First Biennale of Contemporary Art, Rabat
Morocco is consolidating its engagement with contemporary art with the first edition of a biennale that brings together exclusively female artists. Abdelkader Damani, head curator of the event and director of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire in France, speaks to us about the genesis of the idea.
L’OFFICIEL ART: Which semantic and creative fields are expressed in the title of the first Rabat Biennale of Contemporary Art, “An Instant Before the World.”
ABDELKADER DAMANI: “An Instant Before the World” is an excursion into religious and scientific thinking about the creation of the universe. Both consider the instant that precedes the beginning of the story to be mysterious, whether it be the Big Bang or the mythology of creation in six days, to mention only the example of the monotheistic religions. The “world” in the biennale’s title is to be understood in the sense of “making a world” or the “conditions of a world”, thus going beyond the geographical and spatial comprehension of this term. The instant is, in this new configuration, the totality of duration. And this is precisely the magic of a work that makes the instant of its own creation the totality of time that precedes and succeeds it. It is in this sense that every work, if it is successful, becomes a refuge for worlds, and constitutes the memory of all human beings. It is then reasonable to believe in this conscious or unconscious journey on which the artist embarks in order to try to see, touch, and feel this instant before the beginning of stories, to return to it by way of the memory of a work that escapes determinism. This is surely the most important subversion, and is why some political or religious regimes are fundamentally set on controlling art. To resist is the capacity to give birth to this instant before. Just look at the Algerian people, who since February 22, 2019 [when widespread protests began against the incumbent regime] have created the conditions for a new world. Moreover, every Friday [when the protests take place], the streets of Algiers and all the cities of Algeria are the most successful exhibition of the meeting between human beings and their dreams.
In addition to your career as an art historian, you are trained as a philosopher. How does this affect your vision and your curatorial work?
I first studied architecture, a discipline that intersects with philosophy as “the art of organization” (Deleuze). I should make it clear, however, that I am only a lover of philosophy, a guest of the discipline, in a way. The first thing that philosophy allowed me to understand was that an exhibition is not a place of answers, but of collisions and experiences. Philosophy teaches us to question what we take to be obvious truths, and authorizes unexpected encounters. Thus, the work of a curator becomes that of generating questions. Thinking philosophically is, for me, an activity that seeks to identify possible encounters between materials that contain thoughts, which the works themselves are, but in this case they are not the only ones – the most important protagonist for this purpose is the spectator, the visitor. This is also to realize that an exhibition produces a space for absences: “This or that is missing from the exhibition.” But this lack represents the territory required by the public in order to move within the exhibition, and make it exist.
How did you conceive and organize this biennale, which brings together only female artists? What concepts and main thrusts have you chosen to highlight? How does the exhibition fit into the city of Rabat? All exhibitions must be situated. So I decided to make the city – its physical and historical territory – our first invited artist. This resulted in the itinerary of
the visit and the choice of the exhibition site. The second decision was to remember this city. The memory that I refer to, because I was not yet of this world, is the singer Oum Kalthoum in Rabat in 1968. The exceptional communion of the artist with her audience was spectacular. Between these two references – a territory and a voice, a poem and music – I had the necessary anchorage in order to bring the project to fruition. Then came the subsequent question of the conditions for a biennale. The answer lies in the way we chose the artists, on the one hand, and on the other, in the exhibition’s form. From the first working sessions, I announced the decision to invite only female artists. That was the most pressing thing. The form would follow later, with three concepts that I conceived of as intuitions as much as convictions. There is above all the recognition of wandering as a unique destiny. Wandering proceeds as much from waiting as from movement, without being synonymous with one or the other. A wait allows one to be struck by the world, to receive it not by inheritance, but by way of thought. It is this place of the “after,” where there is no more doubt that one can reach out to whoever is arriving next. Because they are arriving, the immigrants, in order to remind us of our previous selves, whom we have forgotten. We are the immigrants of a world of wandering. And this is our only future, our eternal beauty.
We may add to this the attempt to define art as a nostalgia for imbalances. To speak of a nostalgia for imbalances is to say that each work of art is suspended within its own instant. Every work of art suspends every instant. A work of art always remembers what is going to occur. It is an inverted memory. Works prepare in us our imbalances, in order to reconcile us with what is coming.
And finally, there is the feeling of what I call a “subversive tenderness.” Since I have spoken about and begun to think about subversive tenderness, many people have asked me, with surprise, what it is all about. To tell you the truth, subversive tenderness may have no explanation, but it does have names: it is Carola Rackete [the ship captain taken to court in Italy over migrant rescues] who challenges Matteo Salvini [Italy’s former minister of the interior]. She defies him, and all of Europe, with one gesture: to save a life. She does not confront him. She saves a life. She does not fight. She saves a life. She does not flee. She saves a life. Without making of these three thoughts physical chapters or boundaries within the exhibition’s itinerary, we find in each room references to these three paths.
“In order to define the urgencies of a moment of creation, it is necessary to pay off one’s debts. To make an inventory of regrets, of things forgotten even more than what has not been said … and which may be screamed into the face of the world … Our debt is fundamentally with regard to women,” you write. What are the contours and the content of what you call “debt”? Do you make a distinction between Western countries and Arab countries, where women’s situation, whatever some may say about it, is culturally and religiously very different?
Women’s inequality is an anthropological and historical issue. It must be remembered, for instance, that in ancient times a woman’s belly was the property of man. That in pre-Islamic times, in the Arabian Peninsula, girls were buried alive at birth. And, strangely, the explorer Ibn Battuta (1304–1368) expresses his astonishment, during a trip to Sudan, at the freedom enjoyed by women in a Muslim country. From this point of view, the distinction between Western and Arab countries does not stand up to analysis.
The question is elsewhere. There is, in fact, in the very structure of what we call humanity, an injustice with respect to women. The debt is as old as our existence. The second paradigm that makes it possible to understand the contours of this debt is that of the role of women in the evolution of civilizations. Women keep territories and maintain balances. I am convinced that we owe it to women that we still have a world. However, you are right to point out that in postcolonial societies, and more specifically in the Muslim tradition, women are living, in our contemporary moment, an unprecedented tragedy. To speak personally, I come from a world where, until a short time ago, one had to apologize before pronouncing the word “woman.” We refused that women be named. It is an extreme form of violence.
“An Instant Before the World,” Rabat Biennale of Contemporary Art, until December 18, 2019. www.biennale.ma