11.05 Tea with Nefertiti The Invention of Cultural Otherness through the Display of Art

Through their inaugural lecture, curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath discuss the curatorial strategies underpinning their critically acclaimed exhibition Tea with Nefertiti: the making of an artwork by the artist, the museum and the public. Through discussing the premise and methodology behind the show, they highlight the ways through which exhibition making can become a leading contributor to decolonizing projects across museums and vis-à-vis the rewriting of the art historical canon. Through employing the Nefertiti bust as a metaphorical thread, they illustrate how an artwork acquires different meanings and agencies when it travels through time and place. By interrogating the contested history of Egyptian Museum collections from the 19th century onwards, they explore how an artwork, along with curatorial paradigms and mechanisms of display can become a tool for the writing of much-contested narratives that serve as frameworks through which an image of another culture can be imagined and consequently fixed. Tea with Nefertiti was on view at the Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst in Munich after a successful run Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris and Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia.

11.05 Ways of Seeing Curating on Shifting Grounds

Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath's recent international group exhibition "Ways of Seeing" (Arter – space for art in Istanbul, Villa Empain in Brussels, and NYU Art Gallery in Abu Dhabi) invited the viewer to investigate the manifold ways by which artists re-configure our perception of the world through exploring the various formal strategies that artists employ to accord familiar forms and concepts with renewed appearances and meanings. Taking its cue from John Berger's 1972 critical text on visual culture, it brought together 33 artists, with works ranging from 1000 BC to the present, and spanning a variety of media from painting, sculpture and photography to sound, film and installation.

The curators walk us through this multifaceted exhibition providing insights into the questions and strategies that undeprin their curatorial pracice. They speak about how they adapt curatorial methodology and content to fit different institutional and cultural contexts bringing us into their fascinating, global curatorial practice.

11.11 Surrealism in Egypt: the Case for Transmodernism And the Making of the Exhibition Art et Liberté…

Founded on December 22, 1938 with the publication of their manifesto Vive L'Art Dégénéré, the Cairo-based, Surrealist Art et Liberté Group rejected the convergence of art and nationalism, aligning itself with an international Surrealist network, and was globally engaged in its defiance of Fascism, Nationalism and Colonialism. Through consulting a significant body of artworks from the 1920s until the 1940s, along with a diverse corpus of unpublished primary sources, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath highlight Art et Liberté’s contributions to a distinct Surrealist language that was at once, internationally minded yet locally engaged. The presentation equally focuses on their groundbreaking exhibition Art et Liberté: Rupture War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938 – 1948), which traveled to Centre Pompidou, Reina Sofia, Kunstsammlung K20, Tate Liverpool and Moderna Museet and featured around 130 artworks and more than 200 archival documents most of which had never been exhibited or published before. They elaborate the curatorial approach underpinning the exhibition, which posits the Group’s contributions to Surrealism beyond the polemics of post-colonial discourse and the polarizing paradigm of Saïd's Orientalism, therefore advocating their notion of Transmodernism for a new understanding of the Surrealist movement and modernist art historical studies at large.

11.19 Walking Through Walls Art and Political Engagement

In their latest exhibition "Walking through Walls", currently on view at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath take the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall as point of departure to capture the emotional, psychological, and physical impact of tangible and metaphorical walls. The fall of the Berlin Wall remains one of the most salient political events of the twentieth-century. Yet, countless other deep-seated divisions predicated on national, economic, gender and racial injustices persist. The curators, therefore, posit the exhibition as a nuanced response to the politically charged landscape of the moment. Bringing together 28 artists from 21 countries across the globe, the exhibition provides a current panorama of a diverse range of artistic practices that evoke the polarizing realities of separation and exclusion. In this lecture, Bardaouil and Fellrath speak about their conceptual and spatial approach to the exhibition whereby, and in taking into consideration the politically charged landscape surrounding the Gropius Bau in Berlin, they weaved together key philosophical theories by such seminal figures as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben, with Edward Saïd, Benedict Anderson and Zygmunt Bauman, to assess what they see as a "lyrical formal shift" in contemporary practices that grapple with divisive power structures.

11.08 Site visit and onsite discussion, The West Bund Art & Design

WESTBUND ART & DESIGN was founded in 2014 and is held annually at the Westbund Art Center along the Huangpu Rrom Asia, Europe and the Americas to exhibit high-quality modern and contemporary paintings, sculptures, images, installations and performance arts. The WESTBUND ART & DESIGN is held with by the Shanghai's city art institutions together constituting Shanghai's rich artistic map, and marking the city of Shanghai in November an important spot on the global art calendar.