Mother of Hope Words

Megan Hall (US), VJ Um Amel (EG/US).

Word Cloud Visual and video were installed in Art Territories’ exhibition, COMUNITAS. Among Others, curated by Camera Austria director Reinhard Braun in Vienna in the Fall 2011:

“COMMUNITAS. Among Others, curated by Camera Austria director Reinhard Braun, seeks to address the unimaginable social reconstruction that has seized our lives, turning the question of one’s own social or cultural location into a more difficult task than ever before. The exhibition asks which values, convictions, traditions or revolutions, protests, resistances, subversions of all kinds put pressure on this social location or allow it to become imaginable nevertheless? With the social and political restructuring of Arab societies, many initiatives for building strong civil networks and institutions are bound to emerge now. What is most needed at this point is the strengthening of direct dialogue among artists that will lay the grounds for a discourse on art and visual culture from the bottom up. ArtTerritories has been invited to present its community building endeavor in the exhibition. The wall installation represents this process in an arrangement of recorded Skype interviews and photographic works by artists involved in ArtTerritories. In this nocturnal scene, the chatty quality of simultaneous voices speaking from the wall conveys the intense discursive activity going on at all times across the region. The interviews discuss the complex aesthetic concerns of five artists, also bringing to light some of the difficult questions permeating the identitary and political ruptures and negotiations in the region.”