Meeting Point 6: Locus Agonistes - Practices and Logics of the civic

Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels

02.10.2011 - 18.12.2011

 

Argos welcomes Meeting Points 6: Locus Agonistes – Practices and Logics of the Civic, a transnational multidisciplinary event curated by Okwui Enwezor and initiated by The Young Arab Theatre Fund (Brussels). After its launch in Beirut in April 2011, both KVS and Argos host the second stop of this event that will tour historical cities in the Arab World (Amman) and Europe (Berlin, Athens).

The collapse of the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and the tottering regimes in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have further exposed the urgent civic and political demands of diverse populations across the entire Middle East. While the events of change, transformation, and renewal move beyond the frontier of reform, new horizons of the future are already being imagined and constructed. Through its exhibitionary, performative and discursive aspects, the artists that take part in Locus Agonistes explore aesthetic strategies and ways in which contemporary representations advance concepts of civic imagination and struggle. These contemporary art practices, politics and transformations are as much responding to the resistance movements in the Middle East, as they are engaging with other diverse global antagonisms, including the global crisis of representation on the political, economical, social and artistic level. “Today the situation of the struggle between civic forces cannot be localized in one particular part of the world. Nor can the effects of popular disenchantment be confined within specific contemporary practice,” states Okwui Enwezor. Therefore Meeting Points, as usual, is not simply limited to the presentation of Arab artists but takes their contemporary practices as its starting point. (TAEF/ IS / RQ)

Participating artists in the exhibition at Argos include Adel Abdessemed, Saâdane Afif, Doa Aly, Allora & Calzadilla, Tarek Atoui, Stan Douglas, Radhouane El Meddeb, Mounir Fatmi, Mona Hatoum, Bouchra Khalili, Sandra Madi, Basim Magdy, Rima Maroun, Selma & Sofiane Ouissi, Tino Sehgal and Jalal Toufic.

For this project, Argos received a special support from the Brussels Capital Region. Meeting Points 6: Locus Agonistes – Practices and Logics of the Civic is a multidisciplinary event initiated by The Young Arab Theatre Fund (Brussels). Meeting Points 6 is organized in coproduction with Argos Centre for Art and Media (Brussels), Beirut Art Center (Beirut), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Royal Flemish Theatre (Brussels), La Société l’Art Rue (Tunis), Makan Art Space (Amman), Onassis Cultural Center (Athens), Opera House (Damascus) and The Townhouse Gallery (Cairo).

 

Brussels, October 2011