Tour of “A Few in Many Places” exhibition led by curator Lila Nazemian
ArteEast invites you to join a tour of Protocinema’s exhibition, “A Few in Many Places”
Led by ArteEast Special Projects curator and Protocinema’s curator New York chapter, Lila Nazemian.
Saturday, August 7th, 11 AM*
Protocinema house on Governors Island | Colonels Row, 410A
Limited attendance strictly by ticket
*Note: Ferries to Governors Island depart August 7th at 10:00 am from 10 South Street in Manhattan or 10:15 am from Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn. Please note which location you will be departing from when you RSVP.
A Few in Many Places
Co-Curated by Mari Spirito and Abhijan Toto
New York Chapter in collaboration with:
Lila Nazemian, Vartan Avakian, Kristine Khouri, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh
On view: May 8 – August 8, 2021
Hours: Saturdays and Sundays; 12 – 5 pm
Protocinema presents A Few in Many Places, a multi-city group exhibition that addresses on-going collapses and cycles of violence, through various forms of collectivity. Taking place in Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, Santurce, and Guatemala City, all of these interventions use sustainable exhibition-making models of reducing exploitation (of natural resources, labor, and knowledge) and consumption (no shipping or flying). This year, collaborators present works on continuing inequalities happening in both physical and digital realms. Developed by Protocinema in 2020, A Few in Many Places maintains a foot in physical real-life, small, and safe get-togethers in each community while utilizing far-reaching digital support structures, to be both hyper-local and globally interconnected. Each chapter is site-responsive while speaking across the regions and produced in a format that allows for forms of engagement under various conditions of lockdowns or other contingent situations.
A Few in Many Places in Bangkok, Istanbul, and New York will focus on the image in its myriad forms as a site of collective investigation and re-learning as well as a tool to unhinge the cycles of violence. In New York Lila Nazemian in collaboration with Vartan Avakian, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, and Kristine Khouri, members of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), explore histories of (forced) migration, memory, and material culture through their intervention situated in a house on Colonels Row, Governors Island. This unfolding exhibition is made with the participants of the Practitioner-in-Residence workshop (entitled: Unravelling Collections and Practices: Rights Materialities and Photographic Agency) at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. It is made up of photography, research texts, recipes and film that comes out of conversations and proposals to consider repatriation, rightful ownership, custodianship and control over culture and data.
About Protocinema:
Protocinema is a cross-cultural, mission-driven art organization, commissioning and presenting site-aware art in Istanbul, New York, and elsewhere. We produce context-specific projects of the highest artistic quality that are accessible to everyone. Protocinema evokes empathy towards an understanding of difference, across regions through exhibitions, educational public programming, and mentorship.
Protocinema is supported by FfAI – The Foundation for Arts Initiatives; The Cowles Charitable Trust, New Jersey; 601 Artspace, New York; American Chai Trust, New York; Hagop Kevorkian Center, NYU, NY
About Arab Image Foundation:
The Arab Image Foundation (AIF) is an independent association founded in 1997 in Beirut. Its collection of over 500,000 photographic objects and documents from and related to the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora has been gradually assembled over the last 20 years by artists and researchers and through donations.
About ArteEast:
Founded in 2003, ArteEast is a leading New York-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to engaging a growing audience with the contemporary arts from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its diaspora. Through public programming, strategic partnerships, and dynamic online publications, ArteEast is a forum for critical dialogue and exchange aimed at supporting the development of a sustainable MENA art sector.
About the Collaborators :
Vartan Avakian is an artist working with video, photography and sculpture. Avakian’s work has been shown at Marfa Projects, Beirut; MuCEM, Marseille; Sursock Museum, Beirut; and Apexart, New York. Avakian is a recipient of the Abraaj Group Art Prize and is represented by Kalfayan Galleries, Athens-Thessaloniki and Marfa Projects, Beirut.
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh uses her background in photography to combine research, conversation, image, and meta-archival practices to reflect on notions of collectivity and power. One of her long-term projects explores the impossibilities of representation through a potential digital archive assembled in collaboration with inhabitants of Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr, Lebanon. She was a 2018/2019 fellow at BAK, Utrecht, and is recipient of the 8th Vevey International Photography Award (2011), and the Arles Discovery Award (2013).
Kristine Khouri is a researcher and writer whose interests focus on the history of arts circulation and infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa. She is co-founder of the History of Arab Modernities in the Visual Arts and has advised on archival projects and digitization strategy for organizations in Kuwait, Syria, UAE and Lebanon. Her most recent texts were contributions to Labour of Love (Palestinian Museum, 2008), Seta Manoukian (Saradar Collection/Kaph Books, 2019), and Hamed Abdalla, Arabécédaire (Zamân Boks, 2018).
Lila Nazemian is an independent curator and the Special Projects Curator at ArteEast whose recent curatorial projects include “Now That We Have Established a Common Ground” (forthcoming 2021) at Assembly Room, New York; “I open my eyes and see myself under a tree laden with fruit that I cannot name” organized at New York’s Center for Book Arts in January 2020; and the “On Echoes of Invisible Hearts” series, featuring contemporary artists from Yemen (2018-2019.) She is a QAYYEM 2019 Curatorial Fellow, was among the inaugural participants of the 2018-2019 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York, and participated in ICI (Independent Curators International) 2018 Curatorial Intensive in Bangkok.
