Qalqalah #3 and reading by Rasha Salti
For the launch of the new issue of Qalqalah, Rasha Salti will share her new text Be Still My Beating Heart, part 4 which questions, through her curatorial practice between Beirut and Berlin, the exhibition of war images, pursuing her writing research, “ a fugue in fictional art history “. “ Contemporary art theory, curatorial and artistic practice have engaged in many ways and at several levels with the complexities and mysteries of memory, remembrance, affect, archival traces, documents, rumors, hearsay, forensics, etc. In the end, the stakes lie in the act of re-telling and in the reconstitution of a forgotten, silenced, or unwritten event or practice. ” Lotte Arndt, guest editor, will introduce the reading, in presence of the editorial committee and Virginie Bobin who will outline the future development of Qalqalah. Through four contributions, this third issue of Qalqalah – meaning “a movement of language, a phonetic vibration, a rebound or an echo” – delves into narration to offer critical fictions facing the violence and authoritarianism of the present. Nora Sternfeld imagines a speculative museum from the year 2030, asking why exhibit at all ; Trinh T. Minh-ha weaves images and words, searching for modes of transmission that differ from the authority of History as a master narrative; Aykan Safoglu creates a dialogue which mixes his family, friends, artists and activists, crossing both geographical and historical boundaries; Rasha Salti acutely questions the deprived humanist speech attached to the promotion of art as civilizational project in the Middle East – with some significant colonial resonances. Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer and curator of art and film, working and living between Beirut and Berlin. Since 2017, she is commissioning editor for La Lucarne at Arte France. Writer and cultural theorist Lotte Arndt accompanies artists in their critical interrogations of Western modernity and its pitfalls. Virginie Bobin works with artists, researchers, curators, writers, institutions and art schools. In 2018, she joined the PhD-in-practice in artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Qalqalah – A Reader #3 A n editorial project by KADIST and Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris. With contributions by Nora Sternfeld, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Aykan Safoglu and Rasha Salti Editors : Virginie Bobin, Mélanie Bouteloup, Victorine Grataloup, Léna Monnier, Élodie Royer, Émilie Villez Guest Editor : Lotte Arndt Graphic design : Guillaume Ettlinger & Jérôme Valton