Hajra Waheed

As part of her short stay at Delfina Foundation, Hajra Waheed will talk about her work and latest exhibition at Green Cardamon, The Scrapbook Project. The evening will be moderated by Hammad Nasar (Green Cardamom) and hosted at Delfina Foundation on Friday, 3 February 2012 at 18:30. 

Screenings of short films by Fayçal Baghriche

To coincide with Fayçal Baghriche’s current residency at A.i.R Dubai, Delfina Foundation is showcasing four of his short films to kick-start a new film programme for 2012.

Fayçal Baghriche works with performance, photography, film and sculpture, examining everyday existence, behavioural forms and collective symbols. He often transforms the public realm into a venue for startling transgressions, absurd scenarios, and minimalist actions tinged with humour.  He has shaped an artistic practice that embodies a distinctive state of mind and triggers thoughtful critical reaction.

Point, line, particles (2008) 2 mins, 24 secs
In Point, line, particles the artist revisits the principles of formal composition, outlined by Wassily Kandinsky in his work entitled Point and Line to Plane (1926). In this book Kandinsky defines the line as the result of a combination of a point in movement and the expression of the force of an action. Fayçal Baghriche illustrates Kandinsky’s concept by choosing a train as a surface. At the moment the train departs, the artist begins to spray a point on the wagon’s surface by simply pressing down on the spray can’s valve. The resulting point becomes a line as soon as the train accelerates. Finally, the line disappears as the train reaches a speed at which the paint can no longer stick to its surface. Herewith the artist’s meager intervention reduces the train to its simple form and its elementary speed.

Labor market (2003) 2 mins 
The subway carriage is often a form of contemporary agora. It is a moving public place, which provides a captive audience for those wishing to transmit a message. This thoroughfare ‘stage’ is frequented by people-in-need who are asking for some kind of acknowledgement or help. Unable to find paid work, the artist chose this platform to propose his services, documenting his ‘pitch’ with a hidden film camera.

Le sens de la marche (Facing Forward) (2009) 5 mins, 15 secs
In the video Facing Forward time flows in reverse. Fayçal Baghriche stands immobile on a street corner; the artist appears as the only calm and poised figure in a world functioning backward. Nothing distinguishes him from the other individuals accept this immobility which places him at a distance from the rest. The impassive presence of the artist in the heart of this urban agitation leads us to ask what he is up to and how his intervention may disrupt the system.

Philippe (2008) 4 mins, 24 secs
In this work, the artist installs Philippe, a mannequin, at various tourist hot spots in Paris such as Le pont des Arts and outside the Louvre Museum. Baghriche dresses the statue from head to toe in a Tutankhamun costume, with a gold cape and mask. Onlookers mistake the statue for a motionless street performer, offering money to have their photographs taken with it. Later two tourists watch in disbelief as the artist then dismantles the mannequin to take it home.

Dates: 20 January – 29 February, 2012
Opening hours:  Monday to Friday, 10:00 – 18:00 or by appointment
Address: Delfina Foundation, 29 Catherine Place, London SW1E 6DY

*****Due to copyright complications between the artist and the original producers the film, The Message, will not be shown at Delfina Foundation until the matter is resolved. Please check back for further info.*****

For more information about Fayçal Baghriche and A.i.R Dubai please click here

A Discussion Panel: Participatory Art Practices at The National Portrait Gallery

Delfina Foundation's artists-in-residence Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Baptist Coelho discuss how participation and public engagement are elements of their practice. During their residency they are engaging with the communities and uncovering local histories around Battersea Park to develop new works, which will form the basis of their exhibition and programme at the Pump House Gallery in March 2012. Moderated by Hammad Nasar of Green Cardamom and curator George Unsworth.

This event is co-produced as part of the NPG's Chasing Mirrors exhibition.

National Portrait Gallery 
Ondaatje Wing Lecture Theatre 
Floor: minus 2
25th November 2011
19:00 - 20:00 (doors open at 18:45)

FREE EVENT

Speakers:

Nadia Kaabi-Linke (Tunisia/Russia) for more info please click here

Baptist Coelho (India) for more info please click here

George Unsworth is a curator of contemporary art and is currently conducting research towards an AHRC funded Phd at Central St. Martins College of Art, University of the Arts London. He is the director of Shaping Sculpture, the inter-college programme for University of the Arts aimed at revealing new methods of supporting current and future artistic practice, and is a co-founder of the East London gallery space AND/OR. His research examines spatial traditions surrounding contemporary art practices, aimed at illuminating alternative ways in which to consider and support processes of production. For more info please click here.

Hammad Nasar is a curator, gallerist and writer based in London. He is co-founder of the not-for-profit arts organisation Green Cardamom. Recent curatorial projects include Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh at the Whitechapel Gallery; Safavids Revisited at the British Museum; How Nations are Made at Cartwright Hall, Bradford and Manor House, Ilkley; Beyond the Page: Miniature as Attitude in Contemporary Art from Pakistan at the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, California; Drawn from Life at Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal; and the forthcoming Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, NY. For more info please click here.

The National Portrait Gallery, founded in 1856, is home to the largest collection of portraiture in the world, with works dating from the Middle Ages to the present day. With over 1,000 portraits on display visitors can come face to face with the people who have shaped British history and culture, from Elizabeth I and Charles Dickens to The Beatles and David Beckham by artists ranging from Holbein to Hockney. For more info on NPG please click here

This Autumn at the National Portrait Gallery take part in a range of free events as part of the Chasing Mirrors season, focusing on contemporary visual art and culture inspired by connections with the greater Middle East. See Chasing Mirrors: My Portrait, Shape by Shape, an installation of new work reflecting on portraiture and concepts of representation and identity, by British-Iraqi artist Athier Mousawi. For more info on Chasing Mirrors please click here.

This residency and forthcoming exhibition is in collaboration with: The Pump House Gallery and Creative India Foundation. The outcomes of Nadia and Baptist's residencies will be exhibited at The Pump House Gallery on 14 March - 20 May 2012

The Eighth Congress: The Curious Case of Europe

Looking at the world as a picture, questions posed, become surprised, as the figures in the picture move about, re-arranging the image of the world as we know it, and as the spectator demands. Looking at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris, Sarah Rifky will attempt to piece together what really happened when the Egyptian Delegation, who headed to the Eighth International Orientalist Congress in Stockholm, that same year, stopped for 18 days in Paris, and experienced Cairo in its spectacular appearance at the world exhibition. In the autumn of 2011, while on a research residency in London, serendipity strikes and Rifky meets an artist who gives an account of herself as 'the last Orientalist': Vanessa Hodgkinson. Describing their first encounter, Rifky says Hodgkinson, a young beautiful woman, was dressed as an Orientalist image of herself, had deliberately and in most theatrical fashion, fallen off her chair. Intrigued by this incident, Rifky follows Hodgkinson in conversation, and as it turns out, Hodgkinson, a living contemporary artist, had been present, over a century ago at the Eighth International Congress in Stockholm (1889). She had also stopped in Paris, en route to Sweden, to see the acclaimed erection of the Eiffel Tower.

Event at The National Portrait Gallery
Studio Gallery
11th November 2011
19:00 - 19:45

This event is co-produced as part of the NPG's Chasing Mirrors exhibition.

Sarah Rifky is a writer and curator (Townhouse, Cairo), and the first recipient of the DELFINA-FICA Research Fellowship residency in partnership with Iniva and Goldsmiths. Click here for more info.

Vanessa Hodgkinson (b.1982) lives and works in London. She studied History of Art at Cambridge University, Arabic at Kuwait University, Islamic Art at the Prince's School of Traditional Art, and is about to begin her Post-Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

Hodgkinson's practice is based on the rigorous training in traditional Islamic arts. But instead of following the expected religious or cultural framework of these modes, she infuses her work with the complexities of Orientalism, in both historical and contemporary contexts.

14 Proper Nouns with Hassan Khan and Nida Ghouse

14 Proper Nouns draws on a set of references from Hassan Khan's seminal work 17 and in AUC (2003). Every night, starting from 21 October 2011 and running till 3 November, one reference or 'proper noun' will serve as subject matter for a discussion between the artist and Nida Ghouse. 

For 17 and in AUC, Khan constructed a soundproofed one-way mirrored room in which he sat for four hours every night over two consecutive weeks. While drinking beer and smoking cigarettes he spoke to an audience he could neither see nor hear about his teenage years in the early nineties at the American University in Cairo. 

17 and in AUC – the transcriptions is a document published the following year of every audible word uttered by Khan during those 56 hours. The resulting text is a heady history of delirium in which words run on without commas or full stops. On the cover, Khan writes that "the decision to keep the unpunctuated flow of the spoken word was dictated by the interest of maintaining the rhythms and enigmas of a consciousness on the brink." With no account of intonation, this printed matter, this stuff of memory, insists on an investment from the reader who must then make up its rhythm in order to construct its sense.

Through the blur of this unpunctuated flow of letters, the uppercase appears, either for the first person pronoun 'I' or for proper nouns—a street, a bar, a song, a drug, a film, a filmmaker, a friend… a university department, a television icon, an avant-garde writer, a collaborative artwork—the list goes on. These capitalised words are significant, not just as elements that may have had some influence on him, but also, as symptoms of a landscape he says he was "part of, belonged to, and drank from." As source materials they suggest perspectives with which to address and situate an artistic practice as restless as Khan's.

A few lines of computer code were written to extract all the proper nouns from the transcriptions. 14 have been selected. The discussions at The Delfina Foundation will take these as starting points, and will each night focus on a different one. In approaching the transcriptions as a repository of memory, this series of events presents a structure to understand the artist's early beginnings. Many of these references have persisted in their importance and are relevant to him and his work even now. 14 Proper Nouns thus also delves into various aspects of Khan's practice, samples of which will surface through the course of this two-week process. These will include rarely seen early and incomplete works as well as other material such as notes, images, books, sketches, cassettes of recorded music.

The programme for the ʻproper nounsʼ is as follows:

Friday 21 October: Funhouse
a year in the house of bliss and loss

Saturday 22 October: Yassin El Tohamy
the munshid who made philosophical poetry as popular as coca-cola

Sunday 23 October: Egyptian TV
strategies learnt from the world's worst television

Monday 24 October: Pulmolar
a cough syrup that bent streets and made asphalt soft

Tuesday 25 October: John Cage
the tapes that came after reading silence

Wednesday 26 October: Attar
daily breakdowns at the theater workshop

Thursday 27 October: Midan Ramsis
paranoia and ecstasy with the crowd

Friday 28 October: Hendrix
a guitar becomes something else

Saturday 29 October: JC Auditorium
auteur cinema and the incredible power of the living moving face

Sunday 30 October: William Blake
how hell was made dense

Monday 31 October: Ard El Golf
making noise in bedrooms and on rooftops

Tuesday 1 November: Sherif
a friendship forged through a shifting lens

Wednesday 2 November: Cairo Atelier
the haunt of the corrupt intellectual

Thursday 3 November: English Literature
a university department with a seminar room

Please note that each event is limited to an intimate audience of 15 people, strictly by RSVP.  To reserve a seat, please email rsvp@delfinafoundation.com.

Nida Ghouse (b. 1982) is a writer and curator based in Bombay, India, and the first recipient of the DELFINA-FICA Research Fellowship residency in partnership with Iniva and Goldsmiths. 

Hassan Khan (b. 1975) is an artist, musician and writer who lives and works in Cairo. He has had solo shows at, amongst others, The Queens Museum (New York, 2011), Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris, 2011), Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (St. Gallen, 2010), Uqbar, (Berlin, 2008), Le Plateau (Paris, 2007) and Gasworks (London, 2006). Khan has also participated in Manifesta 8  (Murcia,  2010),  Yokohama  Trienniale  (2008), Gwangju Biennale  (2008),  Thessaloniki Biennale  (2007),  Sidney Biennale  (2006),  Seville  Biennale  (2006),  Torino  Trienniale (2005) and other international exhibitions. His album tabla dubb is available on the 100Copies label, and  he is also widely published in Arabic and  English. His text Nine Lessons Learned from  Sherif  El-Azma was  published  by  the  Contemporary  Image  Collective  (2009),  and  his artist  book 17 and  in  AUC  – the transcriptions was  published  by  Merz  and  Crousel  (2004). Khanʼs solo show The Twist comprising newly produced work is on at Objectif, Antwerp till 22 October 2011.

Hassan Khan will also be performing at the Showroom A short story based on a distant memory with a long musical interlude. Followed by the launch of the book Circular Facts. Thursday 20 October, 6.30pm. Please click here for more information.