A Conversation with Reem Shadid and Yazan Khalili on the Occasion of their Exhibition "Debt" at the Fourth Qalandiya International, Palestine, by James Scarborough

INTRODUCTION.

The fourth Qalandiya International (QI) will take place from October 3rd - October 30th. Also known as the Palestine Biennial, it’s the largest contemporary art event in Palestine. This year's QI examines the theme of Solidarity. Exhibitions and programs will take place throughout the country. Sites include Jerusalem, Gaza, Ramallah, Al Bireh, Birzeit, and several Palestinian villages. It will feature the work of dozens of Palestinian and international artists (See below). Solidarity-themed events will also occur in New York, Cape Town, and Beijing.

Everything about the QI is significant. Qalandiya refers to a notorious West Bank checkpoint. It also refers to life in pre-Occupation Palestine. Since its founding in 2012, QI has focused more on collectives than individuals. It serves as an act of defiance in response to oppressive and Occupation events. Its aim is two-fold. It encourages public dialogue. These dialogues present an undistorted image of Palestine to the rest of the world. It also allows Palestinians to examine their cultural heritage and its place in world culture.

Qi 2018 is a collaboration between 9 art and cultural organizations:

M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah
Al Hoash – Palestinian Art Court, Jerusalem
Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem
Eltiqa Group, Gaza
Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah
Ramallah Municipality
RIWAQ – Center for Architectural Conservation, Al-Bireh
Shababek for Contemporary Art, Gaza
The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit

Qalandiya International IV in Numbers:

9 partners
8 exhibitions
41 events in Palestine
19 events abroad (New York, San Francisco, Olympia (Washington), Cape Town, Doha, Dusseldorf and Swansea)

Below follows a conversation with Reem Shadid (Sharjah Art Foundation) and Yazan Khalili (Director, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center) on the occasion of their exhibition, Debt. The show will open Saturday October 6^th, 2018, at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah, Palestine.

Debt participating artists:

Majd Abdel Hamid, Noor Abu Arafeh, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Marwa Arsanios, Casey Asprooth-Jackson and Mujahed Khallaf, A. Carmel, Lyra Garcellano, Hans Haacke, Pablo Helguera, Jill Magid, Joe Namy, Walid Raad, Khalil Rabah, Omnia Sabry, and SUPERFLEX.

Other interviewees for this year’s QI will include:

Rachel Dedman, curator of the Labour of Love.
Eltiqa & Shababek, do-curators of the Toward Hope.
Fida Touma, the Deputy Director General of the A.M. Qattan Foundation. In cooperation with the Birzeit University Museum, the Foundation has co-curated the exhibition Lydda - A Garden Disremembered

……….

JS: Solidarity suggests banding together around shared interests and goals. For this year’s QI, what are those interests and goals? Why are they important now?

RS +YK: QI in itself is a collective platform in which different cultural and art institutions in Palestine collaborate together to make a biennial with the limited resources available. The theme Solidarity came to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first Intifada, and we thought that we should think of the Intifada not as an event, but rather as a structure of solidarity in which the Palestinians managed to create a new society based on questions of how to work together, and how to build a collective action.

It is important now to think of solidarity because of the changes that happened in the Palestinian and the global politics, where solidarity has been conflated with support and feel good politics, rather than the bottom-bottom action and mutual struggle.

JS: How does solidarity manifest itself in terms of art. Can solidarity-informed art lead to concerted action? How?

RS + YK: We think there are different ways this could happen, one is very direct where an artist creates works in solidarity with a cause, or people, or country, etc. Another way is by action rather than through producing an artwork. It’s how artists work together with one another, how do they exchange. It’s not necessarily one action but it’s a practice. And this is how it does lead to concerted action, is when it’s a practice rather than a reactionary momentary happening.

For the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center’s contribution to Qalandiya International, our project Debt looks at art practices and their relation to the economy/market systems and the politics of art production, taking the notion of debt at its core. Debt that is not a response to credit, or exchanges of power but that escapes it, but one that is mutual and social. So it was clear to us that the question of Solidarity was being asked in a cultural platform, and we wanted to question this; why are we looking at solidarity, what does it mean to be in solidarity now and specifically in artistic and cultural practices, how has market system and particularly the art market affected artistic production, how do artists deal with it? What are the collective actions on indebted relations between artists are in the cultural scene nowadays? Is the cultural scene exploiting the term? Or is it really a structure that the cultural scene works with.

JS: How would you trace the evolution of solidarity with respect to the history of Palestine? Is it a linear evolution? Why or why not?

RS + YK: Palestinian struggle has been part of the anticolonial struggle, so to be in solidarity with the cause came from the mutual struggle of the oppressed against the colonial powers. With the change in nature of political struggles due to primarily economic and market system conditions and shifts, so has the understanding of solidarity. The rise of individualism that came with ensuing expansion of capitalism also contributed to the skewing of the importance and potential of solidarity to what it is today; a reactionary symbolic or financial action. Political solidarity disappeared and financial aid under the guise of solidarity flourished.

JS: How do you define solidarity? A political strategy? A cultural practice? A religious position? A social manifesto? All of these? Something else?

RS +YK: We think solidarity can be all these things, but more importantly it can be as we mentioned earlier a practice of artists and cultural practitioners day in and day out, an ongoing practice of resistance and emancipation. There’s solidarity in everything that we do in a way, our relations to each other and to society and the work that we do.

In a recent lecture part of Debt programming held at KSCC, Sami Khatib said that solidarity is between the defeated and the oppressed, a kind of a collective struggle between equals, this has been an important key for us to think of our exhibition, the difference between solidarity as a collective work against the feel good and aid politics that come top down, from the rich and powerful to the poor and powerless.

So solidarity for us is defined in these structures, a way of collective action.

JS: Do other societies or cultures face the same challenges that Palestine faces?

RS+YK: everywhere has its own challenges, Palestine does not have the monopoly or the superlative of suffering, but of course the Zionist occupation and for such a prolonged period of time does create difficult circumstances and unique challenges that have become part of people’s daily lives. But there are also many many challenges that are shared globally or with other people and nations under occupations or living in injustice.

JS: What are optimal outcomes for Palestinian solidarity?

RS+YK: If solidarity is viewed as a single reactionary sentiment or action then there would be an optimal outcome but we don’t think of it this way and instead try to understand it and practice it as an ongoing action of indebtedness, that is about our relationships with each other and our surrounding and situation. Solidarity practice is required not just against the Zionist occupying forces but also with our work and life together as Palestinians.

Some of the projects in Debt do specifically that, they build on relations. Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri for example are working on a long-term project – past Qalandiya International duration- of creating a “communist museum” that houses its collection inside the homes of Palestinians. It’s a proposal for restoring the potency of art in its capacity to alter the way we see the world and ability to interrogate life as it is lived today.

JS: What’s the genesis of the exhibition?

RS+YK: Our approach to Debt came about from conversations between us that have been ongoing as friends and as colleagues. Both of us from different perspectives have been interested in the art market. When the theme of solidarity was proposed by Qalandiya International this year, we started thinking about it and what it actually means today to be in solidarity with one another, specifically within neo liberal system we live in. How can we think of it given the rise of individualism, the takeover of market systems. We thought about issues of artistic production, authorship, rights, etc. but we also thought about what it means to be in solidarity with someone or a cause given the existing (art) market systems. We thought about artist practices that instrumentalize the art market (or market systems in general) to show solidarity, like SUPERFLEX’s Hospital Equipment project, or ones that try to expose and explore the entrenched networks of market systems and artistic practices and ask important questions about these practices such as Walid Raad’s Walkthrough, part 1 (part of a larger project: Scratching on Things I Could Disavow (2007). This lead us to think more and more about the notion of debt, financial of course but actually also away from the market in how we work and deal together, debt that cannot be paid off or exchanged as the pillar of how we approach the project.

JS: What particular issue or gap do you want the show to address?

RS+YK: one of the main elements of the project is a collective study for a proposal towards possibilities of a new form of solidarity that can help answer the question of how do/can we work together. We launched the project with a series of weekly meetings between July and August 2018 as a tool for this collective study, and more importantly to bringing people together to speak about these issues – solidarity, how do we work together, what is needed in the art scene in Palestine, etc.

Another gap or issue was that we wanted to address through the exhibition particularly was the way Solidarity is now being exploited by the art and cultural practice in Palestine and else where, how it became a commodity that is being commercialized and used. We also wanted to highlight artistic practices that problematize the art market, or uses it against itself, and plays with it in an attempt to create a critique of the practices of the market.

We also wanted to question the fact that this year's theme is solidarity, we asked: does the art scene in Palestine practice solidarity, or is it only using it as a romantic title for a scene that is overloaded with capitalist structures.

JS: What was your criteria for the works’ inclusion?

RS+ YK: We had an open call + a list of invited artists. We invited artists works who have -whether directly or indirectly- addressed the themes and questions we are proposing, we wanted to work with Palestinian and international artists. We wanted to also look into more incidents and moments where artists were looking at these same issues in different places around the world or from different perspectives. For the open call we had a selection committee, we wanted to be able to give artists a chance to produce new works but also try to work with artists we haven’t worked previously.

JS: Was the art made specifically for the show or did it pre-exist? Or both?

RS+ YK: due to difficulties in shipping artworks here, most of the works in the exhibition have either been commissioned specifically for the exhibition or produced out of conversations we have had with the artists on how to present existing work in Palestine. So yes you can say everything is produced for the show somehow.

We also thought of the transformation of the works once they cross - metaphorically of course- the tough borders and the closure of Palestine, what kind of work can cross such border, how it changes, what it becomes, and how it connects to this situation. We see this transformation as a form of solidarity, where the work accepts the conditions of its movement and exhibition and works with it, creating a work that fits the context and speaks to it.

JS: In light of the art market’s impact and influence on art production and exhibition, why must the role of solidarity be reconsidered?

RS+YK: In Palestine, the art market is a product of the political and economical changes in post-Oslo era, where the role of art and culture is shifting from being a medium for resistance and existence (post 1948) into a commodity or work that can be financially beneficial, but also work that produces its value from meeting a demand to represent the history of struggle and injustice.

Solidarity as a commodity in cultural practices produces artworks that are made for the market, and valued through their market price, not through their effect on the intellectual and popular knowledge production in Palestine.

So for our exhibition we moved away from producing the object of art that can become a commodity, and we worked with artworks that in their essence critique the market through their thinking and production process or talk about notions of debt that are not just financial. We also held the meetings for the collective study with art and cultural practitioners in Palestine, in the aim to push these hidden questions and concerns up to the surface.

JS: Have the practice of art, the actions of its institutions, and its critical apparatus played roles in this transformation of the art market?

RS+YK: yes of course, nobody works in a vacuum. Decisions on where to show, what to show, how to show and who to show all impact the art market, so do critical discourses as most of the time they’re still operating within the art market without being fully aware. It’s important to say (and not sure if this is the right place), this is not an exhibition or a project that is trying to vilify the art market, we are just interested in having important discussions about and around it and its influence on art/exhibition production and our complicity within it.

JS: What was the biggest challenge you faced as you brought the exhibition to fruition? Your biggest surprise, delightful or otherwise?

RS+YK: There’s the usual budgetary issue and of course occupation restrictions of movement or unfeasibility of shipping artworks. The delights however were many; one of the most important ones is the response of the artists, their generosity with their time and solidarity with the work that we are doing here. It has been really great also working closely with artists on solutions or proposals on how to present existing works in a new form that can be produced in Palestine – productions they cannot personally oversee. This requires a lot of trust from the artists, some whom we have not met before for example.

JS: What would be the one takeaway that you would want the serious, focused, time-is-no-object visitor to take from the show?

RS+YK: That solidarity is an ongoing practice of relations to one another, or desired relations rather than a romantic idea from the past or a feel-good momentary reaction or sentiment.