TASWIR and TASWIR.ORG:  The Exhibition as Palimpsest and Performance

A Panel proposed by ha’atelier for Performing Tangier 2010

The TASWIR project in Berlin 2009/2010 began to develop an exhibition parcours of visual, literary, and acoustic artistic positions presenting objects of classical Islamic art together with over fifty contemporary artists’ positions from East and West. Within the inner atrium of the exhibition, the curators developed a site-specific artistic and intellectual engagement of the various artistic positions within a special public setting, a performative kind of “madrasa”, offering new layers of the exhibition in which international curators, artists and intellectuals offered interpretations, commentary and new works of art.  Within this performative setting, TASWIR.ORG was created to witness this interpretive process; it is a website in which the various artistic materials produced were ‘deposited’, recorded, edited and made available during the exhibition itself. 

TASWIR.ORG has in the meantime become itself a digital palimpsest, an ephemeral and dynamic organisation of knowledge that overwrites its own history with continuously updated configurations.  The project engages classical exhibits and topics from Islamic and Jewish traditions as constituents of a post-colonial cultural agenda, playfully relocating the axis of European Modernity, which in the renowned Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas was generally seen as an extension of the European Renaissance and of classical antiquity.

Participants in the panel who present the projects TASWIR and TASWIR.ORG are Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, Director of the Graduate Program for Contemporary Arab Studies at Birzeit University, Ramallah, A. S. Bruckstein Çoruh, curator of TASWIR, Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann, freelance curator and producer, Oliver Schneller, composer, and Khalid Amine, ICPS  

In cooperation with ha’atelier – platform for philosophy and art 

Bios:

Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh

Poet and writer, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Graduate Program for Contemporary Arab Studies at Birzeit University in Ramallah; Research areas: Post-Colonial Studies, Cultural Politics and the Politics of Education in Palestine; Publications, a.o.: Ash Wheels, 1998; City Remnants, 2003; Departing Narratives , 2008; Palestinian Textbooks. Issues of Identity and Citizenship, 2008; and the English translation of Hussein Barghouthi’s autobiography al-Daw’ al-Azraq (The Blue Light), 2003.

Khalid Amine

Senior Professor of Performance Studies, Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan, Morocco, & Research Fellow at the Institute of Interweaving Performance Cultures, Free University, Berlin, Germany. Since 2006, Founding President of the International Centre for Performance Studies (NGO). Among his published books: Beyond Brecht (Meknes: Sindy Publications, 1996. Moroccan Theatre Between East and West (Faculty of Letters Publications, Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan, Morocco, 2000); Fields of Silence in Moroccan Theatre (Rabat: Union of Moroccan Writers, 2004); Dramatic Art and the Myth of Origins: Fields of Silence (International Centre for Performance Studies Publications, 2007).

Almut Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh

Philosopher and curator, initiator of the TASWIR-project. Founding Director of ha’atelier – platform for philosophy and art.  Initiator and Director of "Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Critique” at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin together with Navid Kermani and Angelika Neuwirth. Various professorships in Europe, a.o. the Rudolf Arnheim Professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin (2004) and  the Martin-Buber Professorship at the Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt a. M. (until 2006); Publications, a.o.: Vom Aufstand der Bilder. Materialien zu Rembrandt und Midrasch, 2007; Claudio Lange. Der nackte Feind. Anti-Islam in der romanischen Kunst (Hrsg.), 2004; Hermann Cohen on Maimonides‘ Ethics, 2004. 

Oliver Schneller

Composer and sound artist, Professor of Composition at the Music Academy in Stuttgart; Guest-Lecturer at the University of the Arts and the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler in Berlin; Fellow at the IRCAM / Centre Pompidou in Paris and Fellow at the German Academy “Villa Massimo” in Rome; works with visual artists such as Curtis Anderson, Iris Dupper, Christoph Brech, Alexander Polzin. 

Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann

Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann is currently working as a freelance curator and producer in Berlin, Istanbul and Australia. Prior to her recent position as artistic director of the “Zurich Theater Festival” in Switzerland, Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann was the deputy artistic director of the Hebbel Theater Berlin. In addition, she acted as one of the program directors of Theater der Welt 1999 in Berlin. MM Schwaegermann lectures at Zurich University of the Arts and at the Norwegian Theater Academy, Fredrikstad. She graduated from the Braunschweig University of Art and worked as set- and costume designer and photographer.