Essays
Working together under the name K-oh-llective, we are a group of five artists currently based in Cairo, London, Rabat and Sierre. Ever since we met in 2018, we continued to foster a support system to nurture each other’s practices as we frequently engaged in ongoing and critical conversations. The brainchild of our coming together is an online platform with the same name, where we create a space for resource-sharing, writing about and discussing urgent topics amongst art practitioners in Egypt and the Arab world.
READK-oh-llective: Maybe We’re in a Bad Marriage
K-oh-llective members on creating an online platform for resource-sharing, writing and discussing urgent topics among art practitioners in Egypt and the Arab world.
One is reminded of the famous ghost of the Communist Manifesto: students in the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture have taken to occupy the ARTS building Väre, organising demonstrations and negotiations with the university representatives. Not bad!
READSTOP Cutting Funds for Higher Education in the Arts!
Taina Rajanti breaks down Aalto University’s argument of necessity of cuts in response to the ARTS students’ protesting the cuts, reorganizations of the departments, and the inaccessibility of the school premises.
How long can an art association operate under short-term funding? How many fellow organizations suffer from the same problem as Catalysti? Have they found solutions? How does Catalysti stay true to its mission of granting more opportunities as an association under such restrictions?
READA Co-Artistic Director Speaking
Lin Chih Tung on the challenges and aspirations working for an artist-run association. How do you redefine slogans, identify problematics, contemplate contradictions, and convey the message correctly?
One of the reasons why the sports genre is fascinating is that behind the facade of entertainment, it has many layers of subtext and symbolism attached to it. A well-made sports film hides more than what it reveals. This is why looking deeply at this genre can uncover many nuances and tell us a lot about nationhood, communities, politics, and society.
READWinning the ‘Toss’: A Look at Who Gets a Sports Biopic in India
Anurag Minus Verma asks whose struggle gets a film in an unequal society such as India where caste can privilege as well as oppress.
The 2022 Aurat March ‘Reimagining Justice’ theme encourages the Pakistani society and the State to reimagine legal, economic, and environmental justice to align with a feminist future. It asks that a new and more inclusive perspective of justice be envisioned, expanding its definitions beyond the limited ones granted under the patriarchal system and its legislation.
READAurat March: Reimagining Justice Through Sisterhood & Solidarity
Sheherazade Amin articulates the significance of a feminist movement envisioned with an inclusive perspective of justice.
I’ve never felt comfortable exploring my sexuality, and I think I need to engage in this aspect of my creative life. I’m worn, strained and feel a need to revitalise myself. What I’m doing here is an attempt to come to terms with my curiosity. But I might be overdoing it. Instead of working with my issues, I’m jumping in headfirst and committing a public sex act to get over it. We all have to start somewhere, right?
READPersonal Decamerone
Eero Yli-Vakkuri on considering sex work as artistic practice.
The settler-colonial Zionist project may have, for now, occupied Palestine physically, but its failure to occupy the dream of Palestine in the Palestinians inside and outside of historic Palestine not only signifies a failure of the project as a whole but foreshadows a mammoth failure in the future of the necropolitical state.
READOccupying the Palestinian Dream
Sanabel Abdelrahman on the failure of the settler-colonial Zionist project of occupying the dream of Palestine among Palestinians.
customer aggressively informs me that he accidentally put in his parent’s address and that i need to take the order to his. he messaged me through the app apparently but, with no signal in the building, i can’t see it. using the younger brother’s phone, i type the address into google maps - it’s two and a half miles away.
READThe Brink of the Platform: Riding With Deliveroo
How can algorithmic management lead to authoritarian management and precarious jobs?
How is it expected of artworkers without access to employment security and no business background to be able to sustain their organizations and initiatives once their grant runs out? Could funding bodies come together to create the possibility of dialogue, the sharing of experiences, and the development of a body of knowledge and toolsets around the topic of post-funding survival and economic sustainability for the initiatives they fund? Or at least create a space for questioning and analysing these futures?
READTaidekirppis: What Happens When an Archive-Based Project Ends Prematurely?
Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Farbod Fakharzadeh on the perils of short-term funding and the cycles of affirmation, abandonment, despair, and continuation it propels.
For the past year, I have been teaching the course “Decolonise your Studies” at Aalto University with Kiia Beilinson. Settling on this title was an effort to inspire action, despite believing it’s not really possible to decolonise academia. Teaching the course filled me with feelings of inadequacy and doubt. How can we make sure this course does its name justice, especially in a colonial country like Finland that is still oppressing Sámi peoples’ rights? Are we only playing into an empty buzzword culture that is actually damaging to indigenous rights? How can we justify teaching this course at a university, with its structures of institutional violence?
READOn the Limits and Possibilities of Decolonising Universities
Prompted by the feelings of inadequacy when teaching “Decolonise your Studies”, Miia Laine reflects on her experiences with decolonial work at three universities in Germany, the UK and Finland.
Mishandled Archive started in 2017 when Tara Fatehi Irani dispersed an archive of family photographs and documents in public places and created a dance at the site of each dispersal–once a day for a whole year. This led to the creation of a new archive of 365 photographs and dance scores, a performance-installation and a book. In summer 2021, Tara presented the first outdoor performance of Mishandled Archive. She invited poet Nisha Ramayya to attend this performance and write a response to it –to write around and through the performance and its themes, to create a text that thinks with this performance and allows its readers an alternative way into the project.
READChoreographing Dissonance: A Response to Mishandled Archive
On creative methods of daily storytelling through working with unofficial, unpublished, and neglected histories using the archive of family photographs and documents in public places.
To find yourself in a new Syrian school, established in a residential building in Turkey, that teaches the Libyan curriculum to freshly-arrived Syrians, makes you want to tell stories about it.
READTemporary Peace
Shahi Derky’s poignant text about leaving Syria, seeking refuge in different places, and the unending exile of figuring things out, remembering many pasts, and imagined futures.
