Meeting Points 6

Meeting Points is a multidisciplinary bi-annual event organized by the Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF) in collaboration with regional and international partners. It takes place simultaneously in different cities, presenting contemporary artistic productions from the region and beyond. Meeting Points started in 2004. The first four editions of Meeting Points were curated by Tarek Abou El Fetouh and took place in Amman, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis and Damascus. Meeting Points 5 2007/2008) was curated by Frie Leysen assisted by Maha Maamoun. It presented forty contemporary artistic productions including theatre, dance, music, visual art, film and performance. Meeting Points 5 took place in eleven cities in the Arab World and in Europe.

Meeting Points 6 is curated by Okwui Enwezor.

Meetings Points 6 will provide audiences with an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the work of important names on the contemporary Arab scene who will be presenting their work in Greece for the first time in a marathon of performances, monologues, readings and dance. The artists will include the dancers and choreographers Selma & Sofiane Ouissi from Tunis with their online dance performance Here(s), the film-makers and visual artists Ioanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige from Beirut, the independent Cairene author and director, Laila Soliman, with her performance Knock knock knock until you die..., which is based on “diaries, sounds, movements, news and anything that constitutes a revolution”. The Marathon will also feature two artists from Damascus: the writer Mohammad Al Attar, with a new work about the conditions in which prisoners are kept in Syria, and the director, Omar Abu Saada, who will be presenting a multimedia project entitled Look at the streets… this is how hope looks like…, a work examining the role played by social networking in the organization and spread of the recent uprisings in the Arab world.

Born in Beirut, Tarek Atoui moved to France in 1998 where he studied contemporary and electronic music at the French National Conservatory of Reims. Finding his inspiration in social and political realities, he soon established himself as one of the pioneers of an upcoming generation of Arab artists experimenting in the fields of electronic music and digital arts. Atoui is known for building new software for each project he works on, as well as creating innovative computer tools for interdisciplinary art forms and youth education, such as the workshop Empty Cans that he presented in France, Holland, Lebanon, Egypt and New York.

He is currently the artist in residency at the Sharjah Art Foundation that has been closely following his work since 2008.

Infinite Times Zero 2010/2011, digital sound performance, 8 months and ongoing

Launched in Beirut as the first venue of Meeting Points 6, Atoui's new piece is about creating overlapping time and space continuums over an 8 months period, during which the sound is uninterrupted while moving from one city to another following the trajectory of Meeting Points 6 through the internet, without ever having to stop until becoming an autonomous independent organism endlessly written and existing on the web.

Entirely made of digital and abstract sound transcending socio-cultural references, and provided with special software, this piece is essentially composed of hundreds of digital signals and tones of generators offering infinite possibilities of composition and improvisation, and synthesizing complex, rich and dense soundscapes free of any loop effect or repetitiveness. The mutating sound will keep transforming whether through the presence of a performer, complex multi-channel installation, or a simple speaker.

Infinite times zero is an ambitious and cutting-edge translation of physical performances and sound installations that continue and prolong each other through the technologies of the internet, annihilating distance and transcending concrete space, borders and geography.

In 1975, multidisciplinary artist of Palestinian origin, Mona Hatoum was forced into exile when the Lebanese civil war broke during one of her visits to London, where she stayed, training at both the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College. Hatoum's work revolves around the body, politics, gender issues, the concept of space, and the physical interaction with the viewer/spectator. Her creations – in which she often used her own body as a medium - are an attempt to create both sensual and intellectual experiences dealing with the themes of exile, displacement, the sense of loss and separation caused by war, and the relation between the Third World and the West. Since 1983, Hatoum has been displaying her installations and performance videos on solo and group exhibitions all around the world, including: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Britain, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; MoMA, New York; Darat Al Funun, Jordan; Venice Biennale, Italy; Documenta XI, Germany; and the XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil…

For Meeting Points 6, she exhibits a reenactment of the legendary performance The Negotiating Table, which debuted in 1983 as a response to Israel's invasion into Lebanon, as well as a series of documents (videos, drawings, notes, photos, et. al.) from her works Roadworks (1985), Variation on Discord and Divisions (1984), and Don't smile, you're on camera! (1980).

Meeting Points 6
Locus Agonistes
Practices and Logics of the Civic
Kurator: Okwui Enwezor

Künstler: Fadhel Jaibi / Jalila Baccar, Mona Hatoum, Tarek Atoui, Omar Abu Saada, Mohammad Attar, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Tarek Atoui, Hafis Dhau / Aicha M´Barek, Tony Chakar, Samah Hijawi, Selma & Sofiane Ouissi, Laila Soliman, David Hare.

Stationen:
27.04.2011 - 11.05.2011 Beirut Art Center
27.04.2011 - 04.05.2011 Makan Art Space
01.10.2011 - 18.12.2011 argos, Brüssel
12.01.2012 - 14.01.2012 Haus der Kulturen, Berlin
07.03.2012 - 11.03.2012 Onassis Cultural Centre