The Political Imagination of Art: Artist Solidarities and Museums in Exile
On Friday, 25 October 2024, ASAP | art organised a conversation with Kristine Khouri, joined by Rasha Salti in the Q&A, on Past Disquiet, an archival and documentary exhibition which has been touring the world since 2015. Based on extensive and dynamic research conducted since 2008 by curators Kristine and Rasha, the exhibition decenters the art historical canon by bringing to the fore elided art histories, intermedia and exhibitionary practices, in particular, transnational solidarity networks that emerged from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine held in Beirut in 1978—a political gesture intended as a future museum for a future state, temporarily exiled in Beirut.
The discussion considered how this form of support for a free Palestine would spark the creation of three other “museums in exile,” which strove to struggle for the liberation of the Nicaraguan people, positioned itself against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and brought renewed attention to the apartheid regime in South Africa. By intervening in the process of canon-formation in the context of material and ideological contestation, these museums became crucial for the very development of historical consciousness and subjectivity.
Tracing threads from Beirut, Baghdad, Rome, Paris, Venice, Santiago, Tokyo and Cape Town amongst others, the curators use the grammar of Scheherazade’s frame tale to tell stories of one thousand and one artists and militants who had the courage to create the world they were fighting for: a world without walls. In the discussion, the curators took us to a time not so long ago, when artists became revolutionaries, cultural workers were active members of political outfits, and exhibitions acted as spaces for fostering partisan attachments and solidarities. In the context of the present occupation of the region, Khouri and Salti reflected upon modes of artistic solidarity and the meaning of archiving histories of resistance amidst unfathomable loss.
Recalling India’s own commitments to the non-aligned movement and a Third Worldism that encouraged collective action following from the 1955 Bandung Conference, Khouri and Salti’s focus on artists’ grassroots collectives and unions, and their involvement in the anti-imperialist movements between the 1960s and 1980s is also a reminder that the past is not over, the future is not past, and the time for political imagination and action–in and through art—is “now.”
Kristine Khouri is a researcher with a background in Arab cultural history and art history. Her interests focus on the history of arts circulation, collection, exhibition and infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa as well as archival practice and knowledge dissemination. She is a member of the board of the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut.
Rasha Salti is a writer, researcher, and curator of art and film. She has co-curated several film programs, including, with Jytte Jensen, Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s until Now (2010–12), at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She was one of the co-curators of the tenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial in 2010.
Khouri and Salti are researchers and curators of Past Disquiet, and co-editors of Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity, and Museums in Exile (2018).
(Featured image: Material from Toshio Satoh's Archive, Japan. Image courtesy of the author.)
