Postcolonial Ecologies opens with a presentation by the curators on Tuesday 9 March 2021 at 6:00 pm (Amman time). Unfolding through multiple exhibitions, an online residency, public program and Summer Academy, the exhibition project discusses and reflects on essential ecological questions, addressing how colonial practices and extractive economies have affected/contaminated the natural environments of indigenous peoples and native ecosystems. Departing from the epistemic violence enacted through dominant technologies of measurement and calculation that subdue life forms to market logic, Postcolonial Ecologies unearths indigenous knowledge systems rooted in conceptions of nature and land as sources of life and subsistence. Thinking with Fanon, participants are invited to engage in critical readings of decolonization and to speculate on life futures that acknowledge land as ‘the most essential value’, its humus at once a carrier of collective memory/trauma and a site of anticolonial resurgence and regeneration. Against a modern grammar of predation and extraction, the multifaceted program invokes other worlds in the making, exploring radical forms of social organisation that centre mutual aid and more-than-human collaboration.
Curated by: Joud Al-Tamimi, Firas Shehadeh and Reem Marji.
Read the full statement here.
Exhibition
Featuring works from the Khalid Shoman Collection, the main exhibition opens in September in the Main Building, Darat al Funun. Participating artists include Ali Jabri, Ahmad Nawash, Amal Kenawy, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Etel Adnan, Gouider Triki, Jananne Al-Ani, Jumana Emil Abboud, Laila Shawa, Maha Mustafa, Moataz Nasr, Mohammad Hawajri, Mona Hatoum, Nicola Saig, Rachid Koraïchi, Samia Halaby, Vladimir Tamari and Wael Shawky.
The exhibition will also feature works from outside the collection, including commissions by local artists responding to the conceptual framework of the project. The full line-up will be announced in the coming months.
The Lab Residency
As part of the online activities under Postcolonial Ecologies, a web residency will be taking place between 1 March- 1 May 2021. Engaging with concepts of futurity, world sharing and more-than-human commons, the final projects will be exhibited on our online space, DF Online.
Resident artists include Mays AlBeik, Nadine Fattaleh and Ali Eyal.
Covid 19, the Delta variant, and the measures imposed by the Jordan Ministry of Health restricting public gatherings compel us to cancel the on-site opening of the Postcolonial Ecologies exhibitions initially scheduled for September.