On October 10, the second panel of the Seminar Places and Meanings in Art: Debates from the South, themed Rethinking Spaces: Art, Uses and Daily Life, organized by Sabrina Moura, featured the artists Keli-Safia Maksud (Kenya) and Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew (Ethiopia) and the curators Till Fellrath (Germany) and Hoor Al-Qasimi (United Arab Emirates), members of the jury of the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil.
At the meeting, the Kenyan-born, Canada-based artist Keli-Safia Maksud, who is featured in the Southern Panoramas | Commissioned Projects show, discussed the use of textiles in her work, in various African cultures and in the role of women as creators, distributors and receivers of this material. The artist and director of the Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts and Design, Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, gave a critical image-based account of the true history and urban experience behind the seeming modernization of African cities that would leave no space for collective memory, and how art interventions in these threatened spaces are a form of resistance and preservation of this memory. The curator and cofounder of multidisciplinary curatorial platform Art Reoriented, Till Fellrath brought to the debate the experience of visual arts’ dialogue with the urban space, the local public and other fields of culture — including music and dance. The curator also discussed how the work of art should be apprehended as artistic work first and foremost, rather than as anthropological document or political phenomenon. The artist and president of the Sharjah Art Foundation, which organizes the Sharjah Biennial, Hoor Al-Qasimi highlighted the Foundation’s work in understanding the relationship of the national and immigrant communities in Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates, with their place of residence, and how, as a result, art-oriented interventions started to be created and left in the urban settings for two years, up until the next Sharjah Biennial, turning the city into a constant artistic space.