Alien Encounters

In this performative talk/ reading, Rana will set a trail of questions that aim at problematizing the notion of ‘alienness’ in terms of the revolutions and uprisings taking place in the Arab world. Bringing together elements from science fiction, architecture, political theory, as well as narratives from her personal history, she asks whether it is possible to think of the alien as a political subject, and whether extraterrestrial space in science fiction can possibly be a productive locus for thinking of issues of rights and justice. How would it be possible today to think of the rights of man beyond the institution of the nation-state? And what would constitute the political agency of the alien, understood as both an outcast with regards to the law and an extraterrestrial?

The lecture is in Arabic

Biography

Rana Hamadeh is a visual and performance artist from Beirut, based in the Netherlands. Interested in curation as an artistic practice, she works on long term discursive projects that comprise different levels of collaboration, and that involve lecture-performances, installations, and audio/text based works. She focuses on speech/conversation as an artistic medium, questioning with that the conditions of spectatorship; as well as the boundaries, authority and mechanisms of meaning production. In 2008 she initiated GRAPHIS N0 127 project, as an umbrella under which she has been producing several art works, publications and theoretical texts. Her work has been shown in several international venues including (a.o.) Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), New Museum (New York), and Beirut Art Center (Beirut). She is currently a resident artist at the Townhouse gallery (Cairo).

The Architecture and Art Series

This occasional summertime programme is conceived as a way to bring together issues of architecture and art that may be pertinent to us today. A series of speakers will be invited to engage with an audience at Megawra to see what emerges when questions of contemporary art are brought side by side with architectural discourse and practice