement, to become a subject through fighting for a cause, to live in independence, to insist on decolonising processes, to ask for thinking in a situation of knowing. Conceived with Baha Jubeh and Suhair Jubeh, this presentation will discuss notes from a workshop on the Abu Jihad Museum for Prisoner Movement in order to articulate a theory of curating from within the struggle. Mendes addresses why it is important to include struggle in the practice of institution building, stressing that the politics of occupation in Palestine make it necessary to understand that the politics of exhibition-making are under occupation too.

Doreen Mende is a curator and theorist. Recent research projects include KP Brehmer. Real Capital – Production, Raven Row, London (2014); Travelling Communiqué, Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2013–2014); Double Bound Economies, Halle 14, Leipzig; Centre de la photographie, Geneva and ETH Zurich (2012–2013) and project- based collaborations in Ramallah, Beirut, Addis Ababa and Tehran. Mende was co-editor of e- flux journal # 59, a tribute to Harun Farocki (2014) and resident blogger for Manifesta Journal (2013–2014). She is an associate faculty member at the Dutch Art Institute, Gelderland, the Netherlands and Head and Professor of the CCC Research Master Programme and CCC PhD- Forum at HEAD–Genève. In 2015, she was part of the founding group of the Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin. Mende has a PhD in Curatorial Knowledge from Goldsmiths, College of London. She lives in Berlin and Geneva.

Rabih Mroué Three Non-Academic Lectures Presented by Asmaa Azaizeh

Make Me Stop Smoking – Presentation of Ideas Under Study (2006) What happens when a lost landscape is re-appropriated through its archived representation? Mroué reconstructs the radical, heterogeneous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars, with the aid of countless anonymous and personal documents, videos, photos, newspaper clippings and eyewitness reports that he pieces together to create a complex system of meandering narrations. In so doing, he questions the veracity and cogency of the archive as much as he negotiates the validity of the reconstruction of ‘reality’.

Produced by Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, with the support of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2006. English translation by Ziad Nawfal.

The Inhabitants of Images (2008) Three mysterious occurrences in a city haunted by images, of people known to me and others unknown. Images abandoned by their occupants; some have become ruins. An image is invaded, a new face moves in—sometimes an ally, sometimes an old foe. One vanishes, while another travels from one picture to another.

Co-produced by Tanzquartier, Wien; Bidoun magazine and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. English translation by Ziad Nawfal.

Pixelated Revolution (2012) ‘Syrians are filming their own death.’ That is how the Pixelated Revolution begins: by aiming to study the various tips and directions in mobile phone documentation as shared via the medium of Facebook and other virtual communication tools during the first year’s events of the Syrian revolution.

8 It begins from the point when Syrians are recording their images ‘now and here’ and reflects on the relationship of this act of photographic documentation with death and on our perception of these videos ‘now but there….’

Co-produced by Berlin Documentary Forum – HKW/ Berlin; dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012) and the 2010 Spalding Gray Award (sponsored by the consortium of Performing Space 122, New York; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; On the Boards, Seattle and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis). English translation by Ziad Nawfal.

Rabih Mroué, born in Beirut and currently living in Berlin, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. He is a contributing editor for TDR/The Drama Review, New York and the quarterly Kalamon, Beirut. He is also a co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). He was a fellow at the International Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’, Freie Universität Berlin (2013–2015). He has been an associated theatre-director at Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich since 2015. His works include Rima Kamel (2017), So Little Time (2016), Ode to Joy (2015), Riding on a Cloud (2013), 33 RPM and a Few Seconds (2012), Photo-Romance (2009), How Nancy wished that everything was an April Fool’s joke (2007) and Who’s Afraid of Representation (2005), amongst others.

Asmaa Azaizeh is a poet and journalist based in Haifa. She received her BA in Journalism and English Language from Haifa University in 2006. She won the A M Qattan Foundation’s Young Writer Award in 2010 for her first volume of poetry, Liwa (2011). Her second collection, As the Woman from Lod Bore Me (2015), was launched at a staged poetry event where the text was presented by practitioners in various creative fields. Azaizeh and her work have featured in journals, anthologies and poetry festivals, and her poems have been translated into a variety of languages. She has also worked as a newspaper editor, a journalist and a TV and radio presenter. She is currently a freelance writer for cultural magazines, and she manages Poetry Yard, which she founded in 2017, and Fattoush bookshop in Haifa.

Azaizeh was trained by Mroué in Berlin to present his three non-academic lectures in Ramallah and Haifa. He cannot enter the occupied Palestinian territories because he has a Lebanese passport. This is the first time any work by Mroué has been presented in Palestine.

Suhad Daher-Nashif Secret Cemeteries of Numbers: Imprisoning Palestinian Corpses in Buried Historical Archives Paper

Since the late 1960s, Palestinian martyrs' bodies have been kept by the Israeli military forces in death prisons known as the Secret Cemeteries of Numbers. The National Campaign for Retrieval and Disclosure of Palestinian and Arab War Victims' Bodies, undertaken by the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, documented 262 cases of detained Palestinian and Arab corpses in these cemeteries and 65 cases of missing corpses. Giving expression to the experiences of the dead Palestinians and their families, this paper presents the corpses as a buried historical narrative, partially archived just 50 centimeters underground. It describes the physical parameters of these cemeteries and how the corpses move over and under the ground between two lives and two deaths. Two functions of the Secret Cemeteries of Numbers will be explored: their role as a secret archive and their part in a public Zionist project to undermine the possibility of a Palestinian nation-state. The imprisoned corpses can be considered colonial capital reserved for negotiations and a tool to obliterate historical facts and torture families. However, the paper also aims to read the Secret Cemeteries of Numbers as a mechanism for reviving and maintaining the narrative of the martyr for many years to come.

9 Suhad Daher-Nashif’s research focuses on body, youth, women and death practices, mainly within Palestinian society. She explores the different classification systems that operate in rebuilding the body as a site upon which intersectionality between social, religious and political apparatuses is inscribed. Daher-Nashif works as a lecturer, academic supervisor and coordinator with several research and academic programmes. Her most recent areas of research and publication are the imprisonment of Palestinian corpses, forensic medicine in Palestine, history of medicine and forensic medicine in the Arab world, femicide in Palestine and the trafficking of Palestinian women. Basing her work on her ethnographies, Daher-Nashif is also a writer of short stories and scenarios. She holds a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in occupational therapy and a PhD in anthropology, with a special interest in the anthropology of medicine and culture.

Khalil Rabah The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind Collection Handbook Closed Workshop and SB13 Ramallah Commissioned Publication

The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind was established to inspire wonder, encourage discovery, promote knowledge, provoke curiosity and deepen understanding of the natural and cultural history of Palestine. Founded in 1995, the Museum is the most extensive cultural institution in Palestine. It houses objects dating from prehistory to the present in its Botanical, Space and Solar System, Geology and Paleontology and Archival Departments. The permanent collection includes a diverse selection of fossils, paintings, meteorites, sculptures and artefacts. On the occasion of its 22nd anniversary, the museum has endeavoured to publish a handbook of its remarkable collection.

The handbook on view is a draft. The book will be published at the end of 2017.

Khalil Rabah is a conceptual artist working in a wide variety of media. His working process is a form of artistic science that questions history and memory, specifically in the context of his native Palestine. He co-founded Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem and ArtSchool Palestine, London and is the director of the Riwaq Biennial, Palestine. Rabah also serves on the advisory boards of the Delfina Foundation and Biennial Foundation and is a member of the curricular committee of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program, Beirut. Rabah studied fine arts and architecture at the University of Texas and subsequently taught architecture at Birzeit University and fine arts at Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. He was born in 1961 in Jerusalem.

Yara Saqfalhait Subterranean Cavities Presentation and SB13 Ramallah Commissioned Publication

At an ever accelerating pace since the 1980s, thousands of sinkholes have appeared in the landscape around the Dead Sea as a consequence of falling water levels and years of heavy mineral extraction. This situation has resulted in the dissolution of segments of the underground salt layer, leaving behind subsurface cavities into which the surface eventually collapses. As sinkholes devour electricity lines and road sections, expose buried pipelines and affect real estate speculation, geophysical prediction mechanisms are put in place to anticipate which spots will collapse next. The Dead Sea area has historically been subject to different forms of speculation (e.g. political, geophysical, economic, environmental and historical) that were instrumental in directing its current formation. Sometimes this process took the form of now obsolete infrastructure proposals, and at other times, it assumed the bystander role of

10 providing an early warning. This presentation will discuss the research project about the sinkholes and its investigation into the relationships and gaps between systems of prediction and the realities they help to materialise.

Trained as an architect, Yara Saqfalhait pursues research at the intersection of architecture, history of science and technology, critical pedagogy and the spatial imaginary, particularly as mediated by political systems and technical infrastructures. Her writing has been published in Jadaliyya, Bidayat and Interruptions, amongst others. Saqfalhait holds a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering from Birzeit University and is currently completing a master’s degree in design studies at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Nasser Soumi Striving to Re-establish the International Exhibition for Palestine Presentation

In 1978, the International Exhibition for Palestine took place at the Arab University of Beirut, with 182 artists from 28 countries donating their artwork to support the Palestinian revolution. The collection included a large number of pieces by internationally renowned artists and eventually reached a total of over 300 works. The goal was to continue collecting works to be housed in a future Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition was organised by the Art Section of the Unified Information Department of the PLO, where both Mona Saudi and Nasser Soumi had worked. Some of the exhibition was sent to Japan in 1979, and some went to Oslo. In 1982, Abdulhay Mosallam Zarara brought a large part of the collection to Muna Soudi’s house, but another part, which had been exhibited in Tehran, never came back. Nasser Soumi will talk about the process of locating and documenting each of the missing artworks and how collecting must continue. He will also discuss the ongoing struggle to achieve the original goal of establishing a Palestinian Museum of Contemporary Art. Nasser Soumi is a multidisciplinary artist. He studied art at the National School of Fine Arts in Damascus (1971–1977) and continued his studies at the National School of Fine Arts, Paris (1980– 1982). Born in Palestine in 1948, he has lived and worked in Paris since 1980.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins Waste Underground Video Presentation

This presentation will explore how waste infrastructures interact with the underground in Palestine. It will investigate themes such as the relationship between futurity and storage through a discussion of the physical features of these infrastructures. Seen from the perspective of the people whose garbage they make ‘disappear’, sanitary landfills, for example, are often thought of as disposal sites. From the perspective of the earth in which waste is buried, however, landfills are storage sites. Each new deposit of garbage in a landfill constitutes a transformation of the underground. Landfills have finite capacities. They are infrastructures with expiration dates. As trash flows in and populations grow, they fill up and close for business. West Bank Palestinians’ two sanitary landfills were built to last twenty to thirty years. Their designers had to calculate Palestine’s anticipated population growth over that period, a period during which some also anticipated the return of millions of Palestinian refugees. Given the shrinking amount of land to which Palestinians have access and the growing volumes of trash they produce, how do landfill designers constrained by the technical features of the sanitary landfill-as-storage site encode political futures into Palestine’s waste infrastructures?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, US. Her research has been supported by the National Science

11 Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation and Palestinian American Research Council. Based on fieldwork in Palestine (2007–2016), her book provisionally titled Waste Siege: Improvisation and Infrastructure in Twenty-First Century Palestine explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from ‘matter out of place’ into ‘matter with no place to go’. Her publications include articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, The Jerusalem Quarterly, Anthropology News, and The New Centennial Review. She received both her bachelor’s degree and PhD from Columbia University and a master’s degree from the University of Oxford.

Subversive Film The Syllabus Presentation and SB13 Ramallah Commissioned Publication

The Syllabus is a research project and publication based on an archival document explaining how to film using a 16mm camera during the Palestinian revolution. The handwritten document was found during research into the archive of filmmaker and co-founder of Fatah’s Palestine Film Unit, Hani Jawhariyyeh. The publication includes annotated scans of the original document as well as an introduction by the collective and a selection of video stills from films shot during the period of Palestinian militant filmmaking. The archival document by Hani Jawhariyyeh is a detailed technical manual on how to use the 16mm camera. It presents an intricate understanding of the tool of production, or rather the tool for emancipation, as the camera stood in line with the rifle in an era of the Palestinian armed struggle for liberation and the emancipation of the image. The project also includes a series of supplements, the first of which will be a discursive collaboration with some of the members of the Mosireen Film Collective from Cairo, addressing, among many other issues, another syllabus on filming and video making authored by Mosireen during the Egyptian revolution. The supplement is presented as a draft and will be finalised and printed in September 2017.

Subversive Film is a cinema research and production initiative that aims to cast new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region, engender support for film preservation and investigate archival practices and effects. In addition to The Syllabus, projects developed by Subversive Film to explore this cine-historic field include the digital reissuing of previously overlooked films, the curation of rare film screening cycles and the subtitling of rediscovered films and publications. Subversive Film was formed in 2011 by Mohanad Yaqubi, Reem Shilleh and Nick Denes.

Respondents

Lana Judeh Lana Judeh is an architect and instructor at Birzeit University. She previously worked on Riwaq’s rehabilitation projects to restore the historic centres of Palestinian villages. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from Birzeit University and a Master of Arts in Architecture, Cultural Identity and Globalisation from the University of Westminster, UK. She is a co-founder of Group28, a research collective looking at the built environment in Palestine.

Rami Salameh Rami Salameh is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva and a 2017 fellow at the Palestinian American Research Centre. He lectures in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit

12 University and is also a researcher at MUTAWIN, Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy. His research topics address the everyday experience of the body, settler colonialism, pain, speech and writing.

Hanan Toukan Hanan Toukan is Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Visual Arts at Brown University, Providence, US. She received her PhD in 2012 from SOAS, University of London, where her dissertation won the MESA 2012 Award for Best PhD in the Social Sciences. She is currently working on her book Starting the Revolution from a Different Place: Dissent, Diplomacy and Art in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan, under contract with Stanford University Press.

Lara Khaldi Lara Khaldi is an independent curator based in Jerusalem, Palestine. She is a recent alumna of the de Appel curatorial programme, Amsterdam, and the European Graduate School, Switzerland. Khaldi has curated exhibitions and projects in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Cairo, Dubai, Oslo, Brussels and Amsterdam. She teaches at the International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah and has taught at Dar Al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem. She is currently co-curating Desires into Fossils: Monuments without a State, a series of research exhibitions at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah (April – August 2017) and is curator of the Sharjah Biennial 13 Off-site Project Ramallah, August 2017. Khaldi will be a fellow at the Academy of World Cultures, Cologne in November, 2017.

Other Publications and Publication Display Structure

Ma’touq Editorial Group Abu Jildeh and Armeet SB13 Ramallah Commissioned Publication

The editorial group ‘Ma’touq’, composed of artists, researchers and curators, came together for the first time to reinscribe the story of Abu Jildeh and Armeet, two subversive Palestinian characters from the 1920s. Officers of the British mandate claimed that Abu Jildeh and Armeet were bandits, and the two men were captured and executed shortly before the 1936 Arab revolt. This publication, available only in Arabic, emphasises the importance of such characters today, revolutionaries who are aware of the class-based relationship between ruling class and colonisers and the inevitable violence of class struggle.

Publication by artist Maria Theresa Alves and students SB13 Ramallah Commissioned Publication in partnership with Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center

This publication will be the result of a workshop by artist Maria Thereza Alves and geographer Omar Tesdell with art and geography students. The workshop will be led by the artist and the geographer, who will invite the students to select a plot of land, engage in researching every aspect of it and then choose a subject or material of interest to present in the publication with other visual material. This workshop will take place in September 2017 in partnership with Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah.

Elias and Yousef Anastas Commissioned Display Structure for Publications

Designers and architects Elias and Yousef Anastas have designed and realised a display structure for the publications upon the invitation of the curator. Referring to the subtopic of

13 ‘the underground’ within the general theme of ‘Earth’, the display structure explores the idea of surface. The single massive piece of stone is an informal geometrical representation of surface topology from which traces of the presented publications are obliterated. The structure will remain as the central distribution venue for the nine commissioned publications until mid- September. After that time, the KSCC will keep the structure and use it for other publications.

About Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj

Taking place from January 2016 to January 2018, Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj encompasses exhibitions, projects and educational programmes in five locations, expanding the biennial structure across space and time. ‘Tamawuj’ is an Arabic word that suggests the rising and falling of waves; a flowing, swelling, surging or fluctuation; or a wavy, undulating appearance, outline or form. Curated by Christine Tohme, Sharjah Biennial 13 (SB13) includes exhibitions and public programmes in two acts, one in Sharjah (10 March–12 June 2017) and one in Beirut (October 2017–January 2018), as well as SB13 School, a year-long education programme that spans the west, central and eastern regions of Sharjah. SB13 also seeks to mobilise ongoing conversations. Four interlocutors in as many cities have organised projects around keywords that are integral to SB13’s conceptual framework. Kader Attia investigated water in Dakar (8 January 2017), Zeynep Öz considered crops in Istanbul (13 May 2017), Lara Khaldi studies earth in Ramallah (10 August 2017) and representatives of Ashkal Alwan reflect on the culinary in Beirut (15 October 2017).

Sharjah Biennial is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation, which brings a broad range of contemporary art and cultural programmes to the communities of Sharjah, the UAE and the region. Since 1993, Sharjah Biennial has commissioned, produced and presented large-scale public installations, performances and films, offering artists from the region and beyond an internationally recognised platform for exhibition and experimentation.

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Team and Collaborators Thanks To Ziad Abdallah Hind Al Ali Jumana Emil Abboud Engy Aly Abu Jihad Prisoners’ Rana Anani Museum Ali Arqub Ibtisam Ahmad Yazan Al Ashqar Lobna Araj Youssef Bazzi Elias Anastas Dima Bittard Yousef Anastas Dalia Boukhari Em Waleed Kitchen Kathleen Butti Yasmine Foqahaa Ali Aldeek Raoof Hajyihya Hannah Scott Deuchar Yusor Hamed Hind Essousi Yousef Hammad Waseem Fuad Noor Abu Hashhash Nicola Gray Inaash Al Usrah Valerie Grove Ryan Inouye Carmen Hassan Sharif Kanaan Waleed Ihsheish Ahmad Abu Laban Lara Khaldi Nisreen Naffa’ Ragaa Khaled Hafez Omar Yazan Khalili Beesan Ramadan Ala’ Khanger Alhareth Rayan Carol Khoury Suad Rishmawi Nawale Lacroix Raed Saadeh Naveed Majeed Lena Sobeh Loai Misleh Dima Srouji Bekriah Mowasi Amani Yacoub Ali Mrad Ramez Mufdi Hoor Al Qasimi Nawar Al Qassimi Alyazeyah Al Reyaysa Ismail Rifai Noora Said Yara Saqfalhait Reem Shadid Dennis Sobeh Christine Tohme Nael El Toukhy

Printing Houses

A.R. Hijjawi Print House Al-Ayyam Newspaper Gasman Communicate Hanin Center

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