history panelPublic panel discussion as part of the performance festival HISTORY WILL BE KIND TO ME, FOR I INTEND TO PERFORM IT @PALS.

What can art do to demythologise, decolonise, deconstruct and re-negotiate the historically singular interpretation of knowledge? How can art use the body to revisit the stories that didn’t stay for History, to exercise contemporary counter-knowings, to perform and embody other forms of individual and collective existence and remembrance?
The panel discussion ‘End Point For Beginners’ will look at different decolonial approaches created through art projects from Berlin, Yaoundé, Syria and Sweden, to understand where art stands in relation to collective knowledge formation. The panel speakers will discuss how art can create spaces that democratise the access to alternative, real and imagined forms of past, present and future that are still marginalised outside of the common knowledge and historical narratives.

Guest speakers:
-Abir Boukhari
-Corina Oprea
-Serge Olivier Fokoua
-Elena Agudio

Moderator:
-Márcio Carvalho

About the speakers and the moderator:

Abir Boukhari is the director, curator and co-founder of AllArtNow, the first contemporary art space in Syria, founded in Damascus in 2005. Based in Stockholm, Sweden, since 2015, Boukhari works with different organisations and institutes in Sweden and abroad, continues to create platforms for art and artists through her curatorial work and her current global ‘Nomadism’, exploring the effects of displacement on individuals and cultures, as well as the many exhibitions she has curated through Europe and the Middle East for Syrians and international artists.

Corina Oprea is Artistic Director of Konsthall C, Stockholm, running the program The Decolonial Option. Oprea holds a PhD from University of Loughborough-UK, with the thesis The End of the Curator: on curatorial acts as collective production of knowledge. Oprea is a Allumni of Curator Lab at Konstfack, Stockholm, and holds a MA in Arts–Cultural Policies in the Balkans from Belgrade University. From her recent exhibitions are Precarious Terrains and Entangled Situations and Nordic Trouble at Konsthall C, the video-work Sicherheit co-authored with Saskia Holmkvist and Ellen Nyman and presented at Gothenburg Biennial and the co-curated winning apexart Franchise exhibition, Washed Out, Feb 2011, at Konsthall C-Central Tvätt, Stockholm. In her practice, she focuses on questions relating to the social and political context, modes of discoursivity and performativity in the public realm.

Serge Olivier Fokoua lives and works between Cameroon and Gatineau, Canada. He received his artistic training at the University of Yaounde and through workshops organised by Renc’art studio of the Yaounde Spanish Embassy. He also attended advanced training on cultural management at Institut für Kultur Konzept in Hamburg, Germany. Since 2008 he has been the Artistic Director of the Biennale RAVY: Yaoundé Visual Art Encounters. Currently he is actively working on multiple platforms for artistic exchange between Cameroon and several other countries.

Elena Agudio is a Berlin-based art historian and curator. Her research is focused on the sharing and exchange of knowledge and skills across disciplines and cultures. Since 2013 she is artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary, where she is curating and co-curating exhibition projects, discursive programmes and series, among which – currently – ‘We Who Are Not The Same’. Exercises Towards The Unmaking Of Patriarchy, Control, Dominion and Other Male Cogito's Misplaced Potencies, dedicated to an exploration of current feminist practices and alliances.

Márcio Carvalho is a Portuguese visual artist and an independent art curator, based between Berlin and Lisbon. His work and research focus on collective technologies and practices of remembering and how they influence individual and group memory of past events. He is interested in the different modes of public commemorations, specially mnemonic signs and systems, that we engage with on a daily basis, to embody, represent and reenact specific narratives of the past. Most of Carvalho's projects propose exercises to demythologise and decolonise knowledge and ultimately to deconstruct and re-negotiate the singularity of knowledge.

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Date & Time:
Thursday 6 September
18:30 Door open
18:45 Welcome speech
19:00 Panel discussion

Place: Fylkingen / Münchenbryggeriet
T-Mariatorget
Free admission
Only card payment in bar

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HISTORY WILL BE KIND TO ME, FOR I INTEND TO PERFORM IT @ PALS
An international festival of performance art and a public discussion at Fylkingen in Stockholm on 6–8 September 2018. The project invites artists and theorists from African and Nordic countries to use performance as a means to deconstruct knowledge and examine the power relations of today.

Can performative artistic processes challenge the dominating historical narratives?
If the fixed history of the west used to be the reference to revisit and remember the past, now it is crucial to bring performance to the forefront of meaning making.