Raafat Majzoub: GROUNDS

Curated by Artemis Akchoti Shahbazi

“…I like the idea of interruptions. When you insert something… be it an object or a story… in a public space that doesn’t necessarily fit, you invite people to go outside the rules of that space, and engage with new stories. Interruptions are windows to other possibilities. I’m curious about how these interruptions compete with agreed upon “reality” and how they can influence them. What happens when someone proposes an idea? What happens when more people subscribe to it? How can communities challenge stories imposed on them? I find all of this very exciting.”

–Raafat Majzoub

Since 2012, Raafat Majzoub has been writing “an autobiography of another Arab world” titled The Perfumed Garden. Performative excerpts of this novel have been published internationally through film, video, audio, textual, and public installations. The work produces fictions that compete with the status quo and plants them in public as new realities. For Majzoub, The Perfumed Garden is an act of claiming power. It produces grounds where existing borders and definitions are challenged and fights for space in defiance of an increasingly homogenizing and bordered world.  

Marking a decade of The Perfumed Garden, GROUNDS brings together a selection of excerpts to weave a conversation with visitors about intimacy and collaboration, and to inspire a meditation on collective futures.

The exhibition is an invitation to reconsider truth as multiple. To change. To engage. And to share. It presents grounds for the validity of our collective fictions and creates new grounds for shared realities to come. 

Please touch the work. Add to it.

The exhibition objects will be integrated in Majzoub’s ongoing project. 

 

Everything—in your love—becomes easy (video), with AbdulKader Mekkawi, Mahmoud Abu Lokmeh, ‘Abu Khodr’ & Tarek Majzoub, documents a project that invites a group of people to learn from, and produces a public landscape to host this learning process. The title of this video is a quote from a Whatsapp voice note (original Arabic: كل شي بحبك بهون ) sent to the artist by ‘Abu Khodr’, one of the collaborators on the Streetschool (prototype) as part of a negotiation of the fairness of equal compensation to all members of the team.

Exhibition Catalogue by Zoë Pulley

This is the third exhibition in the new “1:1 Exhibition Initiative” series presented in the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts. Each exhibition in this series presents a collaborative project between one curator and one artist, and either introduces a new artist or highlights a new aspect of a more experienced artist.

The Sounds of GROUNDS

Curatorial Walkthrough

January 21, 2022

GROUNDS: A Closeup on the Sound of Blooming

February 12, 2022