The Living Room:
The right to be a host
Meeting with Shafiq Kakar at Everyday Forms of Resistance exhibition
Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art cordially invites to the meeting with Shafiq Kakar.
U–jazdowski’s resident Shafiq Kakar, host at The Living Room at Van Abbemuseum, will meet the public to share his story and talk about the project he runs.
Event in English. Admission fee is included in the price of a ticket.
The Living Room is a project created by Sandi Hilal, based on her experience from Boden, a military town, that has now become one of the major reception centers for asylum seekers. The project is inspired by a story about a Syrian refugee couple Yasmeen and Ibrahim, who had moved to Boden from Syria two years previously, and drew on the tradition of hospitality, never accepting that they should give up their right to be hosts in their new home. They continued what was an important part of their life in Syria, opening up their living room to host both Swedes and others.
In Sandi Hilal’s project organized in Boden, in Fawaar Refugee camp in Palestine or in Van Abbemuseum in Einhoven in Netherlands, the living room functions as a self-representational space, that has the potential to subvert the role of guest and host and give a different socio-political meaning to the act of hospitality. The possibility of hosting had become, for them, a way to regain access to their lost personal and collective history.
