Passages through Passages الرفيق قبل الطريق
March 4, 2022 - July 4, 2022
Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah Art Foundation
A survey exhibition of the spatial, technical and cultural imaginations cultivated by CAMP.
Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi
Wall text: Created between 2006 and 2021, these projects draw upon CAMP's unique artistic processes: the use of technologies as geopolitical media, the actualisation of concepts such as leak, neighbour, footage and archive, and the persistence over time of so many of their collaborative projects and intersubjective interests. CAMP deals in the longue-duree of technologies and our relation to them, while also retaining the surprise and lightness of the unexpected way forward, as they like to say, like the cut in film.
The title of the exhibition talks about movement and its context. Its medium, like the ship, but also the forces that push and pull at it, and what art does here as a kind of embodied explorer crawling through the passages pf possibility and rearranging them. They rarely do this alone, CAMP’s work has collaboration of diverse types as its starting point, as the title in Arabic of the exhibition tells us - the comrade before the journey.
The things that move in interesting ways in this exhibition include exhibitions themselves, as in the “Annotated Gujarat and the Sea Exhibition” (2011), newspaper images that have found new neighbours in A Photogenetic Line (2019), or the faceted subcontinental movements of A Passage through Passages (2020). The things that don’t or cannot move include the people in Al Jaar Qabla al Daar (2011), or the camera in Bombay Tilts Down (2021), and a certain member of CAMP (ie, they cannot travel to this exhibition's country). They do not move, but they move us.
On the ground floor which is dedicated to maritime worlds, the exhibition also features From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2009 – 2013), a film project commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation Production Programme, and two other Sharjah-based projects, the book Wharfage and Radio Meena, recipients of the grand jury prize at Sharjah Biennial 9 (2009). The upper floor has a cybernetic lineage, although enmeshed in regional contexts from Afghanistan to Palestine.
Passages through Passages is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi.
