Join us for the opening of the online exhibition After Hours, featuring a conversation with Batool el Hennawy and participants Ali Hussein Al-Adawy, Noor Abuarafeh, Ahmed Mongey, Rama Sabanekh, Asha Athman, and Sanabel Abdelrahman.

As an eight-week research residency, After Hours looked into contextual entanglements and modes of navigating institutional obligations in art, writing and publishing, among other fields. The conversation started from a place of thinking what art and cultural institutions can signify as a possibility or limitation. Naturally, the premise called for defining certain aspects of this conversation, both contextually (conditional/circumstantial scope of experience with institutions) and personally (aspirations for change and preferred work agreements).

We took our time to think and ask questions: What is the institution doing? What do we mean when we say “changing how things are done”? A paradoxical relationship to contexts of production can be a place for navigating new relationships within them and towards them.

In a situation where finding time to figure out a challenge corresponds to the ability to find a space for its resolution, we worked towards a common ground that acknowledges the layers of work critical thinking invites; a temporary egalitarian space, where a figurative horizontal relationship exists between the participants of this conversation, their subjects of work, and their respective contexts of production. Rethinking definitions of “change” were talking points, and equally, active negotiations.

In this event, we will return to look at the participants’ contributions within a frame of a temporarily-merged thought process that ended up being the work itself.