future

A Gazan Memory for Forgetting

For Mahmoud Darwish, while memory serves as a tool of resistance against the erasure of existence, it also represents another form of symbolic death for identity and history. This is because it enforces a kind of stagnation and immersion in old pain, trapping the individual in a cycle of grief and reflection on past losses. In his reading of "Memory for Forgetfulness," Ra'ad Abu Sa'ada questions, as a Gazan, the role of memory in the ongoing Palestinian struggle and in the collective Israeli identity, with a view toward the Holocaust, the besieged Beirut of 1982, and Gaza today.

Endeavors to Forget: Bedouin Resilience and Desert Sustainability Vs the Israeli State’s Contemporary Colonialist Sculpture

Large piles of rubble that remain after acts of destruction and forced displacement appear like temporary, monumental manifestations of “Contemporary Colonialist Sculpture.” They stand out in stark contrast to the lightweight and versatile construction used by the Bedouins, which it seeks to supplant, and as a tangible embodiment of the violent act of erasure and enclosure. The Common View collective learns from the Naqab/Negev Bedouins’ adaptability and resilience towards an alternative, equitable futures.

Palestinian Collective Memory: Present-Oriented and Forgotten

For Palestinians living in historic Palestine and for those referred to as "Palestinian refugees," the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 never ended. This memory shapes Palestinian identity, but is it a lack of narrative that has existed for decades? Nour Saed analyzes factors inhibiting Palestinian society from investing in the arts while emphasizing the importance of storytelling and documenting a national experience versus forgetfulness.

Disappearing Cities: Beirut and Berlin

A one-night event in Berlin this February brought Charlotte Bleicher to ruminate about the relationship between two cities - Beirut and Berlin. She writes about processes of cultural loss taking place in both cities, and about artistic acts of defiance against this disappearance.

A Call to Preserve Memory Through a Future Gaze

How is Palestine represented in contemporary art, and how do Palestinian artists deal with the notions of memory and the past? Larissa Sansour raises in her work many questions concerning ideas of sanctity, homeland, and memory, in a manner that helps turning them into an illusion. In an analytical review and an in-depth critical gaze, scholar Housni Alkhateeb Shehada presents a broad picture of the place, the dialogue, the memory, and the conflict the figures are experiencing in the work recently presented by Sansour, in the Danish Pavilion, at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Resurrection After All: Russian Cosmism as an Intellectual History Project

Russian Cosmism is the subject of the widely-exhibited film trilogy by Anton Vidokle, which traces, or better, resurrects the presence of Cosmist ideas in post-Soviet art, engineering, and architecture. Alma Mikulinsky reviews the films' installment in an artist-run space in Toronto, as well as the theoretical corpus that has been developed around the subject in the last four years.

The Need for a New Revolution

The 6th Athens Biennale expressed the need for an urgent new self-identification of the confused contemporary community, either in local or in international terms - an urgent need of a new “revolution” that would define the 21st century. Christos Paridis writes about the exhibition, which he describes as an adult playground for those who are seeking questions or answers to present and future nightmares.

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