Curatorial Practice
أعمال تنسيقية

 

HaRaKa Platform since its inception was driven by a sense of urgency to contribute actively to discourses around bodies, cities, and environmental histories. Through movement, performance, multimedia and texts, the collective engaged with curatorial practices that brought them in close contact with multiple institutions, individuals and other collectives. HaRaKa actively works to deconstruct colonial hegemony, and contributes to nuancing decolonial practices, a term that circulates as a general umbrella term rather than an active political and aesthetic critique. We see the necessity in bringing performance and choreography to the center of historiographic and curatorial practices, to rethink art history through performance history, and to rethink performance history away from canonic works and the prowess of western academia. Over the years, HaRaKa challenged common terms and binaries, destablizing institutional setups, by creating work and discursive practices that require reorganizing the institution around the artwork, and not the artwork around the institution. By investing in regional dialogues in the Arab world, in Asia and in Africa, HaRaKa celebrates performance, choreography, and art histories outside the sanctioned narratives.

HaRaKa founded and curated the International Festival ‘TransDance’ in Egypt. Established the ARC.HIVE of Contemporary Arab Performance, the only archive dedicated to contemporary performance from Arab artists. Started the ‘Cairography Publication’, the first publication dedicated to dance and performance from Arab and Middle East artists. Curated several international festivals and conferences in New York, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Cairo, among other cities. And currently is curating and producing the conference series ‘PRICKS: Pandemics, Representation, Intimacy, Congregation, and Knowledge Systems’, a multi-city ongoing conference series inaugrated at New York University, and Kunsthal Gent.

كان الدافع وراء منصة ح ر ك منذ إنشائها هو الشعور بالإلحاح للمساهمة بنشاط في الخطابات حول الأجساد والمدن والتاريخ البيئي. من خلال الحركة والأداء والوسائط المتعددة والنصوص ، انخرط الفريق في ممارسات تنظيم المعارض التي جعلتهم على اتصال وثيق بالعديد من المؤسسات والأفراد والجماعات الأخرى دوليا

أسست ح ر ك ورعت مهرجان "ترانس دانس" الدولي في مصر. أسست أرشيف الاداء العربي المعاصر. بدأت "منشورات كايروغرافي". قامت بتنسيق العديد من المهرجانات والمؤتمرات الدولية في نيويورك وبرلين ودوسلدورف والقاهرة وغيرها من المدن. وتقوم حاليًا برعاية وإنتاج سلسلة المؤتمرات الدولية “بريكس” التي تستكشف الأوبئة ، فيما يتعلق بأشكال التنظيم والتمثيل والأداء والفضاء العام في سلسلة مؤتمرات مستمرة متعددة المدن تم افتتاحها في جامعة نيويورك ، وكونستهال جينت

Upcoming Project

Contemporary Art Histories

Contemporary Art Histories is one of HaRaKa Platform’s most ambitious research and curatorial projects, culminating after twenty years of research, archival practice, pedagogy, publishing and documentation efforts. How can we address blind-spots in the history of contemporary art in Egypt, and the Arabic speaking region? Who are the interlocutors who remain undocumented? And what kind of primary documents need to be generated, both to document the past twenty years of contemporary art practices in Egypt, and generally of the region, but equally with a future oriented mindset, that is generative and productive?

Contemporary Art Histories first station is Cairo, Egypt.
(CAH:Cairo) is a project that takes the current transformation of the contemporary art scene in Egypt as an opportunity to look back and reflect on the past two decades, as pivotal decades in how these practices evolved and responded to local and global contexts. While the project will mainly focus on practices and initiatives at the turn of the millennium (the period of 2000-2020), it will be in conversation with traces and continuations of former artistic legacies and practices as far back as the 1960's. The project aims to create a space - virtual and real - for past, present and continuing institutions and practices in the field of contemporary art, presenting multiple histories, including conflicting ones, that would reflect the diversity of the fabric of art institutions in Egypt today, and aid art historians, curators and producers globally to have access to context, primary documents, and institutional legacies pertaining to Cairo's contemporary art practices.

Other cities lined up for the research and publication project include Jeddah, Riyadh, Beirut and Dubai.

The project is developed by HaRaKa Platform, operating through a diverse network of researchers, writers, critics and artists. Powered and managed by Wizara.

 

TransDance

 

Established in 2007, TransDance Festival was a series of transdisciplinary encounters around dance and performance, that took place in Cairo, Egypt, and in multiple partnering cities that included Marseilles, New York, Berlin, Alexandria among others. The international festival programmed work by artists including Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Claudia Bosse, Shayma Aziz, Martin Nachbar, Hassan Khan, Mahmoud Refaat, Reem Hegab, Mey Seifan, Amira Chebli among others. It was established to foster a dialogue between practitioners regionally and globally. It placed research and critical thinking at its heart, and therefore other than programming performances, it focused on talks, writing practices, publishing, improvisation, collective meetings and workshops

تأسس المهرجان في عام 2007 ، وكان عبارة عن سلسلة من اللقاءات متعددة التخصصات حول الرقص والأداء ، والتي أقيمت في القاهرة ، مصر ، وفي العديد من المدن الشريكة التي شملت مرسيليا ونيويورك وبرلين والإسكندرية وغيرها. المهرجان الدولي عمل ببرمجة أعمال فنانين من بينهم ليليبيث كوينكا راسموسن ، كلوديا بوسي ، شيماء عزيز ، مارتن نخبر ، حسن خان ، محمود رفعت ، ريم حجاب ، مي سعيفان ، أميرة شبلي وغيرهم. تم تأسيسه لتعزيز الحوار بين الممارسين إقليميا وعالميا. وضع البحث والتفكير النقدي في صميم المهرجان ، وبالتالي بخلاف برمجة العروض ، ركز على المحادثات وممارسات الكتابة والنشر والارتجال والاجتماعات الجماعية وورش العمل

‘SUM’, Performance and Installation by Sama Wali, at TransDance
Photograph by Mohammed Siraj

TransDance Festival flyer, 2013
Desgined by Ahmad Aiyad

Arab Dance Caravan

 

‘Madam Bomba’, performance by Rima Najdi

Arab Dance Caravan

قافلة الرقص العربي

 

For the first time in a major European dance fair, and at the Dusseldorf Tanzmesse, a selection of Arab artists in a concise curated program is presented. The program 'Arab Dance Caravan' was produced and curated by HaRaKa. It aims at contextualizing and disseminating practices in dance and contemporary performance from Arabic speaking cities engaging with new trends and aesthetics, shedding light on context, and the use of choreography as a device rather than an end. It presented the work of Mona Gamil, Amira Chebli, Ahmed El Gendy, Rima Najdi, among others. It was produced by Lamia Gouda, and curated by Adham Hafez.

لأول مرة في معرض رقص أوروبي كبير ، وفي دوسلدورف ، تم تقديم مجموعة مختارة من الفنانين  العرب في برنامج واحد. برنامج "قافلة الرقص العربي" يهدف إلى وضع ممارسة الرقص المعاصر العربي في سياق واضح  وتسليط الضوء على استخدام الكوريغرافيا كأداة وليس كغاية. وقدمت أعمال منى جميل وأميرة شبلي وأحمد الجندي وريما نجدي وغيرهم. من إنتاج لمياء جودة ، وتنسيق أدهم حافظ

ARC.HIVE of Contemporary Arab Performance

Since 2012, HaRaKa Platform has collected, anthologized, and documented contemporary performance in the Arabic speaking region. By working with the artists directly on their practices, HaRaKa has been able to produce a body of new contextual works around the collection, which exists in multiple sites physically, within private collections, as well as online partially. The collection is supported by a series of publications, conferences, and live events, with partners and platforms as diverse as New York University, MIT Press Journals, The German Tanz Kongress, and others. During 2022-2023, HaRaKa Platform will revisit the archive, looking at the works 10 years later, investigating digital futures for performance. It will examine thinking through doing, and doing through thinking.