Forelesning

Bojana Cvejić, Lara Khaldi & Noor Abed / Growing Transindividually, Acting Collectively

In the past decade, social and political movements around solidarity and self-organized practices in art have spawned new forms of collectivityby and large, of living and working together, and redistributing and sharing resources as social commons. These forms of collectivity point to a renewal of social imagination for which we seek out new concepts and terms, propped by stories as evidences of collective capacity in a shrinking world.

Starting from the social dramaturgy of the transindividual (Vujanović and Cvejić, Toward a Transindividual Self, 2022), Bojana Cvejić invites Noor Abed and Lara Khaldi for a collective lecture where the three will lay out a glossary of conceptual tools and stories around their practices (School of Intrusions in Palestine and Documenta 15 curatorial team, The Question of Funding and Fridskul).

School of Intrusions is a collective of changing and fluctuating members who practice informal ways of gathering in and around specific urban and rural sites. Having grown out of a conversation about education, art schools, collectivity, and the city as a common space in Palestine, the group developed a set of tools to navigate the city as a site of knowledge and how this collective knowledge is shared and produced. Lara and Noor were also part of the curatorial team of documenta fifteen and among other projects worked as part of the Question of Funding and with Fridskul, a collective of collectives which formed during documenta fifteen and came together regularly through majeleses, occupying the Fridericianum during the hundred days. A group of eleven collectives govern and inhabit it and have designed and collectively run its library; they are called the fridskul majelis. Particular to the fridskul is the process of majelising and collectively governing a common pot of resources over the course of one year leading to documenta fifteen opening and beyond where fridskul came to connote a collective of collectives.

Bojana wrote the book Toward a Transindividual Self: A Study in Social Dramaturgy (KHIO, 2022) with Ana Vujanović, and their theoretical account of transindividuality as a form of collective individuation derives from, among other things, their work with collectives in former Yugoslavia and collective platforms for art production and education in Western Europe since 2000.

Bojana Cvejić’ research spans performance theory, philosophy, and dance studies. Among several books, she is author of Choreographing Problems (2015)and most recently Toward a Transindividual Self (2022, co-written with Ana Vujanović). As a dramaturg, she has collaborated with many choreographers and collectives on performances and independent self-organized platforms for artistic production, theory and education in Europeand former Yugoslavia. Since 2017, she divides her time between Brussels, where she teaches at P.A.R.T.S. andOslo, where she is Professor at the National Academy of the Arts.

Noor Abed (b. 1988 Jerusalem) 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 attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in Νew York in 2015-16, and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 2016-17. She received her BA from the International Academy of Arts in Palestine and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. Abed was awarded the March Project residency and commission from Sharjah Art Foundation in 2016, a residency grant at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2018, a fellowship at FID Marseille International Film Festival in 2019, Raw Material Company in Dakar (Senegal) in 2019, and Onassis AIR in Athens in 2020. 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, and The Mosaic Rooms, London. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine. Noor 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.

Lara Khaldi is a curator, critic and artist living between Jerusalem and Amsterdam. Since 2019 she has been a member of the curatorial team of documenta fifteen. In recent years she was the head of the Media Studies Programme at Alquds Bard College, Jerusalem and a core tutor in the Disarming Design MA program, at Sandberg Institute, 2020-2022. A former deputy programme director at the Sharjah Art Foundation and director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah, Khaldi went on to complete the Curatorial Programme at De Appel, Amsterdam in 2014 and the Philosophy, Art and Cultural Theory, European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, 2015. She has curated projects and symposia in Palestine and abroad, some of which include project Shifting Ground, Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), Unweaving Narratives (2018) at the Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, a solo exhibition by Noor Abuarafeh at the Al Ma’mal Art Foundation in Jerusalem (2019) and Overtones (2019) at the Goethe Institute, Ramallah. Lara is a co-founding member of the independent educational platform School of Intrusions and the collective Question of Funding. Khaldi has been recently appointed as director of de Appel Art Centre in Amsterdam, starting from January 2023.