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FYI,

i'm also contributing to the WILL exposition with my net-art piece
FARAH. I find the whole concept of WILL a great effort.


- ----- Forwarded message from Gita Hashemi <gita@xxxxxxx> -----

Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:10:19 -0400
From: Gita Hashemi <gita@xxxxxxx>
Subject: W I L L :: A Negotiations Event :: A Transnational Exhibition

|__________________________________
|
|   W I L L
|??
|   June 19 ? July 19, 2003
|
|   Exhibition Reception: Thursday, June 19, 5:30-7:30 pm
|   Some of the artists will be present.
|
|   http://negotiation2003.net
|   <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
|
|   A Space Gallery, 401 Richmond St.W., #110, Toronto, Canada
|   416-979-9633
|__________________________________
|   Ilana Salama Ortar, Stephen Wright
|         (Israel, France)
|   Galia Shapira, Aref Nammari, Haggai Kupermintz, Phil Shane
|          (Israel/USA, Palestine/USA, Israel/USA, USA)
|   Alexandra Handal in collaboration with poets Karen Alkalay-Gut
and Nathalie Handal
|         (Palestine/Dominican Republic, Israel, Palestine/USA)
|   Rami a.k.a. Jaromil
|         (Italy, Palestine)
|   Artist Emergency Response
|         (USA)
|   Shahrzad Arshadi, Jos?e Lambert
|         (Canada)
|   Negotiations Working Group
|         (Canada)
|__________________________________
|   WILL is a Creative Response initiative and a part of
_Negotiations: From a Piece of Land to a Land of Peace_ a multi-part
cultural event that intends to create new public spaces for dialogue
on shared entitlement and common responsibility for co-existence in
Palestine-Israel and beyond. For information about other Negotiations
events (June 19 - 29) visit our website at http://negotiations2003.net
|__________________________________
|__________________________________
|   C U R A T O R I A L   S T A T E M E N T

    High-tide on the day of war, before we are drowned into another
twilight of repressed and forgotten truths, engulfed in the light of
explosions ? last year in Afghanistan, this year in Iraq, every year,
for fifty-five years, in the land historically known as Palestine ?
we ask: how do we change our world to change our fate? This question
points directly to the ethics of our intentions and practices for it
is no longer possible to question the urgency and the imperatives.
The world must change if we are to live with one another in dignity.
To live with ourselves, we must change. The empire is unmasked, yet
again. Rulers are at work to redraw the map, yet again. Bodies have
lined up to stand witness to this violence, yet again. Violations are
countless and cannot be checked against the anachronistic terms of
"human rights." Bombs, tanks, armoured helicopters, guns and missiles
are not bound by any charters, and our utopian investments in
international laws and institutions have failed to produce any
profits except for the profiteers at war for more control over land,
resources, human lives and histories. Resistance was yesterday?s
response. Today, openly formulated insurgence is a reality.
        The Second Palestinian Intifada, which erupted in September
of 2000, provides an instance of such insurgency. This is a new phase
in the century-long Palestinian history of anti-colonial struggles,
ongoing since 1897. Contrary to mainstream representations, the
Intifada is not simply a localized Palestinian nationalist response
to the repressive Israeli occupation and its war machine; rather, it
is a demonstration of indigenous peoples? refusal to surrender their
agency to the hegemonic hold of colonial regimes. In spite of the
gross imbalance of powers, the Palestinians have risen up, yet again,
to challenge colonialism?s intrinsically xenophobic discourses and
its structural patterns of exclusion and domination. More than
anything else, the Intifada exposes the failures of colonialism to
subjugate the will of the Palestinian people and silence dissenting
voices.
        The radicalization of this will has swept over the
checkpoints and barbed wire to infiltrate the consciousness of
Israelis and of people around the world. The new forms of
Palestinian-Israeli and transnational collaboration ? manifested
through organizations such as the International Solidarity Movement
and Ta?ayush ? draw on a renewed will to organize civil communities
in countering economic, political and military colonization. Such
social mobilization calls for different forms of representation; for
a thorough shake-up in our habits of thought. It calls for a
conceptual creativity that sets out to ethically enact strategies of
change and pragmatically prefigure the horizons of a different world.
This, we believe, is the fertile land where a new insurgent art
movement can grow.
        For this exhibition, we called on artists to formulate and
realize the ways in which transdisciplinary artistic practices can
nourish stronger, more ethically accountable, multi-faceted and
multi-vocal responses to the social imperatives we face. A gathering
of politically responsive work, WILL is dedicated to the project of
change: unearthing, remembering, coming to voice, naming and, rooted
in the depths of consciousness, actively intervening in the social
field. The modes of intervention utilized by the projects in WILL
exceed conventional practices of representational art. Each work
shown in this exhibit has emerged through intense negotiations and
co-labouring, of which the ultimate products are the social and
personal relations and transformations that transcend the artwork.
Here the artwork is only a landmark for new conceptions. The real
work is ongoing, constantly evolving and defiant of representation as
it unfolds in the plains of awareness and action.
        WILL provides opportunities for engagement, and asks that we
engage differently. We encourage you to actively participate and
contribute your labour to this work.
- -- Gita Hashemi & Hanadi Loubani for Negotiations Working Group
|__________________________________
|   P R O J E C T S
|________
|   Inadvertent Monuments
|   Ilana Salama Ortar and Stephen Wright

    Our project focuses on what was initially a deeply-entrenched
border cairn, constructed after World War I, intended to separate the
French mandate of Lebanon from the British mandate of Palestine.
During the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon from 1982-2000, and
under the protection of Tsahal, layers of top soil were scooped up
from vast tracts of occupied land and taken by dump trucks to Israeli
settlements near the border ? a fact to which the stone cairn bears
subtle though irrefutable evidence: the cairn, whose bottom half was
deeply entrenched in the earth, now stands some eight feet above the
ground. While its top portion is the same light tan colour as the
surrounding topography, the bottom three feet are a dark ruddy brown
? identical to the soil once covering them. Intended as a horizontal
territorial marker, the cairn has come to mark verticality ? raising
a variety of issues regarding the difference between land and soil,
territory and earth. It is an inadvertent monument. As such, it
stands as a condensed metaphor of the conflict embedded in the
historical present; a public mirror for anyone who cares to look at
the issue of peace and partition not as event but as sign. Taking
this land-art-like unintentional "monument" as its hub, this project
refuses to be partitioned within the territory of "art." Instead,
using art-related skills to refocus attention on an otherwise
invisible symbol, it foregrounds art?s use-value in negotiating the
shift from a piece of land to a land of peace.
|________
|   Destinations: A Palestinian-Israeli Audio-Visual Installation
|   Galia Shapira, Aref Nammari, Haggai Kupermintz, Phil Shane

    The "Destinations" installation makes use of photographic images
collected from Palestinians and Israelis that convey their profound
connection to their shared land and its history. Sound recordings
capture personal stories of love, hope and pain that the images
document. A multiple slide projection, the large photographic images
are projected onto the gallery walls in a continuous sequence and are
accompanied by Arabic and Hebrew audio narratives ? including poetry
and literary pieces by Israeli and Palestinian writers. Surrounded by
images of the shared land, as seen through Israeli and Palestinian
eyes, viewers are invited to re-examine conventional perceptions of
the conflict. Collection and dissemination of images and stories
continue as the artists constitute a growing archive of hope and
struggle towards a common destiny.
|________
|   Farah ? In Search for Joy
|   Rami a.k.a. Jaromil

    The "Farah" project documents my three-week trip, in August,
2002, through the occupied territories of Palestine. During this time
I crossed East Jerusalem, Gaza, Bethlehem, Hebron and Ramallah. This
was while Bethlehem and Gaza were still under siege and Ramallah was
experiencing another full-time curfew after the assassination of
Ahmad Saadat. I set out for this trip independently, but, once in
Palestine, I had the chance to collaborate with some valuable people
of the Palestinian Progressive Youth Union, Tactical Media Crew,
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, International
Solidarity Movement and Indymedia Palestine. Farah is an effort to
document the life and culture of the Palestinian population in zones
of war, without actually mentioning the war itself. It is a net-art
project in the way that it tries to use the net as a privileged
medium to unveil a beauty usually made far by war. It is the content
that counts in Farah, the medium only provides the necessary means
for the message to be conveyed. The project is born from the need to
discover and document that which remains untouched by war: everything
in the tales of children and older folks that pervades in the
identity of a people in spite of dispossession, humiliation and
violence. Farah is a search for joy and for a resistance that
organizes itself in thousands of forms in the imagination. It is to
recognize the millenary Palestine in the untouchable dreams of its
children. http://farah.dyne.org/
|________
|   Dance
|   Alexandra Handal in collaboration with poets Karen Alkalay-Gut
and Nathalie Handal

    Alexandra Handal?s multimedia installation, "Dance," is based on
a joint poem written by Israeli poet Karen Alkalay-Gut and
Palestinian poet, Nathalie Handal. A digital animation of the poem,
which becomes entirely legible only at the end, is projected onto the
floor. While watching the projection, the viewer experiences the
words of the poem transform into abstract shapes that resemble
lightning, needles, feathers, and webs. As they are colliding, moving
past and against each other, the words begin to emerge as lines of a
poem, then stanzas, breaking the fear of sharing the same space in
order to dance together. Dance is a space which invites the viewer to
gather round and experience - through movement, color, and rhythm -
the pain, frustration, fear and joy involved in taking the first
steps towards negotiating our present, ourselves. Dance compels the
viewer to ask: how can we not dance together?
|________
|   Squares in the Pavement & Beau temps, mauvais temps
|   Shahrzad Arshadi and Jos?e Lambert

    "Squares in the Pavement & Beau temps, mauvais temps" is a
photo-documentary project created by two artists: one from the East,
the other from the West. Every Friday since September 14, 2001, these
two artists have met each other in front of the Israeli Consulate in
Montreal to stand vigil for peace and justice in Palestine. For a
period of one full year, rain or shine, Jos?e and Shahrzad have
documented the participants at these vigils as a testimony to their
collective hopes and fears. The collaboration between the two artists
is an installation of 104 black and white photographs. While Jos?e?s
contribution symbolizes time, season and continuity, Shahrzad
captures portraits of people wearing the most immediately
recognizable symbol of Palestine ? the "keffia" ? people of all walks
of life, teachers, workers, artists and students; young and old from
all races and origins, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist and ?
|________
|   Video Petition Project
|   Artist Emergency Response

    The "Video Petition Project" is a visual testimony of North
Americans voicing their opposition to the Israeli Occupation. Despite
their large and growing numbers, these voices are significantly
underrepresented by the mainstream North American media. They are
comprised of Jews and non-Jews alike whose sincere, thoughtful, and
eloquent speech cannot be dismissed as self-loathing or anti-Semitic
simply due to their criticism of the Israeli government and its
policies. Some participants present their own statements and others
use one or another among a variety of statements prepared by AER and
imbue these with their own sincerity. Our ultimate goal is to present
the project at schools, community organizations, art venues, museums,
public access television, radio, and internet sites, and also to
public officials and leaders, thus helping to further aid the
acknowledgement and rightful consideration of this growing movement.
The 80-min video premiered in September 2002 at the Piece Process
exhibit at Chicago?s ARC gallery and was recently (April/May 2003) on
display at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the
exhibit War (What Is It Good For?).
|________
|   Olive Fair
|   Negotiations Working Group

    "Olive Fair" renders visible the material conditions and the
strategies of survival and resistance in occupied Palestine. The
installation displays olive products by Palestinian producers ?
obtained through Sindyanna, a fair-trade company based in Jaffa ?
side-by-side with video documentation of a direct action by the
International Solidarity Movement in support of a group of
Palestinian growers in the West Bank who were resisting the uprooting
of their olive trees by Israeli soldiers and bulldozers. Olive Fair
invites gallery visitors to take product samples in exchange for
contributing personal responses to a website, thus enabling networked
consciousness and informed dialogue. As the olive products in the
gallery diminish, what remains in the physical space ? transmitted
through the ISM video ? is the reality of the struggle in Palestine
cultivating a growing public awareness and solidarity in the virtual
space. http://olivefair.net
|__________________________________
__________________________________
|   A R T I S T S '   B I O S
|________
|   The collaboration between ILANA SALAMA ORTAR and STEPHEN WRIGHT
on Inadvertent Monuments is based on an extra-disciplinary approach
to art: contrary to trendy inter-disciplinary approaches (which
accept disciplinary partitioning as a precondition for association)
and the apparent lack of discipline characterising so much
contemporary art, they seek to mirror the disciplinary
extraterritoriality and non-situatedness of their practice in the
issues that they focus. Using art-related methodologies, they seek to
draw the sort of sustained and thoughtful attention to inadvertent
symbols and monuments ? particularly in situations of social urgency,
suppressed memory and identity loss ? that art-specific proposals
often enjoy. Stephen Wright is a Paris-based theorist of art-related
practice. Ilana Salama Ortar is a Haifa-based artist, working
extensively on the development of "civic art" (city + civitas),
investigating the visible and invisible traces of the erasure of
individual and collective memory in the urban fabric. They previously
collaborated in the exhibition L?Incurable M?moire des Corps.
|________
|   Since November 2002, a group of activists has been meeting in an
effort to explore a new vision and discourse to deal honestly and
courageously with the Palestinian and Israeli experiences. We
emphasize recognition of common destiny, mutual acknowledgement of
pain and suffering, and the embracement of the humanity of each other
as keys to reconciliation. Group members are: GALIA SHAPIRA, an
Israeli visual artist; AREF NAMMARI, a Palestinian electronics
engineer and activist; HAGGAI KUPERMINTZ, an Israeli assistant
professor of education; and PHIL SHANE, an American associate
professor of accounting. The Destinations group aims to promote the
co-existence of historical, cultural, and spiritual Palestinian and
Israeli narratives, through collaborative intellectual and artistic
expressions. By braiding together the stories of peoples' love for
their land, their struggles, pain and hopes, we strive to develop a
new understanding of reality. Our work stems from the realization
that a great responsibility for promoting an alternative vision lies
with the intellectual, spiritual, and arts communities in developing
new images of co-existence that resist self-serving political and
economic dictates. We hope to give voice to a grassroots movement,
expressing Israeli and Palestinian deep yearnings to transcend their
tragic destiny as eternal communities of suffering.
|________
|   RAMI a.k.a. JAROMIL (http://korova.dyne.org) is a free software
programmer and streaming media pioneer, media artist and activist,
performer and emigrant. Wired to the matrix since 1991 (point of
NeuromanteBBS on Cybernet 65:1500/3.13), Jaromil co-founded (1994)
the non-profit organization Metro Olografix for the diffusion of
information technology, and in 2000 founded the free software lab
dyne.org; sub-root for the autistici.org / inventati.org community.
Jaromil is active in the Italy Indymedia Collective, and is currently
the software analyst and developer for PUBLIC VOICE Lab (Vienna). He
recently co-curated I LOVE YOU , an exposition about software viruses
at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt. His past collaborations
include, among others: Giardini Pensili, digitalcraft.org, 01001.org,
August Black, [epidemiC], Florian Cramer, 92v2.0, LOA hacklab, Lobo,
Freaknet Medialab, CandidaTV, the Mitocondri, the HackMeeting
community. Jaromil's most recent online piece is Farah: a
documentation of his travel through the occupied territories of
Palestine, in search for joy.
|________
|   ALEXANDRA HANDAL is a Santo Domingo-NYC based Palestinian artist
whose installations, drawings and digital media focus on issues of
transnationality, cultural migration/displacement, representation,
and memory. Her work has been represented in exhibitions in NYC,
Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Sydney, Australia. Currently, she
is a Visiting Artist Lecturer at the Escuela de Diseno in the
Dominican Republic, affiliated with Parsons School of Design. KAREN
ALKALAY-GUT was born on the last night of the Blitz in London to
refugee parents who brought her to the United States after the war.
She has spent her adult life teaching poetry at Tel Aviv University,
writing, and trying to get people to listen to each other through
poetry. Her 20 books include five poetry books in Hebrew, a biography
of the American poet, Adelaide Crapsey, an e-book of magic poems
called Avracadivra (2002). NATHALIE HANDAL is a Palestinian poet,
playwright and writer who has lived in the United States, Europe, the
Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. She is the author of
the poetry book, The NeverField, the poetry CD, Traveling Rooms, and
the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an
Academy of American Poets bestseller and winner of the Pen
Oakland/Josephine Miles award. Nathalie Handal currently teaches at
Hunter College in NYC.
|________
|   JOS?E LAMBERT is a freelance photographer in the cultural domain.
Twelve years ago, she began documentary work in the Middle-East.
Often associating herself with humanitarian organizations, Jos?e?s
work primarily focused on the impact of sanctions on the Iraqi
people. She also produced, in collaboration with Amnesty
International, an important documentary with prisoners of Khiam
Detention Centre, south of Lebanon. For her exhibition Ils ?taient
absents sur la photo, she was awarded artiste pour la paix in 1998.
SHAHRZAD ARSHADI, a human rights activist and Montr?al-based
Canadian/Iranian artist, came to Canada as a political refugee on
December 24,1983. In the past ten years, Shahrzad has ventured into
different fields of photography, painting and video, enabling her
focus on issues of memory, culture and human rights. Shahrzad has
exhibited her work in various locations across North America.
|________
|   ARTIST EMERGENCY RESPONSE (AER) is a Chicago-based collective of
artists and activists ? including many Jews and Palestinians ?
working for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We seek a just and lasting peace through the minimal, general
framework of the implementation of the Palestinian people?s right to
self-determination, an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, a just solution to the status of Jerusalem, and a
just solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis. We strongly condemn
the escalating violence against civilians on both sides of the
conflict and demand that the United States end its economic,
military, and political support of Israel until the illegal
occupation ends. We are dedicated to fostering dialogue between
communities and combating anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian,
and anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence.
|________
|   NEGOTIATIONS WORKING GROUP: We are women of diverse cultural
background (Anglo-Canadian, Iranian, Italian, Jewish and Palestinian)
and with different skills and experiences (some are artists, some
academics, and most full-time activists). Our differences have
constituted the productive and pragmatic spaces of our
'negotiations', and our work together has been the shared experience
of learning our ethical accountability to one another and to a larger
political project that touches our everyday lives in different and
not always readily acknowledged or immediately visible ways. In spite
of all the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in working towards
social transformation, months of intense volunteer labour have taught
us how to be allies and friends while navigating through politically
contentious, socially complex and historically painful grounds. This
work has made us more determined: negotiations cannot be channeled by
any prescribed roadmaps; they demand complete openness, transparency
and good will. We started as a small formation with dynamic
membership ? by choice, chance or guile ? within Creative Response.
For records of other CR initiatives, visit
http://creativeresponseweb.net

|__________________________________
|?? Negotiations: From a Piece of Land to a Land of Peace
|?? info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
|?? http://negotiations2003.net
|??
|?? Negotiations is a Creative Response initiative:
|?? http://creativeresponseweb.net
|__________________________________


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