Summer School as School
3- 18 July, 2016
Public Program
Tuesday, 5 July 2016 at 20:15
Nat Muller: The Poetics and Violence of Refusing, Disengaging and Discarding Loss
Venue: Boxing Club
Mark Isaku St. Prishtina
Republic of Kosovo
It sounds like a cliché, but so much in the Middle East seems to be, and has been, about loss. Loss of territory, loss of memory, loss of history, loss of voice, loss of opportunity. We are all familiar with incessant news feeds and images on social media saturating us to a point of numbness about war, destruction and hardship. So how do artists from the region engage with the politics of representation and imagery that have been bogged down by expectations of ‘authenticity’ on the one hand and critical engagement on the other? What kind of curatorial frameworks can be developed within such a context? How in a time of monsters, do we insist that there is still a space we can carve out for poetics, beauty and an imaginary? Perhaps the most violent and most poetic act to address loss is to refuse and discard visual representations of it. In this talk I will discuss ideas from artists’ works and my own curatorial practice that collapse the notion of conscious disengagement with a desire for a poetics.
Nat Muller is an independent curator and critic based in Amsterdam. Her main interests include: the intersections of aesthetics, media and politics; media art and contemporary art in and from the Middle East. She is a regular contributor to Springerin, MetropolisM. Her writing has been published amongst others in Bidoun, ArtAsiaPacific, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Canvas, X-tra, The Majalla, Art Margins and Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. She has also written numerous catalogue and monographic essays on artists from the Middle East. With Alessandro Ludovico she edited the Mag.net Reader2: Between Paper and Pixel (2007), and Mag.net Reader3: Processual Publishing, Actual Gestures (2009), based on a series of debates organized at Documenta XII.
She has taught at universities and academies in The Netherlands and the Middle East, and has curated video and film screenings for projects and festivals internationally, including for Rotterdam's International Film Festival, Norwegian Short Film Festival and Video D.U.M.B.O. She is a board member of the IMPAKT Media Festival (Utrecht), the arts organization TENT (Rotterdam) and part of the advisory committee at the Fund for Creative Industries and e-Culture (NL).
Previously she served as a member of selection committee of the Mondriaan Fund (NL). In 2015 and 2016 Nat served as the Outreach Coordinator for the Prince Claus Fund. Recent projects include Spectral Imprints for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in Dubai (2012), Adel Abidin’s solo exhibition I love to love… at Forum Box in Helsinki (2013), Memory Material at Akinci Gallery, Amsterdam (2014); Customs Made: Quotidian Practices & Everyday Rituals at Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah (2014); This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam & American University of Beirut Gallery (2014/15).
Nat is editorial correspondent for Ibraaz and in 2012 was a speaker on BBC World's award-winning program The Doha Debates. In 2015 she curated a group show on contemporary Islamic miniatures Minor Heroisms for Galeri Zilberman (Istanbul) and Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s acclaimed solo show Driven by Storms (Ali's Boat) at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai for which she edited his first monograph, published by Schilt Publishing. She was Associate Curator for the Delfina Foundation’s Politics of Food Program (London). In 2016 she edited Nancy Atakan’s monograph Passing On published by Kehrer Verlag, as well as her solo show Sporting Chances at Pi Artworks (London). Her most recent show on the timely topic of loss of cultural heritage But Still Tomorrow Builds into My Face opened at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery during Art Dubai. She has been appointed guest curator for the A.M.Qattan 2016 Young Artist of the Year Award for Palestinian artists.
www.natmuller.com