9 December, 7 pm CET (hybrid & online)
a performance by Fehras Publishing Practices
Online event please register here
Lip-Sing for your Art!, A Bilingual Karaoke is an interactive work on the relationship between the language of bilingual art publications and the performative voice of the reader. The performance is a playful attempt to tear out the global art discourse from its manifestation inside frameworks of the publication, the institution, or the gallery. Thereby it raises questions about the accessibility of today’s art discourse and its relevance outside the institutional sphere.
The karaoke performance is based on essays from an archive of bilingual art publications collected by Fehras Publishing Practices. The chosen essays address different topics such as globalization, language, curating, etc., and were adjusted to be sung on popular melodies by artists such as Rihanna, Jenifer Lopez, Destiny’s Child, and Roberta Flack, etc.
The participants are invited to carry the voice of the text and the one of the discourse and to sing for global art. The performance is staged in a similar set of a Karaoke bar. In the center are two screens that display the lyrics simultaneously in both languages in which the original essay was written and provide imprint information to each publication and upcoming song.
This work is part of the collective’s long-term project series of Institutional Terms, which focuses on the transformation of modern Arabic in the context of the rise of Arab cultural institutions in the past decades. The series concerns the emergence of a language shaped by global art institutions.
The performance is part of the event kal RITUALS on 9 December 2021, from 6 pm CET (hybrid & online)
Fehras Publishing Practices are Sami Rustom, Omar Nicolas and Kenan Darwich, an artist collective established in Berlin in 2015. Friendship, memories and various interests in publishing and publication, brought us together, and drove us to establish Fehras Publishing Practices as a space for knowledge, exchange of experiences and collective work. The collective is researching the history and presence of publishing and its entanglement in socio-political and cultural sphere in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Arabic diaspora.
Our work is engaging different methods and ways of production, and it focus on the relationship between publishing and art historiography. It concerns with the role of translation as a tool facing cultural domination in its traditional and modern forms, as well as a tool for creating solidarity and deconstructing colonial power. Fehras became for us an observatory for publishing strategies and practices in its relation with the political and geographical transformation of the EMNA region.
The main component of our work are archival materials such as books, magazines, photographs, memoirs, letters, contemporary art publications, libraries of authors, publishers, translators, book vendors as well as radio, television, cinema and digital archives. We collect, order and re-curate these materials by placing it in different spatial and temporal contexts.
We observe publishing as a possibility for creating, transferring and accumulating knowledge. Therefore we initiate projects that carry different forms such as exhibition, film, book, lectures, performances and produce works touch issues we are concerned with like gender, collectivity, identity, migration, notion of independency, funding and institutions.