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The Forum Artists-in-Residence Programme (F.A.R), inaugurated in 2005, resulted from the co-operation between two cultural organizations, Action Field Kodra, which has undertaken the implementation of the programme, and Forum European Cultural Exchanges, that has undertaken the planning and curating. more
Borderlines 2005
The experience of living in a place surrounded by division lines is a contradictory condition with respect to the sense of freedom inherent in the artistic act. It is an opposing force to the need of communication beyond any prescribed territorial, ideological or language limits. Boundary lines, as a theme, sets the challenge to the artists invited to illustrate various forms of transcending the division imposed by current political social and cultural realities. During program, a real action of creative co-existence will be experienced through the proposals made by the artists, thus revealing that “utopia” becomes a real topos in the field of art. |
Artist-in-Residency program: |
Anisa AshkarAshkar’s work builds on the conventions of body and performance art that first came to the fore in the late 1960s and 1970s, when artists rebelled against traditional conventions of exhibition in museums and galleries and sought to erase the separation between art and life. For women artists, especially, transforming their own bodies into both the objects and subjects of their artwork became an act of both aesthetic and political liberty.
Using her body as her primary medium is a complex act for Ashkar: “I am very sensitive and makeup is like a mask that shields your face; yet showy makeup is considered non-modest for a Muslim woman. It is simultaneously a form of seduction, confrontation, and provocation. I use kahal, traditional eye makeup made of ground pigment that is reminiscent of decorative tattoos and thus self-mutilation –Islam, like Judaism, forbids tattooing one’s body. My work always treads the thin line between protecting and hurting myself.” [...] Language is something that constantly preoccupies Ashkar: “I live simultaneously in Hebrew and Arabic, and one language is always intruding upon the other,” she tells me (…). "The act of translation is important to my work. I want people to ask themselves why they need it. When I first performed “Black Swan” at art school, I didn’t distribute any written translation. It was a response to the absence of signs in Arabic, which exist elsewhere in the college – as if Arabs don’t study art." Interpreting the writing on her face isn’t always easy for an Arab audience either. Sometimes she uses mirror writing so that people are forced to ask her about its meaning. Other times, she admits, she writes one thing and translates another, testing her audience’s degree of understanding. “Writing on my own body means I feel free to do what I want,” Ashkar says. “There is no censor other than myself – but I am a good censor.” [...] “Do you identify yourself as a Palestinian artist?” I ask Ashkar (…). “I never heard those two words strung together until I went to art school, where I was immediately identified with them without using them myself,” she says. “On the one hand, I felt a kind of fearful excitement –was I about to become responsible for something larger than myself? At the same time I felt like I was being defined through yet another stereotype. (...) How I describe myself is an ongoing dilemma. My work deals with women in general, and Arab women in particular. My political identity and my identity as a woman go hand in hand. But I only want to represent myself, Anisa, without generalizations.” Excerpts from Talya Halkin’s article “Facing Off”, Jerusalem Post, 17 October, 2003 |
Former Military Camp Kodra
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Christodoulos PanayiotouSlow Dance Marathon
Christodoulos Panayiotou opens a slow dance Marathon in Kalamaria, Thessaloniki, on August 27th, 2005. A series of couples slow-dance to the melodic music of some immortal hit songs for 24 consecutive hours on an improvised stage and under evocative lighting. The Slow Dance Marathon does not end at the place where it starts. The performance acquires its completed form as a proposal for its limitless repetition at different places and times. Indeed, this is a repetition Marathon of a specific attitude towards art and life. Educated in the broader field of co-operation among arts, with studies in fine arts, dance, theater and performance, Panayiotou investigates the sources of twentieth century art in the field of familiar emotional reality. He creates points of fusion for the different expression media in a common language, which function as meeting areas for emotion and intellect, as theatrical stages where we see representations of alternative behavioral types that the individual exhibits in life and in art. The slow dance is the starting point of a Marathon, which aims at violating the measures of a whole life system, based on the overwhelming effort to go beyond the highest level each time. In Panayiotou’s Slow Dance Marathon the goal is not achieved through accelerating the rate of representation. On the contrary, time stops with the repetition of an expression type. He adopts the old practice of dance Marathons, particularly popular in the 1920s and 1930s, as a field of transformation for the aesthetics of conquest and excellence. In those exhibitions, which according to descriptions differ very little from the cruel combats of a Roman arena, the goal was to surpass the limits of physical endurance to an extreme degree. The competitive spirit of dance Marathons at the beginning of the twentieth century was identical to the prevailing value of modernism, which ideally aimed at record breaking, in whatever sector of productive life, at the cost of destroying physical and intellectual powers to a violent degree and without inhibitions regarding the simultaneous ethical degradation of the contestants. In contrast, Panayiotou’s Slow Dance Marathon is a display of love for the human being and the human body. Using a few movements and simple media, he directs a gesture in space and time, where measure is the minimum shift in behavior, which is repeated indefinitely through the succession of different couples. The embrace of two different-sex bodies, which slowly and rhythmically sway to the sensually nostalgic melody of a song about love, pain and the pleasure of life, is a behavioral model. No violence or violation of the measure of human endurance colors this Marathon. On the contrary, the time of desire to become familiar with the other body and get in tune with the various movement rhythms expands. It’s so simple. With a repeated embrace, Slow Dance Marathon touches upon a great range of sensitivities, without distinctions among different social classes, ages or cultural origins. Through the slow tuning of the two moving bodies, which can unreel perpetually, he dares to arouse the feeling of man’s primal need for union, the elimination of loneliness, the abolition of competitiveness, which aims at the predominance of one man. The Slow Dance Marathon is set up as a live representation of a collective dream and desire for the beauty of embracement between the sexes, by turning its back to the violence of antagonism. The transgression inside art is embraced by eliminating the current value we put on the artificial nature of the elaborate and redundant. Efi Strousa Art critic, Curator, President, AICA Hellas Slow Dance Marathon was later presented in many venues:
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Former Military Camp Kodra
Tel Aviv (5-7 April 2006), Curated by Tal Ben Zvi
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Joseph DadouneChanti
The film explores systems of attraction-rejection toward the body, as well as power and authority relations between different types of masculinity. The artist addresses Western stereotypes and their fictions concerning the sexual “nature” of Mizrahi masculinity and the latter’s social construction as an embodiment of the other; a product of fantasies, passions, and anxieties – masculinity which is perceived as primitive, brute, and violent. The main scene in Chanti features a brutal, humiliating, violent male ritual, thrice repeated: a band of dark skinned musclemen abuses a lean youth whose upper body is exposed. They lay him down, touching and pulling his body organs, blowing/ejaculating puffs of thick cigarette smoke at his face to the point of stupor in a sexual act of passion and loathing between victimizer and victim, which grows more and more violent, a near-rape with a homoerotic dimension. Dadoune thus converses with gender images of political correctness and with macho rituals and initiation rites prevalent in Israeli military culture. Nature takes part in the oppression, and the desert scenes become loud, vociferous, contrast to which it generates its official discourse. “Zionist phallic masculinity is constituted through the force of exclusion of the queer, the (homo)eroticized Mizrahi and the Palestinian male ‘others’.'' Thus, through the physical and sexual perspective in recurring rituals, Dadoune addresses mechanisms of power, domination and subordination, exploring arrays of authority and obedience. Projected simultaneously on two screens placed back-to-back, the pictures and sounds incessantly switching between the screens, the viewer is forced to physically-sensorially experience the dichotomies and contradictions presented in the film, while constantly moving between the projections which prevent viewing the entire picture at one time. |
Former Military Camp Kodra
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Zehra SonyaIn the last few years Zehra Sonya has been working with light. In her work, the space accepting her art work is, also, the place for reconciliation between natural reality and the artist’s spiritual being. Her installations with the bright boxes or the light items made of light-weight materials, transparent paper, tulle etc., establish new relations between the borders of the given architecture of any space and introduce the spectator to an environment of evocative atmosphere, structured with continuous passages from darkness to light.
Her formative education in sculpting had early enough turned her attention to the plastic quality of light. She showed extreme sensitivity in making light the tool with which she started to intervene in the natural environment, and gave the meaning of meta-plastic energy within the structured environment to the language of sculpture. Zehra Sonya’s bright items function as light points, as fields where shapes, figures and pictures are formed, where primary fabrications spring from a natural and intellectual energy that is concentrated in a point. Her item space is both microscopic and macroscopic in relation to the rest of the environment, where they stand. From inside each light box the picture is seen in the process of appearing, as if it is still at some remote formation point of infinity. At the same time, the sum of bright signs she puts up in space multiply the connecting points among the light points, thus creating a place where multiple forms of life, both unconnected and different, form an energy field that may have no boundaries. In reality, she seems to construct a series of counterpoints among different bright points, which give a new spiritual identity to architectural space. Having light as a tool, Zehra Sonya offsets the roots of an attitude opposite creative action, which are connected to the value of inner search. The contrasts and differences of the materials and intellectual elements that form the artistic language compose the base on which the process of their reconciliation or collision acquires intellectual substance in each art work. As far as she is concerned, language is a means of trasporting cultural perceptions and interpretations on the contrasts of reality. Using the light she forms the picture of the deeper meaning of life we meet in oriental thinking, in which the unity of differences and, mainly, of contrasts is the essence of philosophy. The vital importance of light presupposes the passage from darkness. Respectively, western thought has approached the subject of contrasts from many sides, underlining the appearance of unity within contrasts, as these exist in many structures of western culture: Heraclites’ axiom about the mutability of elements that lead to “everything is one” – Oedipus bringing to light the holy and unholy in his search for the truth which ends up in tragedy and redemption at the same time – the temple, which, according to Heideger, belong the architectural structure is the place where the relation between “birth and death, misfortune and good luck, victory and disgrace, perseverance and collapse” is established – while the light becomes building material in Byzantine architecture and unites the celestial world with the earthly one...All of these and many more light points in thought both in the east and in the west reveal the power of creation through the comprehension of contrasts as the ingredients of the search for unity. Zehra Sonya’s bright work, a product of a daring course between the unlimited energy of her inner world and her experience from her limited action due to the social reality in which she lives, in Northern Cyprus, acquires ecumenical significance within the global political scene of our modern world, where awareness of the light inside the unity of contrasts is still blacked out. Efi Strousa Art critic, Curator, President, AICA Hellas |
Former Military Camp Kodra
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Presentation in Strasbourg, FranceThe Artists-in-Residence Program and the works produced during the 2005 Program by the four participating artists, Anisa Ashkar (Palestinian), Joseph Dadoune (Israeli), Zehra Şonya (Turkish-Cypriot) and Christodoulos Panagiotou (Greek-Cypriot), were exhibited in Strasbourg, at Rhine Palace and the Oberlin Waldersbach Museum, thanks to the co-operation between Apollonia European Art Exchanges, ArtBOX, Forum and F.A.R.
Palais du Rhin,
Strasbourg, France
In 2006, F.A.R. was presented in the Periphery of Alsace (France) as a model for cultural development. The presentation was organized by Apollonia, co-initiator of Forum European Cultural Exchanges.
Anisa Ashkar, Joseph Dadoune, Christodoulos Panayiotou and Zehra Sonya presented their works produced during the residency in Thessaloniki. The initiative taken by Action Field KODRA to adopt and promote the Artists-in-Residence Programme in a systematic and organized manner, today expresses a first pilot model of international cultural policy in Greece, which is promoted and implemented by local authorities in collaboration with a private cultural entity of a non-profit nature, which is already internationally acclaimed.
In May 2006 the Mayor of Kalamaria presented the Artists-in-Residence Programme as a pilot programme – model of local cultural development for the municipalities of Alsace (France), during the meeting “Cultural Projects and Peripheral Development in Europe” (Strasbourg, 18-19/05), in the framework of the events “Artistes ici et ailleurs. Une dynamique pour les territories” (:Artists here and there. A dynamic for the territories). During the same series of events, the Artists-in-Residence Programme of the Municipality of Kalamaria and the works produced during the 2005 Programme by the four participating artists -Anisa Ashkar (Palestinian), Joseph Dadoune (Israeli), Zehra Şonya (Turkish-Cypriot) and Christodoulos Panagiotou (Greek-Cypriot)- were exhibited in Strasbourg, at Rhine Palace and the Oberlin Waldersbach Museum, thanks to the co-operation between the cultural agencies apollonia, european art exchanges and F.A.R. The initiative taken by Action Field KODRA to adopt and promote the Artists-in-Residence Programme in a systematic and organized manner, today expresses a first pilot model of international cultural policy in Greece, which is promoted and implemented by local authorities in collaboration with a private cultural entity of a non-profit nature, which is already internationally acclaimed.
In May 2006 the Mayor of Kalamaria presented the Artists-in-Residence Programme as a pilot programme – model of local cultural development for the municipalities of Alsace (France), during the meeting “Cultural Projects and Peripheral Development in Europe” (Strasbourg, 18-19/05), in the framework of the events “Artistes ici et ailleurs. Une dynamique pour les territories” (:Artists here and there. A dynamic for the territories). During the same series of events, the Artists-in-Residence Programme of the Municipality of Kalamaria and the works produced during the 2005 Programme by the four participating artists -Anisa Ashkar (Palestinian), Joseph Dadoune (Israeli), Zehra Şonya (Turkish-Cypriot) and Christodoulos Panagiotou (Greek-Cypriot)- were exhibited in Strasbourg, at Rhine Palace and the Oberlin Waldersbach Museum, thanks to the co-operation between the cultural agencies apollonia, european art exchanges and F.A.R. The initiative taken by the Municipality of Kalamaria to adopt and promote the Artists-in-Residence Programme in a systematic and organized manner, today expresses a first pilot model of international cultural policy in Greece, which is promoted and implemented by local authorities in collaboration with a private cultural entity of a non-profit nature, which is already internationally acclaimed.
In May 2006 the Mayor of Kalamaria presented the Artists-in-Residence Programme as a pilot programme – model of local cultural development for the municipalities of Alsace (France), during the meeting “Cultural Projects and Peripheral Development in Europe” (Strasbourg, 18-19/05), in the framework of the events “Artistes ici et ailleurs. Une dynamique pour les territories” (:Artists here and there. A dynamic for the territories). During the same series of events, the Artists-in-Residence Programme of the Municipality of Kalamaria and the works produced during the 2005 Programme by the four participating artists -Anisa Ashkar (Palestinian), Joseph Dadoune (Israeli), Zehra Şonya (Turkish-Cypriot) and Christodoulos Panagiotou (Greek-Cypriot)- were exhibited in Strasbourg, at Rhine Palace and the Oberlin Waldersbach Museum, thanks to the co-operation between the cultural agencies Apollonia, european art exchanges, ArtBOX and F.A.R. |
Palais du Rhin
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