Week 17: Homeworks Forum
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is the next event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with some of the participants in the Home Works Forum, a multidisciplinary platform held in Beirut, Lebanon about every other year. Since its inception in 2002 at the initiative of the Ashkal Alwan Association, Home Works has evolved into a vibrant platform for spirited exchange on art and art-related practices in the region and beyond. Artists, writers, and thinkers gather for ten days in order to share their works, which take the form of exhibitions, performances, lectures, videos, artists’ talks, workshops and publications. What links the forum’s usership is a desire to engage a common set of urgent questions, to produce and consider aesthetic forms capable of embodying those questions meaningfully — and above all to work toward the emergence of a public with the agency to carry the project forward through action and not just in contemplation. Now midway through its 5th edition, the Home Works Forum is a space in which political, social and economic realities can be explored, reflected, and made manifest as visual and verbal articulations.
“Home Works” suggests an intertwining of public and private spheres, the outside world of work and the inside space of home. More broadly, “Home Works,” itself an impossible plural, implies a process of internal excavation, of digging and burrowing deeper while simultaneously constructing and accumulating new practices.
This year, the Forum’s focus is on “In and Out of Education … What Can We Teach Nowadays”, looking at the crisis in arts education, the so-called “pedagogical turn” in artistic discourse and practice — all in the context of the plan to set up a new educational program, The Home Works Academy, which will use the city of Beirut itself as its campus, its research topic and its platform. Beirut as a plausible artworld…
