Nov 18
Collective Efforts: Fehras Publishing Practices
Picture-excerpt from Borrowed Faces No. 1, photo-novel, 136 pages, 24 x 33,2 cm, printed in Arabic and English, Fehras Publishing Practices, 2019
Collective Efforts: Fehras Publishing Practices
Thursday 26 November 2020
6:00-7.30pm (London)
7.00-8.30pm (Berlin/Casablanca)
Join us for our next BiC Digital online conversation. This new series named ‘Collective Efforts’ is developed by the BiC's Associate Curators Soukaina Aboulaoula and Cindy Sissokho who invite artists and practitioners thriving through collaborative and collective work as the main methodology of their practice.
This conversation with Fehras Publishing Practices will dive into their practice, and how the outcomes of their work often materialise in a collective experience within the publishing and publication making world, as well as through alternative forms that include performance, plays and more. The discussion will specifically focus on the collective practice of reclaiming archive materials, the subversion of language, and the politics of translation.
Conversation in English.
BIOGRAPHY
Fehras Publishing Practices is 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 them together and drove them 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.
Their work engages different methods and ways of production, and focuses on the relationship between publishing and art historiography. It is concerned 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 them an observatory for publishing strategies and practices in relation with the political and geographical transformation of the EMNA region.
The main components of their 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. They collect, order, and re-curate these materials by placing them in different spatial and temporal contexts.
Fehras considers publishing as a possibility for creating, transferring and accumulating knowledge. In this respect, it initiates projects taking the forms of exhibition, film, book, lectures, performances, and produces works touching on issues such as gender, collectivity, identity, migration, notion of independency, funding and institutions.
