New Vision Forum Node

Vision Forum is proud to launch a new node in collaboration with 98weeks and Assabil Libraries in Beirut. The project is called VOLUMES: Reactivating Lebanon’s Public Libraries and inserts artworks and performances by contemporary artists in public libraries across Lebanon. The project does so with the aim of investigating the potential of libraries as a site for artistic creation and production of knowledge. It sees that these underused places can host dialogues that inspires a critical dimension where it is direly needed. The project will encourage novel cultural creation in libraries in Beirut and across Lebanon through innovative artistic and critical interventions. Enriched by new activities and "site-specific VOLUMES” the library will be transformed into a participative forum that counteracts the country’s political and religious sectarianism which threatens dialogues of a true public dimension. For the project Lebanese and European curators will commission contemporary artists and critical thinkers from Lebanon and Europe according to the libraries' geographical location, collection history, and current use.

The group will commission 12 artists, writers and thinkers, both local and international, to develop a contribution to the library. This aims to directly engage artists and cultural actors to implement poetic aspects in the library that are textual, but also visual, conceptual or performance-based.

Click here to find out more.

OPEN CALL: CURATOR IN RESIDENCY

98weeks in Beirut is launching a new public programming initiative giving individuals, collectives or organizations the chance to develop a series of events focused on a chosen research theme. The curator in residency will develop public programming such as workshops, talks, exhibitions and performances over a 3 to 6 months period, in close dialogue with 98weeks’ work and operating model. The heterogeneity and eclecticism of 98weeks echoes ways of existing within the city, and provides an open space for artists and the public. In that sense, 98weeks is looking for proposals that can combine both flexibility and focused research work. There is no specific directive as to how the Project Space can be used, leaving it open to be utilized in different formats. Proposal themes that are in alignment with 98weeks’ research interests and work structure will be given priority. Topics 98weeks has been working with, structurally and thematically, include: feminism, resistance, publications, spatial practices, experimental writing, collaborative work, sound and reading. Stipends and resources are available.  For more information about 98weeks click here.

Email proposals to info@98weeks.net

Vision Forum wins prestigious Swedish Institute Grant

 

Vision Forum is proud to announce that we have been awarded a prestigious Creative Force grant from the Swedish Institute to develop a collaboration with Assabil Libraries and 98weeks in Beirut. More info here soon.

Natasha Rosling's Sound from Beirut

For the OuUnPo session in Lebanon Natasha Rosling took the group on a hypnotic journey through the Paris of the East. An amazing sound collage of the piece and an interview can be found on UK-based sound magazine Soundry's blog. Listen and experience more Beirut magic here. Get ready to breathe through your fingertips!

OuUnPo Lebanon

OuUnPo is a European research network made up of artists, curators and researchers. Together they travel to different cities and investigate a given problem in dialogue with local creators, nmuseums, art organisations, research centres, residency programs, and informal groups. With the enactment of Quantum Fluctuations in a Synechdochic Universe in Beirut, OuUnPo launches a 2-year itinerant research project on “Catastrophe & Heritage”. OuUnPonians and local participants will investigate how a catastrophe and a situation of crises embrace potentiality for creation, how architectural and cultural heritage contains the seeds for future developments. The diverse and multiple interactions of these notions will be witnessed, experienced, supposed, analyzed, contemplated, performed, discussed, contested, negated, emphasized in Tokyo (Spring 2013), Sweden (Fall 2013) and Sao Paulo (Spring 2014).


“In a mapped configuration of time-space, OuUnPo lands at a temporary shift in the magnitudes of entropy and gravity. It is one in a multitude and finds itself when the unknown starts. It is a twofold encounter, one contemporary with its participants, the other with an inhabitant of age, which you would call a distant future. What happens is only possible to seize in its aftermath. Recurrence of places is a possibility yet there will be no repetition. Guided by the uncertainty principle the encounters will unfold as moderate conditions are at hand. 


The synecdoche is your key to access a tropic space. The figure of speech involves an intermitted yet visionary perception. You speak as you articulate silence, as you subvert absence and presence. One part may stand in for the whole under circumstance as well as the whole can fit into the most modest detail. You presume what is real from that which that glances at you. The fictional is a reality and a posterior is already in there. It is a journey of wonders, where one cannot expect to trust all that is visible. You are on your own to collect resonances as you go along, to reconstruct a meaningful universe from a discontinuous landscape of fragments. Coincidences, recurrences, déjà vus. These are your way to a simultaneous understanding in the moment of life where time comes into place. You call it now, they call it history, we call it future.”


With OuUnPonians Yane Calovski, Klas Eriksson, Sara Giannini, Per Hüttner, Jacopo Miliani, Marco Pasi, Natasha Rosling, Claudia Squitieri, Samon Takahashi, Fatos Ustek, Stephen Whitmarsh; and Amanda Abu Khalil, Mounira Al Solh Mirene Arsanios, Marwa Arsanios, Seth Ayyaz, Monika Borgmann, Chaza Charafeddine, Lawrence Abu Hamdan,  Sandra Iché, Ilaria Lupo, Ghassan Maasri, Jean-Marc Nahas, Nora Razian, Karine Wehbe, Raed Yassin & many more...

Curated and organised by Sara Giannini & Fatos Üstek. 

More info and program here.