Overview

Four Interlocutors have been invited by Tohme to engage in an extended conversation with Sharjah, from specific sites within the broader region. Artist Kader Attia in Dakar, Senegal; curator Lara Khaldi in Ramallah, Palestine; Zeynep Oz in Istanbul, Turkey; and the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon.

These four Interlocutors will be working closely with researchers in the four cities, paired with counterparts in Sharjah. Together they will populate Chip-ship, a centralised digital storage space, housing various media, images, and texts, addressing the four keywords water, earth, crops and culinary. Each keyword also will correspond to a locality, which will host one of four consecutive programmes envisioned by the Interlocutors in Dakar around the theme of water; Istanbul around the theme of crops; Ramallah around the theme of earth; and Beirut around the theme of culinary. A yearlong online publishing platform will host articles, media and essays responding to the four keywords; four consecutive compendiums will be released coinciding with the start of each of the four off-site projects.

Dates

January 8, 2017:
Off-site project in Dakar.

May 13, 2017:
Off-site project in Istanbul.

August 10, 2017:
Off-site project in Ramallah.

October 14, 2017:
Off-site project in Beirut.

Dakar

8 – 9 January 2017
UCAD II, Salle Atelier

‘Long live the independence of water’ is a two-day workshop that considers the relationship between water and belief. Whether through the lens of tradition, animism, rational logic or contemporary thought, water has been vital to life and the subject of human fascination and inquiry for centuries. Water has been studied, explained and consumed endlessly. In this current era of amnesia overrun by human hubris, how is it possible to recall the maternal relationships between this fundamental element and all forms of life? Does this call for reinventing the very nature of culture – that which humanity created as it evolved, that which alienates and liberates it in equal measure.

For more information about this project, please click here.

Istanbul

3 May—10 June 2017
Abud Efendi Mansion
Istanbul

Sultanahmet, IstanbulTaking place in various locations across Istanbul, BAHAR [Spring] is the second of four off-site projects centred around Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj . SB13 curator Christine Tohme has invited Zeynep Öz to be the interlocutor who researches and dialogues with the keyword ‘crops’.

The project coincides with Turkey’s Hıdırellez festival, a celebration of the arrival of spring and revival of nature. Öz’s intervention follows the life cycle of seeds, exploring questions of dormancy and latency as well as states of pauses in our lives and sleep, and connects this cycle to a wider examination of the psychological, institutional and cultural.

For more information about this project, please click here.

Ramallah

10 August 2017
Ramallah

Organised by Lara Khaldi, Ramallah will host the third SB13 off-site project themed around the keyword ‘earth’. Khaldi’s ongoing research for the project examines relationships between poetic infrastructure and folktales, rumours and urban myths as well as other forms of collective poetic authorship and material infrastructure in Palestine, with a special focus on the underground.

For more information about this project, please click here.

Beirut

14 October 2017
Beirut

From 14 to 15 October, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan – the SB13 interlocutors of the culinary program - presents a weekend of discursive and performative activities, where talks, workshops, walks, cooking sessions and other events will explore the production and consumption of culinary heritage and how our eating habits condition and shape our psychological and cultural dispositions.

For more information about this project, please click here.