For our 2019 program At The Lab, our curatorial premise is to create junctions and conjunctions. For the first time, participants will be working on projects concurrently in what we imagine will be a space of co-existence, co-production and critical exchange. Rather than impose collaborations and dictate how artistic production should take place, the idea is to create the conditions for chance encounters and unexpected combinations, while giving creatives the choice to work on both individual and collective projects.

Conjunction, or bringing people together in the same place and time is proposed as productive in and of itself, be it through the impact selected participants may have on each other’s work or through collaborations that might come about organically. The space will thus operate as a contact zone, where temporary communities emerge, and people and practices intersect.

In 2019, we seek to bridge gaps and build bridges, hoping for a bigger conversation and a larger community. We invite people to come together in an environment of constant change, an in-between situation, with a complex and dynamic series of feedback loops that can be brought into other contexts, nurturing a critical consciousness and creating fertile ground for new possibilities.

Phase I
26 March - 15 June 2019
The first phase of Junctions brings together artists and cultural practitioners exploring sound, listening and sonic practices in relation to forms of collective agency, alternative socialities and the emergence of milieus.

Probing the social and the political possibility of the auditory, Khaled Kaddal will curate listening sessions centred on the urban soundscape, sonic objects and inner sound. In collaboration with other artists and musicians, Yazan El Zubi and Laith Demashqieh will perform a series of site-specific audio and image experiments, contemplating the mystical and the occult in relation to experiences of shared listening and alternative imaginaries. Walid al Wawi (Samt) will curate the third iteration of Qala, featuring interventions that interrogate the subconscious and pre-deterministic pattern within language/history, and the ambient cultural tone that it sets within human behaviours through habit and memory. Hashem El Kelesh will present an immersive sonic experience, building on his inquiry into aurality, listening and transmission. At the same time, Firas Hamdan will be running a  Radio studio, through which he aims to critically engage with a variety of acoustic environments and sonic cultures in the city.

The program will be accompanied by a range of discursive projects including artist talks, seminars and roundtable discussions, designed to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and carve up new spaces for engagement, conversation and exchange.