RE-DIRECTING: EAST
Conversation # 17
Amanda Abi Khalil "Conversations and Manipulations. Beirut, the Cultural 'Exception'"

June 11, 2014, 6 p.m., CCA Laboratory Building
The presentation is held in English.
 

Amanda Abi Khalil
"Conversations and Manipulations. Beirut, the Cultural 'Exception'"
It is the year 2020 and the latest Beirut Biennial, is in full flow. An independent curator who is still in search of criteria is contributing to, and moderating, a discussion being held in tandem with the official programme. The topic… the politics, poetics and aesthetics of the contemporary art world in Lebanon.
The members of her panel, a stellar line-up of superstars, international curators and institution directors, are astonished and overwhelmed by the sheer extent to which art practices from Lebanon are both top-notch and in tune with the global discourse in the arts, critical and visionary alike.
In a suburb close to the heart of Beirut, next to the city’s largest public square, BIEL, the Beirut International Exhibition and Leisure Centre, stands in a location that is no longer by the sea. And in a vast conference space inside the centre, the curator is recalling key conversations that she had between 2000 and 2017, conversations on artists’ practices and general topics related to art discourse and political responsibility in the arts. But she is continuously interrupted by questions from members of the audience. Some of them she remembers, since they are her former students from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts.
This talk by independent curator Amanda Abi Khalil, who is currently based in Beirut, will open up a space for debate on contemporary practice from Lebanon. It is a scene she is looking at, fictionalising or projecting into the future, in order to emphasise the contradictions and absurdity of the context in which art and curatorial criteria are being reinvented and defined in Lebanon today. The structure of the talk will meander and vanish between biographical narratives, accounts of facts and fiction and the tales told by a curator on a peregrination in search of criteria that might lend sense to her fights, hopes and disillusioned desires. It is a story of an enchanted disenchantment.


Amanda Abi Khalil is an independent curator based in Beirut. She studied art mediation, sociology and anthropology of art at the Sorbonne in Paris, graduating with an MA in Curating Art for Public Spaces. She has worked for some of France’s leading cultural institutions, such as CENTQUATRE and for the Aix-en-Provence International Opera Festival. She was the director and curator of the HANGAR art space in Beirut until 2012, curating numerous exhibitions and installations with emerging and established international artists there. She is the founder and director of Temporary Art Platform, an association dedicated to art in public space in Lebanon. She also teaches art history and the sociology of arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts and the Saint Joseph University in Beirut and is a public art consultant for several institutions. Her most recent exhibition project was held at GREYNOISE, Dubai.

RE-DIRECTING: EAST project is realized thanks to the support of City of Warsaw.

CCA media patronage: TOK FM, Elle Decoration, KMag, Label, Aktivist, Purpose, artinfo.pl, Stolica