Impulses

 © Raoul Humpert

From September to November 2021, ArtEvolution Impulse, a series of roundtable discussions with local and regional artists and cultural practitioners will be organised as part of the ArtEvolution programme. The five roundtables are intended to provide an opportunity to discuss processes of social transformation on the one hand and culture-specific opportunities on the other.

If we look back historically, collectives tend to emerge during periods of crisis, in moments of social upheaval and political uncertainty within society. Such crises often force reappraisals of conditions of production, reevaluation of the nature of artistic work, and reconfiguration of the position of the artist in relation to economic, social, and political institutions".

Okwui Enwezor, The Production of Social Space as Artwork in 'Collectivism After Modernism', edited by Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson, 2007

Since 2011, artists from the Arab world have experienced the fantastic power of mass protests, the promises they hold, the radically new ways of inhabiting the streets and reinvesting public spaces, as well as the unravelling of crushing regimes, the lukewarm responses of the international community failing on its promise of justice and democracy upheld by universal values used to maintain a hegemonic order.
 
The most recent upheavals in 2019 and the drastic aggravation of the crisis in Lebanon have revived much of the debate around the role of art in the public sphere. Art and artists have to bear the grunt of contradictory understandings, hopes, and ambitions. For some, artists are supposed to deliver on an aesthetic level, opening up our understanding of beauty and catering to our senses. On the other side of the spectrum, art is seen as yet another tool for specific political messages to come across. Moreover, and since the neoliberal turn of the 80s, institutions and cultural practitioners had to increasingly conform to the demands of a productive economy, in terms of rentability, management and outputs. 
 
The Impulse sessions start with a reversal of the question: rather than looking at how artists are engaging within political or social movements, we should look at how movements operate within artistic practices, understanding the political as well as the artistic not as separated fields but as operating within the confines of the same world. It is then that we can start to distinguish the potentiality of certain types of art forms and practices and carve up spaces to untangle the production of art from the demands of a productivist economy. 
 
The five roundtables will provide an opportunity to discuss processes of social transformation on the one-hand and culture-specific possibilities on the other. We will be looking at some of the strategies and directions that artists and cultural practitioners from the region have chosen to follow, the ways in which they took upon themselves the "necessary task of reinventing politics" to use the wording of philosopher Felwine Sarr – in the sense of 'reinventing the world and its form of social connection' and how this reinvention happens together – through different modes and modalities of collectivity and collaboration – forcing us to reconsider the ways in which art is created, produced, shared and sustained. 
 
We are witnessing a collective turn that is visible in many ways: more artistic processes tend to be participatory, nurturing attentivity to the communities they engage with; questions around institutional practices have prompted a renewal in structure and mission towards generosity; interdisciplinary methodologies involving artists and other professionals are now regarded and understood with the seriousness they deserve; a vested interest in understanding independence as a movement towards interdependence is especially visible within collectives as a way to pool resources and build sustainability; and finally the development of digital platforms allowing the creation of transnational spaces of resistance towards dominant narratives.

Live-Sessions

Impulse I

Impulse II

Impulse III

Impulse IV

Impulse V


 
ArtEvolution Impulses are curated by Marie-Nour Hechaimé

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