Port Cities: Meet the Artists
February 13, 2024
6:00 – 7:30pm
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Liverpool Arab Arts Festival in collaboration with Exhibition Research Lab is pleased to present Port Cities: Meet the Artists.
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Port Cities is a new international visual arts project presented by Liverpool Arab Arts Festival in partnership with the British Council. The exhibition will premiere at Liverpool Arab Arts Festival in July 2024 before travelling to Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia.
Mohamed Abdelkarim, Laila Hida, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, and Siska are currently on a research residency in Liverpool for the project. This will inform the development of new artwork exploring the social, historical and cultural complexities of port cities in Liverpool, as well as those within the Middle East and North Africa region.
This talk will introduce their artistic practices and interests ahead of the exhibition later in the year.
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Mohamed Abdelkarim (1983) lives and works between Cairo, Rotterdam, and Vienna, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste.
Abdelkarim’s works have been included in the Sharjah Biennial 11, 2013, Guild Master of Cabaret Voltaire, Manifesta 11, 2016, Live Works Performance Act Award Vol. 5, IT, 2017 and Berlinale 72/Forum Expanded, 2022. He has also received the Prix Excellence HES-SO in Switzerland 2016, and has been shortlisted for the Henrike Grohs Art Award 2022.
Abdelkarim’s practice is performance-oriented. He considers performance as a research method and a practice that reflects on performative acts such as narrating, singing, detecting, doing, fictioning, and speculating, which embody various forms across performance, installation, film, sound, paintings, and encounters. His current umbrella project focuses on the agency of the landscape as a witness to “a history we missed and a future we have not yet attended.”
Nadia Kaabi-Linke was born in Tunis, Tunisia, in 1978, and raised in Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. She graduated from the University of Fine Arts, Tunis, in 1999, and earned a Ph.D. at Université Paris-Sorbonne, in 2008.
Growing up between Tunis, Kyiv, and Dubai, and now residing in Berlin and Kyiv, Kaabi-Linke has a personal history of migration across cultures and borders that has greatly influenced her work. Her works give physical presence to that which tends to remain invisible, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape them.
Using a variety of materials and methods, Kaabi-Linke often works in-situ on projects that relate directly to their exhibition sites. She has rendered visible the bodily traces of people waiting at Berlin bus shelters and subway stations, the scars of domestic violence victims in London, and paint chips scraped from city walls throughout North Africa and Europe. have often served as the impetus for Kaabi-Linke’s endeavours.
Siska was born in Beirut and resides primarily in Berlin. He holds a Master’s degree in Film and Audiovisual Arts from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. A key figure in the early Beiruti graffiti scene, Siska has also produced and performed music as part of the Lebanese Hip Hop group Kitaa Beirut.
A large part of his practice involves archiveology, examining sociopolitical narratives in relation to personal and collective memories. It is common for his work to take the form of extended cinema where he applies cinematic codes as well as film language in order to explore various visual narrative techniques.
At the Haus der Statistics in Berlin in August-2021, he co-curated a series of conversations, films, readings, and live performances as the artistic director of redeem, a platform for ongoing conversations between voices from Beirut in Berlin. Siska has also collaborated on numerous performance and music productions, taking a midway point between his career as a visual artist and musician.
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All our events are free and open to all, but booking is required for this event. Tickets can be booked here.
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