March - September 2021

Darat al Funun, Amman
contact / location

Curators: Joud Al-Tamimi, Firas Shehadeh, Reem Marji

Postcolonial Ecologies opens with a presentation by the curators on Tuesday, 9 March 2021 at 6:00 pm (Amman time), streamed via Youtube.

Unfolding through multiple exhibitions, an online residency, public program and Summer Academy, the exhibition project discusses and reflects on essential ecological questions, addressing how colonial practices and extractive economies have affected/contaminated the natural environments of indigenous peoples and native ecosystems. Departing from the epistemic violence enacted through dominant technologies of measurement and calculation that subdue life forms to market logic, Postcolonial Ecologies unearths indigenous knowledge systems rooted in conceptions of nature and land as sources of life and subsistence. Thinking with Fanon, participants are invited to engage in critical readings of decolonization and to speculate on life futures that acknowledge land as ‘the most essential value’, its humus at once a carrier of collective memory/trauma and a site of anticolonial resurgence and regeneration. Against a modern grammar of predation and extraction, the multifaceted program invokes other worlds in the making, exploring radical forms of social organisation that centre mutual aid and more-than-human collaboration.

Participating Artists

Featuring works from the Khalid Shoman Collection, the main exhibition opens on Saturday 22 May 2021 in the Main Building, Darat al Funun at 6:00 pm.
An initial selection of participating artists follows below with the complete line-up to be announced in the coming months:
Ali Jabri, Ahmad Nawash, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Etel Adnan, Gouider Triki, Jananne Al-Ani, Jumana Emil Abboud, Laila Shawa, Maha Mustafa, Moataz Nasr, Mohammad Hawajri, Mona Hatoum, Nicola Saig, Rachid Koraïchi, Samia Halaby, Vladimir Tamari, Wael Shawky

Darat al Funun welcomes applications to join its upcoming Summer Academy program, taking place from 1 June- 30 July 2021.

Deadline for Applications: 15 April 2021

The academy offers participants the space to develop their art practice within a critical setting that encourages experimentation, knowledge-sharing, and communal learning. Taking place as part of the Postcolonial Ecologies exhibition project, this year’s program will be curated around a set of fundamental questions concerning ecological crisis, systems of value, and life futures, in light of which the participants will explore new conceptual and aesthetic strategies that entangle both artistic and ecological practices.

Using the space of The Lab as a site of conjunction for the investigation of art and ecology, participants will engage with and begin to answer these questions as they negotiate both contextual and personal gravity points. While there will be a basic guiding structure, the program is designed to allow participants to shape the trajectory of their individual and collective experiences.

The curriculum will include workshops, screenings, discussions, studio visits, and excursions.

Invited faculty members will include Sahar Qawasmi and Nida Sinnokrot (Sakiya Collective), Jumana Emil Abboud, Salah Hassan, Kareem Estefan, Firas Shehadeh, Islam Khatib (WikiGender Collective), Reef Fakhouri, Dina Bataineh, and Nujud Ashour (Taghmees Collective).

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