Please post widely.

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|

|   W I L L

|

|   June 19 - July 19, 2003

|

|   Exhibition Reception: Thursday, June 19, 5:30-7:30 pm

|   Some of the artists will be present.

|

|   http://negotiation2003.net

|   <info@negotiations2003.net>

|

|   A Space Gallery, 401 Richmond St.W., #110, Toronto, Canada

|   416-979-9633

|__________________________________

|   Ilana Salama Ortar, Stephen Wright

|         (Israel, France)

|   Galia Shapira, Aref Nammari, Haggai Kupermintz, Phil Shane

|          (Israel/USA, Palestine/USA, Israel/USA, USA)

|   Alexandra Handal in collaboration with poets Karen Alkalay-Gut

and Nathalie Handal

|         (Palestine/Dominican Republic, Israel, Palestine/USA)

|   Rami a.k.a. Jaromil

|         (Italy, Palestine)

|   Artist Emergency Response

|         (USA)

|   Shahrzad Arshadi, Josée Lambert

|         (Canada)

|   Negotiations Working Group

|         (Canada)

|__________________________________

|   WILL is a Creative Response initiative and a part of

_Negotiations: From a Piece of Land to a Land of Peace_ a multi-part

cultural event that intends to create new public spaces for dialogue

on shared entitlement and common responsibility for co-existence in

Palestine-Israel and beyond. For information about other Negotiations

events (June 19 - 29) visit our website at http://negotiations2003.net

|__________________________________

|__________________________________

|   C U R A T O R I A L   S T A T E M E N T


     High-tide on the day of war, before we are drowned into another

twilight of repressed and forgotten truths, engulfed in the light of

explosions - last year in Afghanistan, this year in Iraq, every year,

for fifty-five years, in the land historically known as Palestine -

we ask: how do we change our world to change our fate? This question

points directly to the ethics of our intentions and practices for it

is no longer possible to question the urgency and the imperatives.

The world must change if we are to live with one another in dignity.

To live with ourselves, we must change. The empire is unmasked, yet

again. Rulers are at work to redraw the map, yet again. Bodies have

lined up to stand witness to this violence, yet again. Violations are

countless and cannot be checked against the anachronistic terms of

"human rights." Bombs, tanks, armoured helicopters, guns and missiles

are not bound by any charters, and our utopian investments in

international laws and institutions have failed to produce any

profits except for the profiteers at war for more control over land,

resources, human lives and histories. Resistance was yesterday1s

response. Today, openly formulated insurgence is a reality.

         The Second Palestinian Intifada, which erupted in September

of 2000, provides an instance of such insurgency. This is a new phase

in the century-long Palestinian history of anti-colonial struggles,

ongoing since 1897. Contrary to mainstream representations, the

Intifada is not simply a localized Palestinian nationalist response

to the repressive Israeli occupation and its war machine; rather, it

is a demonstration of indigenous peoples1 refusal to surrender their

agency to the hegemonic hold of colonial regimes. In spite of the

gross imbalance of powers, the Palestinians have risen up, yet again,

to challenge colonialism1s intrinsically xenophobic discourses and

its structural patterns of exclusion and domination. More than

anything else, the Intifada exposes the failures of colonialism to

subjugate the will of the Palestinian people and silence dissenting

voices.

         The radicalization of this will has swept over the

checkpoints and barbed wire to infiltrate the consciousness of

Israelis and of people around the world. The new forms of

Palestinian-Israeli and transnational collaboration - manifested

through organizations such as the International Solidarity Movement

and Ta1ayush - draw on a renewed will to organize civil communities

in countering economic, political and military colonization. Such

social mobilization calls for different forms of representation; for

a thorough shake-up in our habits of thought. It calls for a

conceptual creativity that sets out to ethically enact strategies of

change and pragmatically prefigure the horizons of a different world.

This, we believe, is the fertile land where a new insurgent art

movement can grow.

         For this exhibition, we called on artists to formulate and

realize the ways in which transdisciplinary artistic practices can

nourish stronger, more ethically accountable, multi-faceted and

multi-vocal responses to the social imperatives we face. A gathering

of politically responsive work, WILL is dedicated to the project of

change: unearthing, remembering, coming to voice, naming and, rooted

in the depths of consciousness, actively intervening in the social

field. The modes of intervention utilized by the projects in WILL

exceed conventional practices of representational art. Each work

shown in this exhibit has emerged through intense negotiations and

co-labouring, of which the ultimate products are the social and

personal relations and transformations that transcend the artwork.

Here the artwork is only a landmark for new conceptions. The real

work is ongoing, constantly evolving and defiant of representation as

it unfolds in the plains of awareness and action.

         WILL provides opportunities for engagement, and asks that we

engage differently. We encourage you to actively participate and

contribute your labour to this work.

-- Gita Hashemi & Hanadi Loubani for Negotiations Working Group

|__________________________________

|   P R O J E C T S

|________

|   Inadvertent Monuments

|   Ilana Salama Ortar and Stephen Wright


     Our project focuses on what was initially a deeply-entrenched

border cairn, constructed after World War I, intended to separate the

French mandate of Lebanon from the British mandate of Palestine.

During the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon from 1982-2000, and

under the protection of Tsahal, layers of top soil were scooped up

from vast tracts of occupied land and taken by dump trucks to Israeli

settlements near the border - a fact to which the stone cairn bears

subtle though irrefutable evidence: the cairn, whose bottom half was

deeply entrenched in the earth, now stands some eight feet above the

ground. While its top portion is the same light tan colour as the

surrounding topography, the bottom three feet are a dark ruddy brown

- identical to the soil once covering them. Intended as a horizontal

territorial marker, the cairn has come to mark verticality - raising

a variety of issues regarding the difference between land and soil,

territory and earth. It is an inadvertent monument. As such, it

stands as a condensed metaphor of the conflict embedded in the

historical present; a public mirror for anyone who cares to look at

the issue of peace and partition not as event but as sign. Taking

this land-art-like unintentional "monument" as its hub, this project

refuses to be partitioned within the territory of "art." Instead,

using art-related skills to refocus attention on an otherwise

invisible symbol, it foregrounds art1s use-value in negotiating the

shift from a piece of land to a land of peace.

|________

|   Destinations: A Palestinian-Israeli Audio-Visual Installation

|   Galia Shapira, Aref Nammari, Haggai Kupermintz, Phil Shane


     The "Destinations" installation makes use of photographic images

collected from Palestinians and Israelis that convey their profound

connection to their shared land and its history. Sound recordings

capture personal stories of love, hope and pain that the images

document. A multiple slide projection, the large photographic images

are projected onto the gallery walls in a continuous sequence and are

accompanied by Arabic and Hebrew audio narratives - including poetry

and literary pieces by Israeli and Palestinian writers. Surrounded by

images of the shared land, as seen through Israeli and Palestinian

eyes, viewers are invited to re-examine conventional perceptions of

the conflict. Collection and dissemination of images and stories

continue as the artists constitute a growing archive of hope and

struggle towards a common destiny.

|________

|   Farah - In Search for Joy

|   Rami a.k.a. Jaromil


     The "Farah" project documents my three-week trip, in August,

2002, through the occupied territories of Palestine. During this time

I crossed East Jerusalem, Gaza, Bethlehem, Hebron and Ramallah. This

was while Bethlehem and Gaza were still under siege and Ramallah was

experiencing another full-time curfew after the assassination of

Ahmad Saadat. I set out for this trip independently, but, once in

Palestine, I had the chance to collaborate with some valuable people

of the Palestinian Progressive Youth Union, Tactical Media Crew,

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, International

Solidarity Movement and Indymedia Palestine. Farah is an effort to

document the life and culture of the Palestinian population in zones

of war, without actually mentioning the war itself. It is a net-art

project in the way that it tries to use the net as a privileged

medium to unveil a beauty usually made far by war. It is the content

that counts in Farah, the medium only provides the necessary means

for the message to be conveyed. The project is born from the need to

discover and document that which remains untouched by war: everything

in the tales of children and older folks that pervades in the

identity of a people in spite of dispossession, humiliation and

violence. Farah is a search for joy and for a resistance that

organizes itself in thousands of forms in the imagination. It is to

recognize the millenary Palestine in the untouchable dreams of its

children. http://farah.dyne.org/

|________

|   Dance

|   Alexandra Handal in collaboration with poets Karen Alkalay-Gut

and Nathalie Handal


     Alexandra Handal1s multimedia installation, "Dance," is based on

a joint poem written by Israeli poet Karen Alkalay-Gut and

Palestinian poet, Nathalie Handal. A digital animation of the poem,

which becomes entirely legible only at the end, is projected onto the

floor. While watching the projection, the viewer experiences the

words of the poem transform into abstract shapes that resemble

lightning, needles, feathers, and webs. As they are colliding, moving

past and against each other, the words begin to emerge as lines of a

poem, then stanzas, breaking the fear of sharing the same space in

order to dance together. Dance is a space which invites the viewer to

gather round and experience - through movement, color, and rhythm -

the pain, frustration, fear and joy involved in taking the first

steps towards negotiating our present, ourselves. Dance compels the

viewer to ask: how can we not dance together?

|________

|   Squares in the Pavement & Beau temps, mauvais temps

|   Shahrzad Arshadi and Josée Lambert


     "Squares in the Pavement & Beau temps, mauvais temps" is a

photo-documentary project created by two artists: one from the East,

the other from the West. Every Friday since September 14, 2001, these

two artists have met each other in front of the Israeli Consulate in

Montreal to stand vigil for peace and justice in Palestine. For a

period of one full year, rain or shine, Josée and Shahrzad have

documented the participants at these vigils as a testimony to their

collective hopes and fears. The collaboration between the two artists

is an installation of 104 black and white photographs. While Josée1s

contribution symbolizes time, season and continuity, Shahrzad

captures portraits of people wearing the most immediately

recognizable symbol of Palestine - the "keffia" - people of all walks

of life, teachers, workers, artists and students; young and old from

all races and origins, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist and 

|________

|   Video Petition Project

|   Artist Emergency Response


     The "Video Petition Project" is a visual testimony of North

Americans voicing their opposition to the Israeli Occupation. Despite

their large and growing numbers, these voices are significantly

underrepresented by the mainstream North American media. They are

comprised of Jews and non-Jews alike whose sincere, thoughtful, and

eloquent speech cannot be dismissed as self-loathing or anti-Semitic

simply due to their criticism of the Israeli government and its

policies. Some participants present their own statements and others

use one or another among a variety of statements prepared by AER and

imbue these with their own sincerity. Our ultimate goal is to present

the project at schools, community organizations, art venues, museums,

public access television, radio, and internet sites, and also to

public officials and leaders, thus helping to further aid the

acknowledgement and rightful consideration of this growing movement.

The 80-min video premiered in September 2002 at the Piece Process

exhibit at Chicago1s ARC gallery and was recently (April/May 2003) on

display at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the

exhibit War (What Is It Good For?).

|________

|   Olive Fair

|   Negotiations Working Group


     "Olive Fair" renders visible the material conditions and the

strategies of survival and resistance in occupied Palestine. The

installation displays olive products by Palestinian producers -

obtained through Sindyanna, a fair-trade company based in Jaffa -

side-by-side with video documentation of a direct action by the

International Solidarity Movement in support of a group of

Palestinian growers in the West Bank who were resisting the uprooting

of their olive trees by Israeli soldiers and bulldozers. Olive Fair

invites gallery visitors to take product samples in exchange for

contributing personal responses to a website, thus enabling networked

consciousness and informed dialogue. As the olive products in the

gallery diminish, what remains in the physical space - transmitted

through the ISM video - is the reality of the struggle in Palestine

cultivating a growing public awareness and solidarity in the virtual

space. http://olivefair.net

|__________________________________

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|   A R T I S T S '   B I O S

|________

|   The collaboration between ILANA SALAMA ORTAR and STEPHEN WRIGHT

on Inadvertent Monuments is based on an extra-disciplinary approach

to art: contrary to trendy inter-disciplinary approaches (which

accept disciplinary partitioning as a precondition for association)

and the apparent lack of discipline characterising so much

contemporary art, they seek to mirror the disciplinary

extraterritoriality and non-situatedness of their practice in the

issues that they focus. Using art-related methodologies, they seek to

draw the sort of sustained and thoughtful attention to inadvertent

symbols and monuments - particularly in situations of social urgency,

suppressed memory and identity loss - that art-specific proposals

often enjoy. Stephen Wright is a Paris-based theorist of art-related

practice. Ilana Salama Ortar is a Haifa-based artist, working

extensively on the development of "civic art" (city + civitas),

investigating the visible and invisible traces of the erasure of

individual and collective memory in the urban fabric. They previously

collaborated in the exhibition L1Incurable Mémoire des Corps.

|________

|   Since November 2002, a group of activists has been meeting in an

effort to explore a new vision and discourse to deal honestly and

courageously with the Palestinian and Israeli experiences. We

emphasize recognition of common destiny, mutual acknowledgement of

pain and suffering, and the embracement of the humanity of each other

as keys to reconciliation. Group members are: GALIA SHAPIRA, an

Israeli visual artist; AREF NAMMARI, a Palestinian electronics

engineer and activist; HAGGAI KUPERMINTZ, an Israeli assistant

professor of education; and PHIL SHANE, an American associate

professor of accounting. The Destinations group aims to promote the

co-existence of historical, cultural, and spiritual Palestinian and

Israeli narratives, through collaborative intellectual and artistic

expressions. By braiding together the stories of peoples' love for

their land, their struggles, pain and hopes, we strive to develop a

new understanding of reality. Our work stems from the realization

that a great responsibility for promoting an alternative vision lies

with the intellectual, spiritual, and arts communities in developing

new images of co-existence that resist self-serving political and

economic dictates. We hope to give voice to a grassroots movement,

expressing Israeli and Palestinian deep yearnings to transcend their

tragic destiny as eternal communities of suffering.

|________

|   RAMI a.k.a. JAROMIL (http://korova.dyne.org) is a free software

programmer and streaming media pioneer, media artist and activist,

performer and emigrant. Wired to the matrix since 1991 (point of

NeuromanteBBS on Cybernet 65:1500/3.13), Jaromil co-founded (1994)

the non-profit organization Metro Olografix for the diffusion of

information technology, and in 2000 founded the free software lab

dyne.org; sub-root for the autistici.org / inventati.org community.

Jaromil is active in the Italy Indymedia Collective, and is currently

the software analyst and developer for PUBLIC VOICE Lab (Vienna). He

recently co-curated I LOVE YOU , an exposition about software viruses

at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt. His past collaborations

include, among others: Giardini Pensili, digitalcraft.org, 01001.org,

August Black, [epidemiC], Florian Cramer, 92v2.0, LOA hacklab, Lobo,

Freaknet Medialab, CandidaTV, the Mitocondri, the HackMeeting

community. Jaromil's most recent online piece is Farah: a

documentation of his travel through the occupied territories of

Palestine, in search for joy.

|________

|   ALEXANDRA HANDAL is a Santo Domingo-NYC based Palestinian artist

whose installations, drawings and digital media focus on issues of

transnationality, cultural migration/displacement, representation,

and memory. Her work has been represented in exhibitions in NYC,

Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Sydney, Australia. Currently, she

is a Visiting Artist Lecturer at the Escuela de Diseno in the

Dominican Republic, affiliated with Parsons School of Design. KAREN

ALKALAY-GUT was born on the last night of the Blitz in London to

refugee parents who brought her to the United States after the war.

She has spent her adult life teaching poetry at Tel Aviv University,

writing, and trying to get people to listen to each other through

poetry. Her 20 books include five poetry books in Hebrew, a biography

of the American poet, Adelaide Crapsey, an e-book of magic poems

called Avracadivra (2002). NATHALIE HANDAL is a Palestinian poet,

playwright and writer who has lived in the United States, Europe, the

Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. She is the author of

the poetry book, The NeverField, the poetry CD, Traveling Rooms, and

the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an

Academy of American Poets bestseller and winner of the Pen

Oakland/Josephine Miles award. Nathalie Handal currently teaches at

Hunter College in NYC.

|________

|   JOSÉE LAMBERT is a freelance photographer in the cultural domain.

Twelve years ago, she began documentary work in the Middle-East.

Often associating herself with humanitarian organizations, Josée1s

work primarily focused on the impact of sanctions on the Iraqi

people. She also produced, in collaboration with Amnesty

International, an important documentary with prisoners of Khiam

Detention Centre, south of Lebanon. For her exhibition Ils étaient

absents sur la photo, she was awarded artiste pour la paix in 1998.

SHAHRZAD ARSHADI, a human rights activist and Montréal-based

Canadian/Iranian artist, came to Canada as a political refugee on

December 24,1983. In the past ten years, Shahrzad has ventured into

different fields of photography, painting and video, enabling her

focus on issues of memory, culture and human rights. Shahrzad has

exhibited her work in various locations across North America.

|________

|   ARTIST EMERGENCY RESPONSE (AER) is a Chicago-based collective of

artists and activists - including many Jews and Palestinians -

working for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

We seek a just and lasting peace through the minimal, general

framework of the implementation of the Palestinian people1s right to

self-determination, an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank

and Gaza Strip, a just solution to the status of Jerusalem, and a

just solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis. We strongly condemn

the escalating violence against civilians on both sides of the

conflict and demand that the United States end its economic,

military, and political support of Israel until the illegal

occupation ends. We are dedicated to fostering dialogue between

communities and combating anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian,

and anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence.

|________

|   NEGOTIATIONS WORKING GROUP: We are women of diverse cultural

background (Anglo-Canadian, Iranian, Italian, Jewish and Palestinian)

and with different skills and experiences (some are artists, some

academics, and most full-time activists). Our differences have

constituted the productive and pragmatic spaces of our

'negotiations', and our work together has been the shared experience

of learning our ethical accountability to one another and to a larger

political project that touches our everyday lives in different and

not always readily acknowledged or immediately visible ways. In spite

of all the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in working towards

social transformation, months of intense volunteer labour have taught

us how to be allies and friends while navigating through politically

contentious, socially complex and historically painful grounds. This

work has made us more determined: negotiations cannot be channeled by

any prescribed roadmaps; they demand complete openness, transparency

and good will. We started as a small formation with dynamic

membership - by choice, chance or guile - within Creative Response.

For records of other CR initiatives, visit

http://creativeresponseweb.net


|__________________________________

| Negotiations: From a Piece of Land to a Land of Peace

| info@negotiations2003.net

| http://negotiations2003.net

|

| Negotiations is a Creative Response initiative:

| http://creativeresponseweb.net