bauhaus
imaginista
Program

A Program of Encounters and Research at the Goethe-Institut & Le Cube – independent art room

The event that took place in Rabat on the 23rd and 24th March 2018 inaugurated the bauhaus imaginista series of exhibitions and discursive programmes. The encounter at the Goethe-Institut Rabat on the 23rd with Marion von Osten, Grant Watson and Kader Attia addressed the transcultural and political dimensions of Bauhaus crafts studies. Departing from a 1927 drawing of an oriental carpet by Paul Klee, they focussed on the transcultural readings of modernist art practice and the re-mapping of avant-gardes' territories.

The workshop "New Methodologies", co-organized by Le Cube – independent art room and the research group ARAV (atelier de recherches en arts visuels) situated as a first event in the larger frame of the project bauhaus imaginista, took place the 24th of March 2018, following a presentation and panel discussion on the 23rd at the Goethe Institute Rabat with the curators Marion von Osten and Grant Watson, the artist Kader Attia, the anthropologist Abdelmajid Arrif, the art historian Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa and Maud Houssais, curatorial researcher for bauahus imaginista: Learning From.

At Le Cube – independent art room, the artist Kader Attia presented insight into research materials that guided the workshop members into his arguments as well on a material and visual level. Together with Attia, the bauhaus imaginista curators Marion von Osten and Grant Watson as well as the researchers Maud Houssais and Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa questioned and debated recent ideas on postcolonial modernities. The aim is to return to the theories of the western modernity and their ties to extra-European contexts. The ramifications and the bankruptcies of the models advocated by the modernism will be approached such as the question of the temporality, the cultural transfers and the translation.

Kader Attia explored the artistic and curatorial approaches as a way to question the reception of the theories of the modernity in the field of the contemporary practices. His specific methodology of his recent works lays on the re-appropriation of objects, forms or speeches stemming from a colonial context, or still the notion of transposition, translation and cultural transfers. The work of Marion von Osten handles with the critical reception theories of the modernity in the contemporary, in particular around the notions of vernacular modernism and the possibility of a co-presence of heterogeneous temporality. She introduced the concept of industrious revolution instead of industrial revolutions, concepts that could shift the perception on craft production as tradition to modus of critique.

Questions raised with a first round of encounters and research initiated in Rabat will be taken further in a public workshop in New York City in June 2018 and an exhibition starting in October 2018 at SESC Pompéia in São Paulo.

www.lecube-art.com

www.goethe.de/marokko

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