Five years ago when the artist Hiwa K. and I conceived Estrangement – a long-term project that materializes occasionally in the form of residencies – we worked firstly on conceptualizing the types of engagement that interested us. Our project connects Iraqi Kurdistan with parts of Europe, and our major interest is not about how to find practices that can be located in the Western value system, but rather how to read the vernacular form and locate practices as a mode of getting to know the broader context of culture.
It is time for us in the arts world to expand our institutional machinery and our understanding of the modes of display, research and concepts. In this way, Estrangement moves from the field of hostility to the field of potentiality. The strange and the unfamiliar become the vehicle of possibility and an expression of longing for something we have once lost. Through the Estrangement project, we have learned how our different competencies support one another: Hiwa coming from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the genocide of the Kurds and me coming from the post-totalitarian condition in Poland. We have discovered the astonishing similarity of the Soviet (in general Eastern bloc) and Middle Eastern pop and television culture which entered the circulation of art at the moment of Western political interest in our respective regions that connected to the fetishization of consumer goods which, in turn, were associated with political stability and normality. By cross-reading these experiences, we established our own modes of work and spheres of associations and references. Another important similarity was forms of organization with which we have grown up. In the case of Hiwa, there were self-didactic and self-organized circles of artists of different disciplines in Kurdistan. In my case, there were artist-run, independent spaces in Communist and post-Communist Poland. Both forms of organization were helpful as experiences to setup our modes of inhabiting each other’s context.
The world is changing, and the last two years have proved that more and more, especially with the young generation’s frustrations about the political and economic order. It is no longer possible to continue certain institutional formats because they reproduce the world we used to know. If we wish to remain relevant we need more understanding of how residencies can fulfill a new and much broader cultural and political role that is in hands of the artists. Increasingly, there will be less submission to institutional agendas for residencies and more transfer of knowledge, skills and abilities. The tensions of these encounters are the most productive tools in the new development of residencies. We need more laboratories of thinking and visual reconceptualization that include vernacularities, locally born knowledges and forms of organization for the world we do not know yet. Looking for the space of artistic labor might become the way of looking for the place of political practice where new ideas can not only be distributed but also implemented.
