The 7th edition of Meeting Points is a series of successive exhibitions, taking place from September 2013 to June 2014 in several cities of Europe, Asia and the Arab World: Zagreb, Antwerp, Hong Kong, Moscow, Beirut, Cairo and Vienna. In comparison with previous versions of Meeting Points, this sequence of exhibitions takes a step out of the Arab World – in terms of the cities where they take plac
e, the list of participating artists and the general stance to refrain from national or regional representation. This is very much to do with timing. The process of organising Meeting Points 7 coincided with the aftermath of the popular rebellion that has been shaking the Arab World since 2011, and also with the rise of various other social movements across the world. The last two years have been a time of intense public discussion about the existing social and economic system. The title of this exhibition is a quote from the revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth, written in 1961 as a reflection on Algeria’s liberation from French colonial rule, whose title, in turn, quotes the opening lines of the Internationale, the song of the world workers’ movement. As an exhibition title, the phrase Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks refers only indirectly to Fanon’s analysis of the passage from colonialism to neo-colonialism and the transformation of anti-colonial revolutionaries into the administrators of a post-colonial order, but it does use his insight to assess the role of middle classes in today’s movements and configurations, including the new globalised class of artists, curators and intellectuals. Similarly, the ‘wiles and tricks’ make us think of the many creative counterstrategies for exposing, recycling and subverting oppressive infrastructures, which have erupted in recent protests and uprisings and forged new alliances between political activism and aesthetic gestures. Yet the exhibition itself is not an attempt to highlight or archive these outstanding episodes of our time. ‘Wiles and tricks’, rather, allude to the ever-shifting ground of complex, unfinished social processes that we see in the Arab revolutions and in the current radical reconfiguration of capitalist development throughout the world. Curators: What, How & for Whom/WHW
Organized by: Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF)
Contact.