RE
_ Responding to the development of the pandemic in Tunis:
Start of the Discusssion with Bettina and Aymen
_ organizing the co-working sessions on Friday

FRI 9 July, 2.00 pm to 6.00 pm

RE
_ Coworking: Conceptual Text
with Daniela and the Conceptual Team
_ Coworking: Artists’ Profile on the Website
with Sara Mari and the Webteam
_ Coworking: Public Program Online / Onsite
with Alexia and the Public Program Team
_ Coworking: Art Mediation
with Salma and the Art Mediation Team
_ Coworking: Communication
with Aymen and all who want to support communication
_ Coworking: Coordination / Hospitality / Well-Being
with Samira and all who want to support coordination

SAT 10 July, 10.00 am to 12.00 am

TASAWORAT
_ Responding to the development of the pandemic in Tunis:
Next Steps with Bettina and Aymen

RE
_ Conceptual Text: Finalizing
_ Choice of Artists: Filling the gaps
_ Web: Artists’ Profiles
_ Debate / Public Program: Trends

FRI 25 June, 2.00 pm to 6.00 pm

RE
_ Funding Portfolio: Finalizing
_ Funding: Supporting Ongoing Applications
_ Funding: Future Funding Applications
_ Travel

SAT 26 June, 10.00 am to 12.00 am

TASAWORAT

_ Open Questions
_ Art Mediation: Supporting the Open Call and the Workshop Series
_ T[3]: Supporting the Interviews

2.00 pm Tunis Time
_ TASAWAR [3] Open Call
_ TASAWORAT Update
_ RE: Coordination/Hospitality
_ RE: Funding
_ RE: Choice of Artists/Open List
_ RE: Sites
_ RE: Production
_ RE: Talks/Roundtables
_ RE: Art Mediation
_ RE: Web Coworking
_ T[2] Publication: Workload? Alternatives?

4.00 pm
MBL

6.00 pm
End

FRI 11 June 2021

2.00 pm Tunis Time
MBL

6.00 pm
End

10.00 am ALWAYS TUNIS TIME
Conceptual Approach
Contexts
_ Bettina

12.00 pm
Organization
_ Samira

1.00 pm | Online
Conversations on Curating: ruangrupa
https://fb.me
Conversations on Curating explores how curating is continuously redefined and repositioned in ways that go far beyond exhibition-making.

ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is a non-profit organization that strives to support the idea of art within urban and cultural context by involving artists and other disciplines such as social sciences, politics, technology, media, etc, to give critical observation and views towards Indonesian urban contemporary issues. ruangrupa also produce collaborative works in the form of art projects such as exhibition, festival, art lab, workshop, research, as well as book, magazine and online-journal publication. As an artists’ collective, ruangrupa has been involved in many collaborative and exchange projects, including participating in big exhibitions such as Gwangju Biennale (2002 & 2018), Istanbul Biennial (2005), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, 2012), Singapore Biennale (2011), São Paulo Biennial (2014), Aichi Triennale (Nagoya, 2016) and Cosmopolis at Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017). In 2016, ruangrupa curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem, NL. They will curate Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany in 2022.

2.00 pm
Break

3.00 pm | Online
Diversity Check
_ Irene

4.00 pm | Online
Conceptual approach to sites
_ Building tandems for site-visit
_ Bettina

6.00 pm
End

FRI 28 May 2021

10.00 am – 1.00 pm | onsite/online
Site-scouting in Sidi Bou Said
_ Bettina & Aymen

1.00 pm
Break

2.00 pm | Online
Funding
_ Alexia, Bettina

4.00 pm | Online
Production
_ Aymen, Elham, Daniela

SAT 29 May 2021

10.00 am | Online
Website
_ Sara-Mari, Leah

1.00 pm
Break

2.00 pm | Online
Art Mediation
_ Kenza, Salma, Syrine

4.00 pm
Summary / Organization
_ Bettina

1 / CONCEPTUAL GUIDELINES & TITLE

Over the last weeks we discussed the theme and the title of the exhibition: We will focus on the ‘The Art of Archiving’ and the title of the exhibition will be ‘RE’ referencing the suffix that indicates ‘to return to the origins’ or to ‘redo’ something. Please try write down your associations and bring them to the session so that we can use them for the ‘curatorial rationale’.

_ Tasks

Synchronize in the curatorial collective what could can / should be addressed in the research and development of the project.

Write a text for the website and the funding info.

Come-up with artist’s proposals and present them to the curatorial collective. If you have artist’s in mind that might be interesting to be included and that might be ok to work in the framework we can provide, please prepare a smal presentation to introduce them to us. If you have no one on your list yet, that is fine, too.

Start to work on the artist’s profiles on the website.

2 / SITES

The exhibtion project will take place in Sidi Bou Said. The qualities and choice of sites is part of the conceptual work.

_ Tasks

Name and frame the qualities of the sites.

Discover Sidi Bou Said and find sites. We will try to provide you all with local tandems to be able to (video-)walk in Sidi Bou Said.

Provide info text and images of the sites for the artists, the website and the funding info.

3 / TIMELINE

The exhibition project will take place within the timeframe from 25 August to 5 September 2021.

_ Tasks

Discuss the pro’s /con’s for the exact days.

4 / WEBSITE / ONLINE EXHIBITION

Due to the ongoing Covid-19-restrcitions we will work on the exhibition onsite and online. We will introduce you to the state-of-preparations.

SOCIAL MEDIA

We will discuss jointly a strategy for a good social media campaign. Please think of some ideas.

ONSITE COMMUNICATION

We will discuss what needs to be done to generate visibility for the exhibtion project in Sidi Bou Said, Tunis, and the region.

FUNDING

We still need funding and we will spend some time to prepare jointly a funding info.

5 / ART MEDIATION

We will share the state-of-preparation for the art mediation program. We will try to find a local team to support us and we have to dicsuss who will train them and who will share their tasks.

6 / CONTEXTS

We will present to you the projects by TASAWAR [1] COLLECTIVE ‘Matter of Time’ and INTERFERENCE ‘Not Listed’ that will take place in the same timeframe. The joint brand will be ‘1³ – Contemporary Art Festival Sidi Bou Said’.

Feedback recommendation statements
Preparing the publication studio

Preparing the exhibition project
_ Cross-check on the ON | OFF Debriefing Book

THURSDAY

10.00 am Tunis Time
Introduction

11.30 am
Research and writing

2.30 pm
Break

3.00 pm to 6.00 pm
Peer-reviewing and correction
Collective feedback session

FRIDAY

10.00 am
Status check and correction

11.30 am
English translation and tandem proofing

2.30 pm
Break

3.00 pm to 6.00 pm | G-DRIVE | Hosted by Bettina Pelz
ON | OFF Archiving
Finalizing the recommendation statements
Preparing the publication studio
Preparing the exhibition project

SATURDAY

10.00 am
Checking all text + Ramadan planning

11.30 am
Website upload + social media adaptation

2.30 pm
Break

3.00 pm to 6.00 om
Summary, review, feedback

EXHIBITIONS Selection

2021 | Paris.fr, Foundation Fiminco
2021 | Paris.fr, Cité Internatuional des Art

2020 | Bruxelles.be, Espace d’art contemporain
2020 | Amman.jr, MMAG Foundation
2020 | Tunis.tn, Selma Feriani Gallery

2019 | Abu Dhabi.uae, Warehouse 421
2019 | Rabat.tn, Le Cube
2019 | Tunis.tn, B7L9
MORE

STUDIES

Paris.fr, University of the Arts La Sorbonne, PhD
Tunis.tn, Art Academy, MA

BIO

Born in Tunis-Carthage.

[/one_half][one_half_last padding=”6px 6px 6px 6px”]
Andréan Bégin: L’impossible syndrome de Stendhal:
Portrait de Farah Khelil (in French). 10 February 2021.
Translation: deepl.com & Bettina Pelz

Farah Khelil is an artist. Farah Khelil is a researcher. Farah Khelil is not an archivist. Farah Khelil is a woman. Farah Khelil used to be a painter, but has emancipated herself from painting. Farah Khelil is a translator of emotion. Farah Khelil is Tunisian. Farah Khelil is not a historian. Farah Khelil is a little punk. Farah Khelil is not at the service of memory. Farah Khelil is a philosopher who formulates ideas and expresses them with artistic forms rather than with words. Farah Khelil is an ontologist, and things are things for themselves.

Farah Khelil’s work is a protean materialization of the artist’s intuitions. The mediums used – photography, installation, drawing, sound composition, writing – are as varied as the sources the artist uses: historical or personal archives, found objects, documentary photographs. This great diversity which merges under her hands allows her to play with several levels of reading and perception. Each work is a universe in itself, where micro and macro stories meet through artistic gesture.

In Farah Khelil’s personal story, everything begins when she arrives in Paris. Before that, she studied Fine Arts in Tunis, where she learned to master the traditional artistic techniques that at the time were the norm in Tunisia. Her artistic practice is then centered around painting, a hyperrealist painting. Her artistic knowledge is impregnated with the study of Western art history.

In Paris, she arrives at museums, and in front of the works she realizes that she already knows them, that she has already been moved, that she has already vibrated when reading the explanations of these works. Some visitors can suffer psychological decompensation in front of masterpieces, it is the syndrome of Stendhal, but Farah Khelil is immune. She may look, but she is physically present but emotionally elsewhere. She is in the books of art history that she studied at length, she travels from reproductions to reproductions of these masterpieces. This silence allows the question of the encounter with the work to emerge. At what point does one encounter an artwork? When do we see it for the first time? Do we really see it and only by facing it? This questioning of the gaze and perception is reminiscent of Denis Diderot’s Lettre ‘Sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient’. In front of a painting, one can not understand it, not be touched by it, even if one has already studied it. Even a blind person who would find the sight will need time to make the synthesis between what he could live before and what his eye discovers now.

But let’s get back to Farah. We are in 2007 and this year marks the death of painting in Farah Khelil’s practice. This death is fertile, since it is actually a birth, the founding act of everything she creates since, an awakening that will allow her to define her intellectual and artistic posture. Farah Khelil becomes aware of the influence of the media culture of Western art in Tunisia. Media in the sense that Western art is examined in all its forms, and that she has access to it through visual or textual analyses. Between her and the works, there is always another medium. This imposed distance leads Farah to reflect on the notion of impact, of the impact that artworks have on us. Farah’s work is all about the question of reception, and the different postures that make it possible: a point of view or a point of listening. A bit like Joseph Kosuth who gathers the chair, its image, and its definition, Farah Khelil’s practice integrates into the work its own media. The content of Farah Khelil’s work is that of a constant exploration of the device of exposure, transmission, and translation. The content is at the service of the container, it is a pretext for the artist, to allow her to bring to life in her works her desire to share, to exchange.

Here intervenes the question of the Tunisian identity, and it is in a logic of decolonization that it questions its heritage, in particular artistic and cultural very largely marked by the Western domination. This duality, Farah Khelil also knows how to put it at the service of its creative purpose. This is the case with the series ‘Viewpoint’, ‘Listening Point’ (Clichés II), initiated in 2012, in which Farah Khelil uses souvenirs of tourism in Tunisia. Found in France, she uses postcards that to her are not archives, but a building material for the artist. She cuts out shapes that appear on the image side of the postcard. Always presented on the text side, playing on what is visible and what is legible, the postcards give to see initially figurative voids, but which become abstract once the card is turned over.

Point of view, point of listening (Clichés II), 2013-2019

This technique of the lack, the hollow, is found in other pieces by Farah. For example, the series ‘Surface Effect’ (2018) is a set of laser-drawn educational art history slides. The laser-drawn shapes are figures taken from an encyclopedia. The ‘Excavations Series’ (2019) is a set of laser-drilled slides of archaeological sites in Roman Tunisia, featuring text correspondences of visitors to Tunisia taken from postcards. These series are also part of the relationship between Western and Tunisian culture.

Excavations, 2019

In the artist’s only painting series, ‘Point of View, Point of Hearing (shots 1)’ (2012), small canvases of Tunisian landscapes intended to be sold to tourists are covered by the artist with white paint. She still leaves the original landscape peeking out in places through small dots. We find here this dimension of seeing through, of a hole which opens our field of vision. Exposed all together, they form a constellation of the visible and the invisible.

Point of view, point of listening (Clichés I), 2013

For the exhibition at the Fiminco Foundation, Farah Khelil has chosen to create new pieces from the series ‘Bedside Notes’ and ‘Point de vue’, ‘Point d’écoute’ (Nuit Blanche), in an installation adapted to the exhibition’s purpose, and which continues the artist’s artistic research. The ‘Bedside Notes’ series began in 2017, during a residency in Gafsa, Tunisia. This region in southern Tunisia is a meeting between her personal family history and an atypical natural landscape. On the one hand, she travels the region with a camera to immortalize the horizon and its vegetal details. On the other hand, she visits one of her father’s aunts who tells her the history of her family, with photographs. Her eye is drawn to the small bedside tables, whose upper shelf is glazed and serves as a horizontal frame for family photographs. Farah Khelil decides to take up this private and domestic device of monstration and to make it the support of a photographic hybridization. Indeed, Farah Khelil mixes archives and personal photographs and especially flattens them. She blurs our senses, that of depth and perspective, as different images are unified by a gesture of composition. However, she treats these archives not as a memory, but rather as a reflexive mapping of lived experiences. The table is a whole, both in terms of the artistic practice for which it serves as a support, and in terms of its previous history as a domestic object. In this dynamic, Farah abolishes any form of hierarchy between sources, between mediums, between image and text.

Bedside Notes #1, 2017

For the exhibition at the Fiminco Foundation, Farah Khelil will take up this format of bedside tables, this time developing a work of silk-screening texts on placemats. The exhibition ‘Freedom of Sleep’, conceived as an exploration of insomnia, of the desynchronization of bodies and society, gives Farah Khelil the opportunity to explore a new meaning of the bedside table series. The object itself, if it serves as a support for an artistic realization, remains an everyday object, a witness of our nights and our insomnia. The artist uses the object in its totality, from its material condition to its emotional significance. The silk-screened texts are extracts from internet forums where people share their testimony on insomnia. Farah Khelil revisits the medium of text, as so many personal stories to make a work with a universal scope, which will amuse, resonate, question visitors.

Ultimately the work of Farah Khelil is born of a mental, visual and artistic emancipation. Emancipation rhymes with freedom, and it is true freedom that guides Farah to break codes, divert objects and ideas and free herself from rules.
[/one_half_last]

Discussing proposals for the exhibition project’s theme

Discussing what to do with the ON | OFF website

Preparing the TASAWAR Publication
Introducing interview-based texts

Preparing funding applications

ON | OFF Evaluation
mentimeter.com

TASAWAR Timeline: Update
MBL Project: 8 to 10 April 2021, 2.00 pm to 6.00 pm (3 days)
Ramadhan Break: 13 April to 12 May 2021
Publication Project: 27 to 29 Mai 2021 (3 days)
Exhibition Project: 15 August to 15 September 2021

MATERIALS

WED 3 March 2020 | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm

THU 4 March 2020 | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Famkje

FRI 5 March 2020 | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Syrine

8 to 26 February 2021 | Daily Monday to Friday | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Time for feedback and crosscheck, to ask questions and to solve problems …
MEETING SPACE

MON 8 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm

TUE 9 February | 1.00 pm to 2.00 pm
Elham Khattab

WED 10 February | 1.00 pm to 2.00 pm
Pia Stengl

THU 11 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Questions about the Networking Event (Daniela, Alexia and Elham)

FRI 12 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Daniela Nofal

MON 15 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Nadia Mounier

TUE 16 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm

WED 17 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
HYPERLINKS event prep with moderators

THU 18 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm

FRI 19 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm

MON 22 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Sara Mari Blom

TUE 23 February | 1.00 pm to 2.00 pm
Syrine Bettaleb ali & Kenza Jemmali

WED 24 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Nadia Mounier

THU 25 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm
Daniela Nofal

FRI 26 February | 12.00 pm to 1.00 pm