The Unhomely : Phantom Scenes in Global Society
2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, 2006
Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
26 October, 2006 – 08 January, 2007
Curator: Okwui Enwezor
Concept: Biacs2 will work closely with artists, filmmakers, playwrights, writers, theorists, and other individuals and organizations to create various sites for reflection, interaction, and critical dialogue. These sites will serve as forums to consider the situation of contemporary art today and artists engagement with a wide range of aesthetic, political, social, and cultural issues. These activities will unfold along a number of axes:
To begin, Biacs2 will occupy two main sites within the city of Seville: Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art (at the Monasterio de la Cartuja) and the Reales Atarazanas, an impressive shipbuilding structure dating to the mid 13th century, the new venue of this second edition. The exhibition will move across the Guadalquivir River to link the Isla de Cartuja with the historical centre. Both venues will show a rich collection of sculpture, painting, photography, film, video, and other large-scale installations by internationally renowned artists. Besides the CAAC and the Atarazanas, Biacs2 will seek to intervene directly in the public domain (with a bi-weekly Op-Ed project in the cultural supplement ABCD of the Spanish national newspaper ABC), in urban spaces in the street of the city: balconies, shop windows in the city centre and a bridge spanning the Guadalquivir River.
Continuing with Enwezors engagement with methods of dissemination of knowledge, the two main sites of the exhibition will be augmented by several collaborations between BIACS and cultural institutions based in the city and another in Tangier, Morocco.
Such a constellation prompts us to ask, What is the space of the Unhomely? To address this question, the exhibition therefore looks beyond the metaphor of the city to reflect upon the complex nature of adjacency and the asymptotic importance of residing next-to, outside-of, or with-in a given site, be it geographical, cultural, or political space. For example, how might we begin to evaluate the nuanced relationship between Northern Africa and Europe, as a problem space? If so, then how do artists, activists, thinkers and the public address, confirm or deny this?
One venue for this examination is a film festival staged in Tangier, Morocco in collaboration with the Cinémathèque de Tanger, planned for late autumn. Curated by Yto Barrada and Bouchra Khalili Under the title Among the Moderns, this Festival will not only address the complexity of the space existing between Europe and North Africa, but also provide a platform for further dialogue on the concept of neighbourliness. Films and videos produced by artists of different horizons (geographic and aesthetic), but who all work to redefine the representations produced on and from the Arabic World will be screened.