|__________________________________
|
| W I L L
|
| June 19 July 19, 2003
|
| Exhibition Reception: Thursday, June 19, 5:30-7:30 pm
| Some of the artists will be present.
|
| http://negotiation2003.net
| <info@negotiations2003.net>
|
| A Space Gallery, 401 Richmond St.W., #110, Toronto, Canada
| 416-979-9633
|__________________________________
| Ilana Salama Ortar, Stephen Wright
| (Israel, France)
| Galia Shapira, Aref Nammari, Haggai Kupermintz, Phil Shane
| (Israel/USA, Palestine/USA, Israel/USA, USA)
| Alexandra Handal in collaboration with poets Karen Alkalay-Gut and
Nathalie Handal
| (Palestine/Dominican Republic, Israel, Palestine/USA)
| Rami a.k.a. Jaromil
| (Italy, Palestine)
| Artist Emergency Response
| (USA)
| Shahrzad Arshadi, Josee Lambert
| (Canada)
| Negotiations Working Group
| (Canada)
|__________________________________
| WILL is a Creative Response initiative and a part of _Negotiations:
From a Piece of Land to a Land of Peace_ a multi-part cultural event
that intends to create new public spaces for dialogue on shared
entitlement and common responsibility for co-existence in
Palestine-Israel and beyond. For information about other Negotiations
events (June 19 - 29) visit our website at http://negotiations2003.net
|__________________________________
|__________________________________
| C U R A T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T

High-tide on the day of war, before we are drowned into another
twilight of repressed and forgotten truths, engulfed in the light of
explosions last year in Afghanistan, this year in Iraq, every year,
for fifty-five years, in the land historically known as Palestine we
ask: how do we change our world to change our fate? This question
points directly to the ethics of our intentions and practices for it is
no longer possible to question the urgency and the imperatives. The
world must change if we are to live with one another in dignity. To
live with ourselves, we must change. The empire is unmasked, yet again.
Rulers are at work to redraw the map, yet again. Bodies have lined up
to stand witness to this violence, yet again. Violations are countless
and cannot be checked against the anachronistic terms of "human
rights." Bombs, tanks, armoured helicopters, guns and missiles are not
bound by any charters, and our utopian investments in international
laws and institutions have failed to produce any profits except for the
profiteers at war for more control over land, resources, human lives
and histories. Resistance was yesterdays response. Today, openly
formulated insurgence is a reality.
The Second Palestinian Intifada, which erupted in September of
2000, provides an instance of such insurgency. This is a new phase in
the century-long Palestinian history of anti-colonial struggles,
ongoing since 1897. Contrary to mainstream representations, the
Intifada is not simply a localized Palestinian nationalist response to
the repressive Israeli occupation and its war machine; rather, it is a
demonstration of indigenous peoples refusal to surrender their agency
to the hegemonic hold of colonial regimes. In spite of the gross
imbalance of powers, the Palestinians have risen up, yet again, to
challenge colonialisms intrinsically xenophobic discourses and its
structural patterns of exclusion and domination. More than anything
else, the Intifada exposes the failures of colonialism to subjugate the
will of the Palestinian people and silence dissenting voices.
The radicalization of this will has swept over the checkpoints
and barbed wire to infiltrate the consciousness of Israelis and of
people around the world. The new forms of Palestinian-Israeli and
transnational collaboration manifested through organizations such as
the International Solidarity Movement and Taayush draw on a renewed
will to organize civil communities in countering economic, political
and military colonization. Such social mobilization calls for different
forms of representation; for a thorough shake-up in our habits of
thought. It calls for a conceptual creativity that sets out to
ethically enact strategies of change and pragmatically prefigure the
horizons of a different world. This, we believe, is the fertile land
where a new insurgent art movement can grow.
For this exhibition, we called on artists to formulate and
realize the ways in which transdisciplinary artistic practices can
nourish stronger, more ethically accountable, multi-faceted and
multi-vocal responses to the social imperatives we face. A gathering of
politically responsive work, WILL is dedicated to the project of
change: unearthing, remembering, coming to voice, naming and, rooted in
the depths of consciousness, actively intervening in the social field.
The modes of intervention utilized by the projects in WILL exceed
conventional practices of representational art. Each work shown in this
exhibit has emerged through intense negotiations and co-labouring, of
which the ultimate products are the social and personal relations and
transformations that transcend the artwork. Here the artwork is only a
landmark for new conceptions. The real work is ongoing, constantly
evolving and defiant of representation as it unfolds in the plains of
awareness and action.
WILL provides opportunities for engagement, and asks that we
engage differently. We encourage you to actively participate and
contribute your labour to this work.
-- Gita Hashemi & Hanadi Loubani for Negotiations Working Group
|__________________________________
| P R O J E C T S
|________
| Inadvertent Monuments
| Ilana Salama Ortar and Stephen Wright

Our project focuses on what was initially a deeply-entrenched
border cairn, constructed after World War I, intended to separate the
French mandate of Lebanon from the British mandate of Palestine. During
the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon from 1982-2000, and under the
protection of Tsahal, layers of top soil were scooped up from vast
tracts of occupied land and taken by dump trucks to Israeli settlements
near the border a fact to which the stone cairn bears subtle though
irrefutable evidence: the cairn, whose bottom half was deeply
entrenched in the earth, now stands some eight feet above the ground.
While its top portion is the same light tan colour as the surrounding
topography, the bottom three feet are a dark ruddy brown identical to
the soil once covering them. Intended as a horizontal territorial
marker, the cairn has come to mark verticality raising a variety of
issues regarding the difference between land and soil, territory and
earth. It is an inadvertent monument. As such, it stands as a condensed
metaphor of the conflict embedded in the historical present; a public
mirror for anyone who cares to look at the issue of peace and partition
not as event but as sign. Taking this land-art-like unintentional
"monument" as its hub, this project refuses to be partitioned within
the territory of "art." Instead, using art-related skills to refocus
attention on an otherwise invisible symbol, it foregrounds arts
use-value in negotiating the shift from a piece of land to a land of
peace.
|________
| Destinations: A Palestinian-Israeli Audio-Visual Installation
| Galia Shapira, Aref Nammari, Haggai Kupermintz, Phil Shane

The "Destinations" installation makes use of photographic images
collected from Palestinians and Israelis that convey their profound
connection to their shared land and its history. Sound recordings
capture personal stories of love, hope and pain that the images
document. A multiple slide projection, the large photographic images
are projected onto the gallery walls in a continuous sequence and are
accompanied by Arabic and Hebrew audio narratives including poetry
and literary pieces by Israeli and Palestinian writers. Surrounded by
images of the shared land, as seen through Israeli and Palestinian
eyes, viewers are invited to re-examine conventional perceptions of the
conflict. Collection and dissemination of images and stories continue
as the artists constitute a growing archive of hope and struggle
towards a common destiny.
|________
| Farah In Search for Joy
| Rami a.k.a. Jaromil

The "Farah" project documents my three-week trip, in August, 2002,
through the occupied territories of Palestine. During this time I
crossed East Jerusalem, Gaza, Bethlehem, Hebron and Ramallah. This was
while Bethlehem and Gaza were still under siege and Ramallah was
experiencing another full-time curfew after the assassination of Ahmad
Saadat. I set out for this trip independently, but, once in Palestine,
I had the chance to collaborate with some valuable people of the
Palestinian Progressive Youth Union, Tactical Media Crew, Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine, International Solidarity Movement and
Indymedia Palestine. Farah is an effort to document the life and
culture of the Palestinian population in zones of war, without actually
mentioning the war itself. It is a net-art project in the way that it
tries to use the net as a privileged medium to unveil a beauty usually
made far by war. It is the content that counts in Farah, the medium
only provides the necessary means for the message to be conveyed. The
project is born from the need to discover and document that which
remains untouched by war: everything in the tales of children and older
folks that pervades in the identity of a people in spite of
dispossession, humiliation and violence. Farah is a search for joy and
for a resistance that organizes itself in thousands of forms in the
imagination. It is to recognize the millenary Palestine in the
untouchable dreams of its children. http://farah.dyne.org/
|________
| Dance
| Alexandra Handal in collaboration with poets Karen Alkalay-Gut and
Nathalie Handal

Alexandra Handals multimedia installation, "Dance," is based on a
joint poem written by Israeli poet Karen Alkalay-Gut and Palestinian
poet, Nathalie Handal. A digital animation of the poem, which becomes
entirely legible only at the end, is projected onto the floor. While
watching the projection, the viewer experiences the words of the poem
transform into abstract shapes that resemble lightning, needles,
feathers, and webs. As they are colliding, moving past and against each
other, the words begin to emerge as lines of a poem, then stanzas,
breaking the fear of sharing the same space in order to dance together.
Dance is a space which invites the viewer to gather round and
experience - through movement, color, and rhythm - the pain,
frustration, fear and joy involved in taking the first steps towards
negotiating our present, ourselves. Dance compels the viewer to ask:
how can we not dance together?
|________
| Squares in the Pavement & Beau temps, mauvais temps
| Shahrzad Arshadi and Josee Lambert

"Squares in the Pavement & Beau temps, mauvais temps" is a
photo-documentary project created by two artists: one from the East,
the other from the West. Every Friday since September 14, 2001, these
two artists have met each other in front of the Israeli Consulate in
Montreal to stand vigil for peace and justice in Palestine. For a
period of one full year, rain or shine, Josee and Shahrzad have
documented the participants at these vigils as a testimony to their
collective hopes and fears. The collaboration between the two artists
is an installation of 104 black and white photographs. While Josees
contribution symbolizes time, season and continuity, Shahrzad captures
portraits of people wearing the most immediately recognizable symbol of
Palestine the "keffia" people of all walks of life, teachers,
workers, artists and students; young and old from all races and
origins, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist and S
|________
| Video Petition Project
| Artist Emergency Response

The "Video Petition Project" is a visual testimony of North
Americans voicing their opposition to the Israeli Occupation. Despite
their large and growing numbers, these voices are significantly
underrepresented by the mainstream North American media. They are
comprised of Jews and non-Jews alike whose sincere, thoughtful, and
eloquent speech cannot be dismissed as self-loathing or anti-Semitic
simply due to their criticism of the Israeli government and its
policies. Some participants present their own statements and others use
one or another among a variety of statements prepared by AER and imbue
these with their own sincerity. Our ultimate goal is to present the
project at schools, community organizations, art venues, museums,
public access television, radio, and internet sites, and also to public
officials and leaders, thus helping to further aid the acknowledgement
and rightful consideration of this growing movement. The 80-min video
premiered in September 2002 at the Piece Process exhibit at Chicagos
ARC gallery and was recently (April/May 2003) on display at the Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the exhibit War (What Is It Good
For?).
|________
| Olive Fair
| Negotiations Working Group

"Olive Fair" renders visible the material conditions and the
strategies of survival and resistance in occupied Palestine. The
installation displays olive products by Palestinian producers
obtained through Sindyanna, a fair-trade company based in Jaffa
side-by-side with video documentation of a direct action by the
International Solidarity Movement in support of a group of Palestinian
growers in the West Bank who were resisting the uprooting of their
olive trees by Israeli soldiers and bulldozers. Olive Fair invites
gallery visitors to take product samples in exchange for contributing
personal responses to a website, thus enabling networked consciousness
and informed dialogue. As the olive products in the gallery diminish,
what remains in the physical space transmitted through the ISM video
is the reality of the struggle in Palestine cultivating a growing
public awareness and solidarity in the virtual space.
http://olivefair.net
|__________________________________
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| A R T I S T S ' B I O S
|________
| The collaboration between ILANA SALAMA ORTAR and STEPHEN WRIGHT on
Inadvertent Monuments is based on an extra-disciplinary approach to
art: contrary to trendy inter-disciplinary approaches (which accept
disciplinary partitioning as a precondition for association) and the
apparent lack of discipline characterising so much contemporary art,
they seek to mirror the disciplinary extraterritoriality and
non-situatedness of their practice in the issues that they focus. Using
art-related methodologies, they seek to draw the sort of sustained and
thoughtful attention to inadvertent symbols and monuments
particularly in situations of social urgency, suppressed memory and
identity loss that art-specific proposals often enjoy. Stephen Wright
is a Paris-based theorist of art-related practice. Ilana Salama Ortar
is a Haifa-based artist, working extensively on the development of
"civic art" (city + civitas), investigating the visible and invisible
traces of the erasure of individual and collective memory in the urban
fabric. They previously collaborated in the exhibition LIncurable
Memoire des Corps.
|________
| Since November 2002, a group of activists has been meeting in an
effort to explore a new vision and discourse to deal honestly and
courageously with the Palestinian and Israeli experiences. We emphasize
recognition of common destiny, mutual acknowledgement of pain and
suffering, and the embracement of the humanity of each other as keys to
reconciliation. Group members are: GALIA SHAPIRA, an Israeli visual
artist; AREF NAMMARI, a Palestinian electronics engineer and activist;
HAGGAI KUPERMINTZ, an Israeli assistant professor of education; and
PHIL SHANE, an American associate professor of accounting. The
Destinations group aims to promote the co-existence of historical,
cultural, and spiritual Palestinian and Israeli narratives, through
collaborative intellectual and artistic expressions. By braiding
together the stories of peoples' love for their land, their struggles,
pain and hopes, we strive to develop a new understanding of reality.
Our work stems from the realization that a great responsibility for
promoting an alternative vision lies with the intellectual, spiritual,
and arts communities in developing new images of co-existence that
resist self-serving political and economic dictates. We hope to give
voice to a grassroots movement, expressing Israeli and Palestinian deep
yearnings to transcend their tragic destiny as eternal communities of
suffering.
|________
| RAMI a.k.a. JAROMIL (http://korova.dyne.org) is a free software
programmer and streaming media pioneer, media artist and activist,
performer and emigrant. Wired to the matrix since 1991 (point of
NeuromanteBBS on Cybernet 65:1500/3.13), Jaromil co-founded (1994) the
non-profit organization Metro Olografix for the diffusion of
information technology, and in 2000 founded the free software lab
dyne.org; sub-root for the autistici.org / inventati.org community.
Jaromil is active in the Italy Indymedia Collective, and is currently
the software analyst and developer for PUBLIC VOICE Lab (Vienna). He
recently co-curated I LOVE YOU , an exposition about software viruses
at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt. His past collaborations
include, among others: Giardini Pensili, digitalcraft.org, 01001.org,
August Black, [epidemiC], Florian Cramer, 92v2.0, LOA hacklab, Lobo,
Freaknet Medialab, CandidaTV, the Mitocondri, the HackMeeting
community. Jaromil's most recent online piece is Farah: a documentation
of his travel through the occupied territories of Palestine, in search
for joy.
|________
| ALEXANDRA HANDAL is a Santo Domingo-NYC based Palestinian artist
whose installations, drawings and digital media focus on issues of
transnationality, cultural migration/displacement, representation, and
memory. Her work has been represented in exhibitions in NYC, Chicago,
Boston, Philadelphia, and Sydney, Australia. Currently, she is a
Visiting Artist Lecturer at the Escuela de Diseno in the Dominican
Republic, affiliated with Parsons School of Design. KAREN ALKALAY-GUT
was born on the last night of the Blitz in London to refugee parents
who brought her to the United States after the war. She has spent her
adult life teaching poetry at Tel Aviv University, writing, and trying
to get people to listen to each other through poetry. Her 20 books
include five poetry books in Hebrew, a biography of the American poet,
Adelaide Crapsey, an e-book of magic poems called Avracadivra (2002).
NATHALIE HANDAL is a Palestinian poet, playwright and writer who has
lived in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America and
the Middle East. She is the author of the poetry book, The NeverField,
the poetry CD, Traveling Rooms, and the editor of The Poetry of Arab
Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an Academy of American Poets
bestseller and winner of the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles award.
Nathalie Handal currently teaches at Hunter College in NYC.
|________
| JOSEE LAMBERT is a freelance photographer in the cultural domain.
Twelve years ago, she began documentary work in the Middle-East. Often
associating herself with humanitarian organizations, Josees work
primarily focused on the impact of sanctions on the Iraqi people. She
also produced, in collaboration with Amnesty International, an
important documentary with prisoners of Khiam Detention Centre, south
of Lebanon. For her exhibition Ils etaient absents sur la photo, she
was awarded artiste pour la paix in 1998. SHAHRZAD ARSHADI, a human
rights activist and Montreal-based Canadian/Iranian artist, came to
Canada as a political refugee on December 24,1983. In the past ten
years, Shahrzad has ventured into different fields of photography,
painting and video, enabling her focus on issues of memory, culture and
human rights. Shahrzad has exhibited her work in various locations
across North America.
|________
| ARTIST EMERGENCY RESPONSE (AER) is a Chicago-based collective of
artists and activists including many Jews and Palestinians working
for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We seek a
just and lasting peace through the minimal, general framework of the
implementation of the Palestinian peoples right to self-determination,
an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a
just solution to the status of Jerusalem, and a just solution to the
Palestinian refugee crisis. We strongly condemn the escalating violence
against civilians on both sides of the conflict and demand that the
United States end its economic, military, and political support of
Israel until the illegal occupation ends. We are dedicated to fostering
dialogue between communities and combating anti-Arab, anti-Muslim,
anti-Palestinian, and anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence.
|________
| NEGOTIATIONS WORKING GROUP: We are women of diverse cultural
background (Anglo-Canadian, Iranian, Italian, Jewish and Palestinian)
and with different skills and experiences (some are artists, some
academics, and most full-time activists). Our differences have
constituted the productive and pragmatic spaces of our 'negotiations',
and our work together has been the shared experience of learning our
ethical accountability to one another and to a larger political project
that touches our everyday lives in different and not always readily
acknowledged or immediately visible ways. In spite of all the
difficulties and uncertainties inherent in working towards social
transformation, months of intense volunteer labour have taught us how
to be allies and friends while navigating through politically
contentious, socially complex and historically painful grounds. This
work has made us more determined: negotiations cannot be channeled by
any prescribed roadmaps; they demand complete openness, transparency
and good will. We started as a small formation with dynamic membership
by choice, chance or guile within Creative Response. For records of
other CR initiatives, visit http://creativeresponseweb.net

|__________________________________
| Negotiations: From a Piece of Land to a Land of Peace
| info@negotiations2003.net
| http://negotiations2003.net
|
| Negotiations is a Creative Response initiative:
| http://creativeresponseweb.net
|__________________________________