Adelita Husni-Bey, Postcards from the desert island – still da video
Adelita Husni-Bey: exhibition, lecture, and seminar
the classroom
Exhibition: April 9–11, 2016
The classroom is a new center of art and education based in Milan.
The project focuses on the production of a series of courses of history and theory of arts taught by artists. In each course the artist is invited to teach and to design his or her own classroom, turning the space of learning into a crafted site of production.
Housed in a former school building that from 1972 to 2011 contained one of the Montessori Schools of Milan, the classroom operates in collaboration with the universities and cultural centers and figures interested in the relationship between art and educational practices.
The initiative sets out to bring artists into the core discourse of the history of arts, encouraging the individual production of paths and methods of study. Its mission is to work on the role of the history of arts as the basis of various paths of training, and on the dynamics by which histories are written, transmitted and spread.
The classroom launches its activity with a program running on April 9 through 18 in Milan where the first invited artist Adelita Husni-Bey (Italy and Lybia, 1985, lives and works in New York) presents a solo show at the center, a course seminar hosted at Bocconi University and a public lecture on arts and educational practices at Triennale Milano.
Vincent Meessen, Sire, je suis de l’o?tre pays – Wiels, Brussels – foto Sven Laurent
Vincent Meessen: Sire, je suis de l’ôtre pays
Curator: Caroline Dumalin
19.02 – 24.04.2016
WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels
Vincent Meessen’s artistic practice consists in producing narrative and discursive installations articulated round overlooked or forgotten documents. In their new spatial scenario, they raise certain paradoxes that haunt Western rationality. Each work is conceived as an experience of a given text, image, sign or sound, put to the test of the present. In his WIELS exhibition Vincent Meessen proposes an expanded setting for One.Two.Three, the filmic, musical and performative installation created for the Belgian Pavilion at the latest Venice Biennial. Starting from an insurrectionary song written in May ‘68 this work reveals a unknown connection between the Situationist International and the Congo. One.Two.Three questions the historiography of modernity’s last international avant-garde, which upset so radically the prevailing view of the relationship between art, politics and everyday life. Through collaboration with young female musicians from Kinshasa, the rumba as a transcultural form serves as a vehicle for a meditation on emancipation, an undertaking that is fundamentally unresolved and condemned to repetition.
The title of this exhibition links One.Two.Three to a recent research project presented at WIELS for the first time. It takes as its point of departure the Situationist International’s unsuccessful plan to establish an experimental city on an uninhabited island off the coast of Italy. The sentence “Sire, I am from another country”, adapted by Meessen following the phonetic logic of Creole languages, echoes a founding text of the Situationist International, Ivan Chtcheglov’s 1953 “Formulary for a New Urbanism”. The very idea of the island offers the possibility of an adventure, proposing both a separation from the world and its possible re-creation.
Vincent Meessen, Sire, je suis de l’o?tre pays – Wiels, Brussels – foto Sven Laurent
