Under the same sky - Patterns and other beings. Intervention in the exhibition "Dialogue among guests"
23 April 2024Under the same sky - Patterns and other beings
The Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, an institution of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, is presenting the exhibition “Dialogue among guests - The Damascus Room in Dresden invites" in the Japanisches Palais. This presentation explores the possibilities and conditions of hospitality and is designed as an open process of polyphony. The museum has invited participants in the master's program "Cultures of the Curatorial" at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig to engage in dialogue and further develop the existing permanent exhibition.
With the intervention "Under the same sky - Patterns and other beings", the students comment on the current presentation of the Damascus Room from different perspectives. The lavishly decorated wood paneling of a Damascene house bears visible and invisible traces of history(ies). There are obvious patterns, such as the intricate ornaments of the painted interior walls. At the same time, implicit patterns are hidden: patterns of presentation, interpretation, and mediation. The intervention was curated by the students and aims to break existing patterns by engaging with contemporary artistic positions and to pause in order to contemplate and subsequently explore new ways of thinking, interpreting, and discussing (about) them. It focuses on the search for other perspectives and future forms of communal living. The instructions handed out at the entrance already suggest different and personalized ways of perceiving the Damascus Room. The room will be opened up for contemporary artistic debates and discussions and will present sound, video, and other installations that explore architecture, infrastructure, memory, and identities.
With its interventionist installations, the exhibition changes the view of the present by focusing on architecture, infrastructure, and the question of memory and identity(ies). The sound installation by Fronte Violeta & Martha Kiss Perrone in the stairwell immediately grabs attention upon entering the room. The artists use sound as a tool of an immaterial infrastructure based on repetition and patterns. In addition to a series of existing photographic portraits, the video of the Haneen Choir, a Syrian women's collective that sings together on International Women's Day, is staged in such a way as to resonate with the viewer and enables them to examine multiple perspectives on the Syrian reality of life. Qusay Awad interacts with the space through his installation, creating multisensory narratives and exploring themes such as memory, identity, and displacement. His intervention is a work in progress and will be developed over time, with another part of his intervention being added to the exhibition at the end of May. Esraa Dayrwan reads passages by the Damascene author Ghada Al Samman that reflect on women's liberation struggles, juxtaposing images of artists and writers with those of anonymous women. The video documentation of a performance ritual by Nagham Hammoush focuses on the Mesopotamian deity of love, war, and fertility - Ishtar. Ossama Shalgheen presents a queer approach to a female social norm from Southeast Asia and offers a new perspective on the traditional perception of gender roles. Zina Dayoub's video installation - an abstract excerpt from her daydreams - portrays manifestations of physical relationships to space and memory. Displacement and precarity are also the key themes of the installation by KIM/ILLI, which is deliberately placed in the showcases of the ethnographic museum. Their position, which examines the exploitation of labor, bureaucracy, and the undocumented status of people, can be interpreted as a proposal to name the makers of the wooden panels of the Damascus Room and to question their anonymity. "International Cloud Archive Vol. 1" by Mirjam Kroker captures the fleeting patterns of the sky. In it, Kroker archives ephemeral clouds without using a traditional classification system. Kroker's work, "Where does hospitality take place?" proposes a renegotiation of hospitality in the current context of polycrisis: Is it possible that the sky, conceived as a boundless communal whole, can provide new impulses for the museum? And which beings, i.e., contributing forces such as people or things, need to be taken into account?
Artists: Qusay Awad, Zeina Dayoub, Esraa Dayrwan, Nagham Hammoush, Haneen Choir, KIM/ILLI, Mirjam Kroker, Ossama Shalgheen, Fronte Violeta & Martha Kiss Perrone
Curators: Alem Kolbus, Alexandra Trost, Amelie Lill, Ammar Hatem, Anastasia Shestak, Clarissa Aidar Oliveira, Elena Grimbs, Hanna Gebert, Helene Otto, Iana Gaponenko, Juness Beshir, Miriam Trostorf, Raphael Bruning, Rebekka Rinner, Theresa Weber, Ulrike Riebel, Victoria Langmann
The project is a cooperation between the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, the State Ethnographic Collections Saxony, and the American University of Beirut, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service. This project is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget approved by the Parliament of the Free State of Saxony.
Opening hours daily 10 a.m. - 6 p.m., Mondays closed
