Date: From 27 January to 26 February 2023
At the B7L9 Art Station
Open from Wednesday to Sunday, from 11 am to 7 pm
A vernissage is planned for January 27 at 5pm
The exhibition takes inspiration from anthems – an inherited cultural form that identifies and brings together and defines a group of people, creating a whole from individual parts. The title of the exhibition is drawn from this inspiration, an English translation of the Tunisian national anthem title. Through the works of these five artists, this frame expands to include related themes: memory, togetherness, place, collective aspirations, and power.
The exhibition consists of two interconnected parts. The first is comprised of works (primarily audiovisual projections) by the five artists listed above. The second consists of an interactive installation entitled Anthem, a ‘stage’ in the middle of the gallery with musical instruments. This installation will be activated through live performances which allow the performer a space to interpret the anthem in a manner of their choosing – whether in its current form, or what they would imagine it to be.
Artist biographies
Adel Abidin was born in Baghdad (1973) and currently resides between Helsinki and Amman. He received a B.A. in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad (2000) and an M.F.A from the Academy of Fine Arts in Time and Space Art in Helsinki (2005). His art uses various media such as videos, video installations, multi media sculptures and sound based installations and photography to explore the issues of the contemporary world that we are living in. He uses his cross-cultural background (as an Iraqi artist living between Helsinki and Amman) to create a distinct visual language often laced with sarcasm and paradox, while maintaining an ultimately humanistic approach. Since his representation of Finland at the Nordic Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), he has exhibited widely in numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Arwtork description
Defenders of the Homeland presents Adel Abdin's work Three Love Songs, which features a satirical reworking of three songs commissioned by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein sung by a female singer from three different eras and styles, resulting in unexpected tensions.
Dia Al-Azzawi (Iraq, 1939).He obtained his advanced degrees in archaeology and art at the University and then at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. He moved to London in 1976. Painter, sculptor, book artist and promoter of young Iraqi creation. Numerous personal exhibitions in galleries, international fairs, museums and art centres. Public and private collections throughout the world: British Museum, World Bank, Institut du Monde Arabe, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ona Foundation, Kinda Foundation, Mathaf of Qatar, Tate Modern, ...Passionate about graphic arts and publishing, he has produced a multitude of original prints, portfolios and artist's books and has played a major role in the creation and dissemination of modern Arab graphic arts in Europe, the Arab world and throughout the Americas. His work has consistently constructed autonomous visual worlds parallel to those of poets, with an equal mastery of ancient and recent Western techniques: engraving, lithography, silk-screening and digital.
Arwtork description
Nasheed Al Jasad (The Body’s Anthem) by Dia Al-Azzawi, originally realised in the aftermath of the Tel al-Zaatar massacre in 1976. Developed during the artist’s experiments with combining poetry and his distinct visual forms, these works visualilse the limits of representation and memory in the face of overwhelming political violence and injustice.
Héla Ammar (B.1969 ,Tunisia) is a Tunisia based visual artist. Author of « Corridors » (2014), a photo book on tunisian prisons, and co-author of "Siliana Syndrome" (2013), a survey on death row in Tunisia, she recently developed a whole artwork around the prison environment. More generally, her photographs and installations address the stakes of memory. Identity is often at the center of her research. A selection of her series is now part of the British museum (London) and the Arab World Institute (Paris) permanent collection. Her work has been showcased in various international biennals and exhibitions including the Biennal of the contemporary arab world photographers (Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (France 2017), « Réenchantements » Dak’art Biennal 2016 ( Senegal), « Fragments d’une Tunisie contemporaine », MuCem (Marseille, France 2015), Bamako Encounters (Mali, 2015 and 2017), Something Else, Off Biennal Cairo (Egypt 2015) International Photography Encounters of Fes (Morocco, 2015), Monochromes Dak’art Biennal, (Senegal 2014), the 27th Instants Vidéo (Festival numérique et poétique, Marseille 2014), World Nomads New York ( USA, 2013), Les rencontres photographiques d’Arles (France, 2013), Dream City (Tunisia, 2010, 2012 and 2017).
Arwtork description
Saadya, by Hela Ammar, which focuses on a single figure (from which the work takes its name) embroidering four words that have been slogans of protest movements and revolutions over the past decade, which continue to have great resonance today.
Noor Abed (b. 1988, Palestine) works at the intersection of performance, media and film. Through a process of image making, her works create situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Anthology Film Archives, New York, Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, The New Wight Biennial, Los Angeles, Leonard & Bina Gallery, Montréal, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, The Mosaic Rooms, London, and MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24 and was recently awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022.
Arwtork description
Noor Abed's short film our songs were ready for all wars to come pieces together visual fragments of Palestinian folk tales in a surreal choreography centred around a specific landscape. The work features the haunting voice of singer Maya Khalidi and sonic textures of sound artist Dirar Kalash, which further complicate ideas of ‘folklore’, presenting its connection to place and time in an unexplored way.
Noor Abuarafeh is a Palestinian artist who lives and works in Jerusalem, graduate of ECAV (MA), and Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem (BA). In between, she participated in the Homeworks study program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, recently Noor finished a one year residency program at the JVE Academy in the Netherlands. Noor works primarily with video installation, performance, publication, and text. Her work addresses the memory, history, archive, and the possibilities of tracing absence, rethinking of different forms of history representations and its relation to different notions such as museums, cemeteries and zoos. Abuarafeh’s videos and performances are text based that questions the complexity of history, how it is shaped, constructed, made, perceived, visualized and understood, and how all these elements are related to fact, fiction and imagination. Noor participated In the last Venice Biennale, Milk of dreams (2022), Berlin Biennale (2020), Sharjah Biennale 13 (2017), Off-Biennial - Gaudipolis, Budapest (2017), Qalandia International, Jerusalem(2016) and others. In 2016 Abuarafeh received the Emerging Voices Award in New York (Finalists), and the Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award (Second prize).
Arwtork description
Notions of representation, belonging, and collectivity are further explored in Noor Abuarafeh’s Am I The Ageless Object at the Museum. Specific sites become areas of focus and reflection – the zoo, the natural history museum, the graveyard – as places in which living beings become objects. Presented in a calm, detached style akin to a nature documentary, an individual aspiration and sense of self emerges.
