Past Disquiet: Workshops

Presented over three days, Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti will host workshops on research methodologies, microhistories and the process of exhibition-making.

Museums in Solidarity 

Thursday 5 February, 3-5:30pm. 

Early in the research process, we encountered the ideas of the museum-in-exile and the solidarity museum. One version of the genesis story of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine links it directly to the MIRSA. At the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Ezzedine Kalak, the Palestine Liberation Organization representative in Paris, met exiled Chilean artists who were involved in the administration of the MIRSA, and this encounter inspired him to pursue a similar initiative for Palestine. Two other museums-in-exile were also inspired by – and had strong connections to – the MIRSA. In solidarity with the people of Nicaragua after the success of the Sandinista revolution, the Museum of Latin American Art in Solidarity with Nicaragua was organized by Ernesto Cardenal and Chilean curator Carmen Waugh. In 1981, artists Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Antonio Saura initiated the Artists of the World Against Apartheid Committee, which assembled the Art Contre/Against Apartheid collection and toured in forty countries around the world between 1983 and 1990. Along with their core idea, these four museums-in-exile demonstrate notable overlaps in terms of the artists who participated, and the people responsible for their organization. 

Transnational Solidarity and Artists Networks

Friday 6 February, 3-5:30pm. 

Past Disquiet threads the connections among collectives of artists, public interventions, and exhibitions in Baghdad, Paris, Tokyo, and Venice, to uncover the contexts and mechanisms of mobilization of artists, as well as how political engagement impacted their practice. Ranging from the anti-establishment, artist-run Association de la jeune peinture in France, to the Japan Asian African Latin American Artists Association (JAALA), a group engaged with anti-imperialist struggles that lent sustained support to the Palestinian cause in the 1970s and 1980s, the Union of Palestinian Artist, the League of Palestinian Artists, the Union of Arab Artists, the Brigade internationale de peintres antifascistes and several others.

Critical Considerations on Archives, Scenography and Transnational Solidarity

Saturday 7 February, 11:30am-2pm

The research looked into documents and histories that were lost, blinded or discarded in the canons of the historiography of art, with scant, dispersed or destroyed archival traces, few of which still exist in institutions. A significant part was transmitted via oral testimonies that were often impossible to fact-check. Images outlive their authors and the ideological context in which they emerged, what happens when their stories are forever lost? Khouri and Salti will share