Future Perfect - Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary
Overview
Co-published with 421
Foreword by: Faisal Al Hassan
Edited by: Rohit Goel (BICAR)
Essays by: Frank Ruda, Mays Albaik, Ala Younis, Isaac Sullivan, Veeranganakumari Solanki, Rico Franses, Mona Al Jadir (in conversation with Mays Albaik)
With the growth of our creative and cultural ecosystem, there is an opportunity, as well as a responsibility, to reflect on our purpose, and what that means for the future. Future Perfect features contributions from a regional group of writers, thinkers, artists, and curators, resulting from the shared dialogue, discussion, and conversations that took place among the first cohort of cultural practitioners in the 421 Curatorial Development.
In the pages of this publication, you will encounter courageous reflections that suggest different paradigms through which to consider how we conceptualize time or the passage of time, and our individual and collective roles in it.
Published as a result of 421 Curatorial Development Exhibition Program, in partnership with Bombay Institute of Critical Analysis and research (BICAR), which took place in 2021–2022. This cycle of the program was titled “Future Perfect: Catastrophe and The Contemporary” and included a series of talks and discussions in which the contributors of this publication have participated.
About the Authors
Mays Albaik
Mays Albaik is a Palestinian artist with an interdisciplinary visual practice triangulating body, language, and place. Crystalizing as performance, video, sculpture, and installations, her work layers a personal poetics onto the sociopolitics that define relationships to geography; looking for moments of mediated as well as immediate contact between place, body and language.
Mona Al Jadir
Mona Al Jadir is an Iraqi-Canadian architectural designer who grew up in Abu Dhabi. She graduated from the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University, Montreal.
Rico Franses
Rico Franses was for many years Founding Director of the University Art Galleries at the American University of Beirut. He has also held teaching positions at The Australian National University (Canberra), Pratt Institute (New York), and a fellowship at Harvard University. He has a BA in Philosophy (McGill University, Montreal), an MA in Art History (McGill) and a PhD in Art History (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Among his publications are a book, Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art. On the Vicissitudes of Contact between Human and Divine (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and several articles including 'Lacan and Byzantium. In the Beginning was the Image', 'The Deleuzian Spatiality of Byzantine Art', and 'Untime in the Unconscious. On the Dislocations of Time in Freud, Lacan, Laurie Anderson and Walid Sadek'.
Rohit Goel
Rohit Goel is the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury) and has taught courses in philosophy, critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria; he was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD Dissertation Research in primary sources in Lebanon. Rohit completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.
Frank Ruda
Frank Ruda is a German philosopher. He is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee.[1] He is also a visiting professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Centre in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Professor at the European Graduate School /EGS (https://egs.edu/faculty/frank-ruda). He received his PhD in 2008 from University of Potsdam under the supervision of Manfred Schneider and Christoph Menke with a work on Hegel's Philosophy of Right and his venia legendi (Habilitation) in 2017 from the Free University Berlin.
Veeranganakumari Solanki
Veeranganakumari Solanki is a curator and art writer whose projects and writing considers history as a vital part of understanding changing movements and art forms. Her current area of research is developed and informed by artists’ practices and theories and institutional methods of education and audience building, that may be referred to as neo/post-contemporary art observations. The primary aspect of this on-going research looks at collaborative projects that exist not only between artists, but also between various fields, such as visual arts, photography, science, music, architecture, sports and theatre. These collaborations are not restricted to art institutes and galleries; they extend into outdoor public and alternate spaces.
Isaac Sullivan
Isaac Sullivan (b. 1980, US) is a Dubai-based artist whose research interests include artificial intelligence, sound art, and the problematics of space and place. His recent exhibitions and performances – which include Kulturforum, Berlin; IF.BE, Mumbai; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; 8th Tashkent Biennale; Beirut Design Week; and ECC's 58th Venice Biennale collateral – explore spatial and temporal forms of latency through video, installation, and sonic intervention. Sullivan has been featured in various publications including Canvas magazine, Quarterly West, and 1913: A Journal of Forms. He is currently Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Zayed University, Dubai.
Ala Younis
Ala Younis is an artist, with curatorial, film and publishing projects. Using objects, film and printed matter, Younis often seeks instances where historical and political events collapse into personal ones. Her work looks also into how the archive plays on predilections and how its lacunas and mishaps manipulate the imagination. She holds a BSc. in Architecture from University of Jordan and MRes in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a recipient of the Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship, as well as two art prizes from Cairo Youth Salon (2005) and Jordanian Artists Association (2005). She is co-founder of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta, co-Head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, member of the Academy of Arts of the World (Cologne), and co-Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2022. She is research scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, at New York University Abu Dhabi.
Technical Details
- Publication Date:
- Wednesday, February 15, 2023
- Language:
- English and Arabic
- Format:
- Softcover with open spine
- Dimensions:
- 16 x 23 cm
- Weight:
- 400g
- ISBN:
- 978-614-8035-57-9
- Number of Pages:
- 288
- Publisher:
- Kaph Books
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