Artists are invited to explore themes of relevance to the global remit of our activities, whilst addressing the local context of our focus areas. We produce exhibitions, talks, commissions and collaborations, showcasing global creativity to our UK-based audience.
Archive of events
© Jawad al Malhi, 2010
The Spacemakers - Edinburgh Art Festival
THE SPACEMAKERS
30 July - 24 August 2010
Edinburgh College of Art (Tent Gallery), Art Space & Nature, Edinburgh College of Art, Evolution House, 78 Westport, Edinburgh EH1 2LE: Mon – Fri, 10:00 – 17:00, Saturday: 11:00 – 17:00
sleeper, 6 Darnaway Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6BG: Mon – Fri: 10:00 – 17:00, Closed on Saturdays
With Taysir Batniji, decolonizing.ps (Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman), and Jawad al Malhi. Films and videos by Nikolaj Bendix, Hala Elkoussy, mounir fatmi, Bouchra Khalili, Judy Price, Basma Sharif and Solmaz Shahbazi.
The Delfina Foundation presents The Spacemakers, a group exhibition that explores artistic perspectives on the immediate challenges of creating a home, in some of today’s most diverse and harried urban landscapes.
The planning and construction of a home articulates personal needs as well as the necessity to improve on one’s general living circumstances. Ideals of a secure home of bodily comfort, and the creation of borders to protect them, significantly inform our social and spatial existences. Notions of home as personal space and as political territory are undeniably intertwined, and in urban areas throughout the world, the relationship between one and the "other" is also informed by spatial organisation strategies, led by economic and political decisions.
How do architecture and urbanism inform social infrastructures and cohesion? How do personal desires for the materiality of a home intersect with wider socio-political agendas and ideologies in the formation of urban landscapes?
Taking Palestine as its starting point and spanning examples from Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, Paris and the U.A.E., The Spacemakers offers a global measure of the immediate challenges of producing habitats in epicenters of social, economical or political tension.
The Spacemakers is taking place across two venues (Edinburgh College of Art – Tent Gallery and Sleeper). It is part of a biennial series of events produced by Beyond Borders Productions Ltd.
Related events:
Jawad al Malhi – Artist talk at Stills
Saturday 31 July, 12:00 – 13:00
Exhibiting artist Jawad al Malhi discusses his work.
Free
Stills, 23 Cockburn Street,
Edinburgh
Scotland
EH1 1BP, www.stills.org, tel: 0131 622 6200
Taysir Batniji – Artist talk at Stills
Saturday 31 July, 13:30 – 14:30
Exhibiting artist Taysir Batniji discusses his work
Free
Stills, 23 Cockburn Street,
Edinburgh
Scotland
EH1 1BP, www.still.org, tel: 0131 622 6200
Tashweesh – Performance
Thursday 5th August, 16:00
A performance-response to the themes of The Spacemakers exhibition, by Tashweesh (Basel Abbas, boikutt and Ruanne Abou-Rahme).
Tent Gallery, Edinburgh College of Art, Art Space & Nature Edinburgh College of Art, Evolution House, 78 Westport, Edinburgh EH1 2LE, Free, book directly with The Delfina Foundation: 0207 233 5344 or info@delfinafoundation.com. Limited free tickets available at the door.
Exhibition Tour
Friday 6th August, 13:00
An introduction of The Spacemakers with Curator Eva Langret, The Delfina Foundation.
Free
Tent Gallery, Art Space & Nature Edinburgh College of Art, Evolution House, 78 Westport, Edinburgh EH1 2LE
Nahed Awwad – The Fourth Room (2005) and 5 Minutes from Home (2008)
Saturday 21 August, 16:45
Two films by award-winning director Nahed Awwad
£6.90/£5.20 concessions, book directly with Edinburgh Filmhouse: 0131 228 2688
Edinburgh Film House, 88 Lothian Road, Edinburgh EH3 9BZ
Elia Suleiman – The Time that Remains (2009)
Saturday 21 August, 18:30
A semi-biographical film by award-winning director Elia Suleiman
£6.90/£5.20 concessions – book directly with Edinburgh Filmhouse: 0131 228 2688
Edinburgh Film House, 88 Lothian Road, Edinburgh EH3 9BZ
From the New Works series ©Jawad al Malhi
Jawad al Malhi - New Works
Exhibition: 11 June – 8 July 2010
Mon – Sat, 10:00 – 18:00, at The Delfina Foundation, 29 Catherine Place, London SW1E 6DY
Mon - Fri, 11:00 – 18:00, Sat 11:00 – 16:00, at The Mosaic Rooms, Tower House 226 Cromwell Road, London SW5 0SW
Jawad al Malhi’s work includes painting, photography, video and site-specific work and is preoccupied with the experience of marginalized communities and their relationship to space. Exhibited across two venues in London (The Delfina Foundation and The Mosaic Rooms), his New Works seek to produce alternative representations of Jerusalem, a city whose iconography has been exhausted by tourists and journalists alike.
Combining photography and video and taking archetypal, panoramic sightseeing vistas of Jerusalem as a starting point, Malhi’s large views of the city are held in slowly disintegrating ice. The frozen panels that are exhibited at The Delfina Foundation comment on the stagnant present of a city that once was a centre of cosmopolitan life. They capture Jerusalem’s remaining arteries of life and explore the contrast between the old city and life in the confines of near-by refugee camps.
Jawad al Malhi is a long time resident of Jerusalem. His New Works are intimately connected with his personal memories and evolve from a return to the sites of his childhood. He observes the cacophony of “voice-overs” that are projected onto the occupied city and highlight its somber reality. Caught between a construction ban and accumulating graveyards, Jerusalem gradually collapses under stratums of ideals, ideologies and mortality.
The works on show at The Mosaic Rooms pursue Jawad al Malhi’s exploration of marginal spaces. Since 2007, he has been documenting life in the refugee camps around Jerusalem, nights and days, across the seasons. The resulting body of work highlights the rapid transformation of the landscape prompted by the necessity to accommodate a growing Palestinian refugee population. The panoramic images act as testimonies of dislocation and document, at the margins of Jerusalem, a precarious daily life, paced by immobility and the monotonous potency of waiting.
Related events:
Exhibition Tour: Wednesday 16 June, 18:30, at The Mosaic Rooms. Led by Jawad al Malhi.
Artist talk: Tuesday 29 June, 18:30, at The Delfina Foundation. Jawad al Malhi in conversation with Dr. Tina Sherwell (International Academy of Art, Palestine).
About Jawad al Malhi
Jawad al Malhi was born in Jerusalem in 1969 and lives and works on the border of Shufat refugee camp. He received his MA in Fine Art from the Winchester School of Art, UK. In 2009, he was short-listed for the Frieze Foundation Cartier Award. Recent exhibitions include In the Middle of the Middle (curated by Catherine David at Sfeir-Semier Gallery, Beirut) No Man’s Land? (Gemak, The Hague), the Sharjah Biennal 09 and Palestine c/o Venice (Curated by Salwa Mikdadi, Venice Biennale, 2009). He is nominated for this year’s Prix Pictet and will be showing in Ground Floor America (curated by WHW) at Den Frie in Copenhagen.