Meeting Points 7 · Beirut: Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand tricks

lawrence abu hamdan · marwa arsanios · sven augustijnen · kianoush ayari · céline condorelli · daar · goran dević · simone fattal · karpo godina · iconoclasistas · iman issa · sanja iveković · maryam jafri · rajkamal kahlon · anton kannemeyer · kayfa ta · Haytham el-Wardany · Runo Lagomarsino · Maha Maamoun · Jumana Manna · Azzedine Meddour · Eduardo Molinari · Jean Rouch · Edgar Morin · Tom Nicholson · Marta Popivoda · Mona Vǎtǎmanu and Florin Tudor · Cecilia Vicuña · Želimir Žilnik

meeting points is a multidisciplinary contemporary arts festival focused on the contextualized presentation of art from the arab world.

the 7th edition of meeting points, entitled ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks, is a series of exhibitions taking place successively between september 2013 and june 2014 in zagreb, antwerp, cairo, hong kong, beirut, vienna and moscow. meeting points 7 was prompted by the unfinished social and political processes of the arab revolutions and the reconfiguration of capitalism throughout the world. in different cities the project is evolving into a continual dialogue whose non-linear chapters digress, take over, continue, complete and contradict each other, playing with possibilities and exploring the limits of what an exhibition can convey in testing political times across neighboring and divergent spaces.

borrowing its title from the revolutionary philosopher frantz fanon’s book wretched of the earth (1961), reflecting on algeria’s liberation from french colonial rule, ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks forays into interlaced subjects: the role of middle classes today in revolts across different geographies, forms of neo-colonialism, counter-revolution and co-optation, as well as the various strategies employed for countering oppression. conceived as an exhibition in time, ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks reapers anew in each iteration, realigning topics with a particular place, its specific geopolitical and historical context. it explores the ways in which a particular selection of themes, clusters of works and artistic positions emerge in response to the specificities and demands of different locales.

mp7‘s journey ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks was inaugurated in zagreb in september 2013, in gallery nova, with an exhibition featuring women artists in which the feminist agenda underpinned the project. evoking the site of the museum as a locus of the new economy but also as a place invested in its own pedagogical potential, the next iteration of meeting points 7 in muhka in october 2013, in antwerp included the references to the postcolonial context inevitably related to belgium’s colonial history. the exhibition juxtaposed number of contemporary and historical works, also including a selection of works from the mhka collection.

the next iterations are produced in february 2014, in cairo, in collaboration with the contemporary image collective, where the exhibition features artists whose works tackle a wide range of social themes examined from specific geopolitical, critical and gender perspectives, and in hong kong, in collaboration with para site, where the focus is on the role of middle class.

after beirut, further stations of ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks are vienna (in partnership with wiener festwochen and 21er haus, vienna) and moscow (in partnership with the v–a–c foundation and the institute for african studies).