Online Talk

• Sat 17 07 2021 / 6 – 7:30 pm •
Hands: dismemberance


with MADHUSREE DUTTA, IMAN MERSAL, ALA YOUNIS

Madhusree Dutta, curator and artistic director of the ADKDW, speaks with Ala Younis, artist and co-curator of the exhibition HANDS: an art campaign, and the poet Iman Mersal about their collaboratively developed video installation Hands: dismemberance. The work serves as a manifesto for the whole exhibition project: Iman Mersal writes on how broken, aged, deformed and replaced memories of solidarity can appear. Juxtaposed over drawings that imagine body parts as landscape, the video borrows gestures from Baghdad’s Liberty Monument (1961) made by Jewad Selim (1919–1961).

Is it not paradoxical that the cultural nature of hands, characterized by a diversity of practices and meanings, is at risk of atrophy and being marginalized due to the current pandemic? This raises the issue of a therapeutic dimension: what role do artists occupy in light of an imminent social depression?

Online via Zoom and Facebook
Language: English
Participation is free of charge