Re–Directing: East 2019
Designing Futures
Between June 3rd and June 30th, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art will be hosting the 7th edition of Re–Directing: East, an international curatorial seminar and residency programme. This year’s seminar is held in collaboration with the Warsaw Biennale, as part of an art & research project focused on Poland’s relationship with Middle Eastern and Northern African countries. The event will feature Rachel Dedman (Palestine/UK), Mariam Elnozahy (Egypt), Aziza Harmel (Tunisia), Radoslav Ištok (Slovakia) and Francesca Masoero (Morocco) whose applications were singled out from over one hundred candidacies.
Getting to know each other, exchange, mutual learning, and collective critical research: those are the principal tools applied during curatorial residencies at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. At the seminar, participants will work with teams appointed by both institutions mentioned before, and expert special guests. It will be an opportunity for them to further develop their individual projects on the relations between the former Eastern Block and the countries of both the Middle East, and Northern Africa.
The participants of this year’s edition of Re-Directing: East work in Europe as well as in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Their focus and interests vary significantly, but the common denominators of their practice are engagement and sensitivity towards urgent social issues.
Rachel Dedman, apart from her literary and educational activity, engages in supporting local communities. As a member of Earth Hold she focuses on political history and the global potential of radio. As a matter of fact, the outcome of her residency at the U–jazdowskim is going to be a radio programme.
Mariam Elnozahy’s main areas of interest are: critical art drawing on collaboration with local communities and promotion of Egyptian contemporary art abroad. In 2017, she was in charge of the Rewriting Criticism project, a year-long writing course the aim of which was to support and develop art criticism in Egypt despite unfavourable social and political circumstances.
Aziza Harmel is one of the curators behind Qayyem, a research programme concerning curatorial awareness and aimed at discovering new models of education, self-organisation, deep adaptation, as well as new methodologies of hope. Her interests revolve around spectral phenomena, visibility principles, the economy of affectation, and secrecy of locations.
Rado Ištok is a Slovakian curator, researcher and editor of publications currently living in Stockholm. In his research and curatorial projects, he explores the subject of postcolonialism as regards Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa. As his contribution to a long-term project entitled Decolonising Architecture he searched for links and interconnections between Slovakia, Palestine, Ethiopia and the Vatican back in the 1930’s and the 1940’s.
In 2018, he presented the outcome of his investigation at the Afterlife of Fascist-Colonial Architecture symposium held during Manifesta 12 in Palermo.
Francesa Masoero focuses on researching politics from the angle of water supplies and access to other common resources. Her other areas of interest are care practice, collective creation and everyday resistance.
The participants of Re-Directing: East will convey their concepts at a public event, the Forum for Central Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East scheduled for June 9th at the seat of the Biennale Warszawa in 34/50 Marszałkowska street.
During the span of the residency, the participants will also jointly look for possibilities of creating alliances and establishing international cooperation. They will investigate solidarity mechanisms outside of nation states in order to come up with a model of a transnational organisation of the future: one that would allow genuine wholeplanetary cooperative practice.
