第十届沙迦三月会议：围绕乡镇 Around Town: Sharjah March Meetings

对于在阿联酋举行的为期三天的活动，最好的作品和谈话就是那些因地理和文化产生的融合，并通过这所有的混杂产生的亮点

It’s early evening in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. I’m one of 100-odd people sitting in an outdoor square, flanked by the cubic buildings of the city’s old town. Before us glows a cartoonish diorama of a Mediterranean city: red-roofed houses, a pink river, city walls and crumbling towers. On stage, around 20 men begin to tap the lulling baritone of jahlahs, clay pot drums, and sing fidjeri, the songs sung by pearl divers in the Gulf. For Wael Shawky’s Song of Roland: The Arabic Version (2018), the foundational epic of Old French is transposed to classical Arabic and traditional song. While the original chanson de geste glorifies the defeat of Carolingian armies during a Basque-Qasawi Muslim ambush in the Pyrenees in CE 778, Shawky’s reversal of its Eurocentrism is biting and topical in an age of renewed fault lines between East and West, religion and secularism: ‘for wrong is with the Muslims, but with the Christians right’.

这是在阿拉伯联合酋长国沙迦的傍晚。 我是坐在室外广场上的100多人中的一员，两侧是城市旧城区的立方体建筑。 在我们面前发出一幅地中海城市的卡通西洋镜：红屋顶，粉红色的河流，城墙和摇摇欲坠的塔楼。 在舞台上，大约20名男子开始发出jahlahs的低音中音，陶罐鼓，并唱起海湾珍珠潜水员唱的歌曲fidjeri。 对于Wael Shawky的罗兰之歌：阿拉伯文版（2018年）是古法语的基础史诗，转用古典阿拉伯语和传统歌曲。 尽管最初的香颂歌颂了CE 778比利牛斯山脉巴斯克卡苏维穆斯林埋伏期间加洛林王朝军队的失败，但在东西方之间，宗教和世俗主义再次断裂的时代，Shawky对其欧洲中心主义的逆转是尖刻的和局部的 ：“对于穆斯林来说是错误的，但对基督徒来说是正确的”。

‘Active Forms’, this year’s March Meeting (the tenth edition to be held at the Sharjah Art Foundation), was an impassioned three-day tangle of performances, five exhibitions and numerous discussions, mostly hinging on our globalized present in which periphery and centre are knotted. The presenters were refreshingly global, hailing from Australia, Bangladesh, the Gulf, Palestine, Lebanon, Japan, Iraq and elsewhere; from Kazakhstan, Almagul Menlibayeva spoke about her photography documenting climate change in the Aral Sea, which has all but disappeared after the Soviet diversion of its source rivers.

今年的“3月会议”（第十届在沙迦艺术基金会举行）是一场慷慨激昂的为期三天的表演，五场展览和众多讨论，主要关注我们全球化的现状，即周边和中心联接。来自澳大利亚，孟加拉国，海湾，巴勒斯坦，黎巴嫩，日本，伊拉克和其他地区的主持人令人耳目一新。 来自哈萨克斯坦的Almagul Menlibayeva谈到她的摄影记录了咸海的气候变化，这个变化在苏联解体之后几乎消失了。

The best works and talks were ones in which geographical and cultural hybridity shone through in all its messiness. Mona Saudi’s exhibition ‘Poetry and Form’ assembled the artist’s delightfully weird, formalistic abstract stone sculptures and drawings influenced by her personal correspondence with Arab-language poets Adonis and Mahmood Darwaesh. In the ‘Active Forms’ exhibition, Mana Maamoun’s video Dear Animal (2006) sees a drug dealer turn into a goat-like animal (from a story by Egyptian writer Haytham El-Wardany): a compelling articulation of the ways myth converge with personal experience. At the heritage house of Bait Al Serkal, Cairo-based artist Anna Boghiguian presented an impressive retrospective of her life’s work (which has travelled from Castello di Rivoli, Turin), seemingly set in a future-present in which the world’s bees have become extinct and the boats in which salt was once traded are beached (The Salt Traders, 2015). Besides wafting sails, artist books, collages and paintings (such as the 90-piece drawing suite, Unfinished Symphony (2017), there’s a life-sized representation of her Cairo studio, and a hidden room in which dead bees drip from a giant wax ear (Tunnel of Life, 2012), like a surreal ode to history’s unreal turns.

最好的作品和谈话是地理和文化混杂在其混乱中发挥的。蒙娜沙特的展览“诗与形式”聚集了她与阿拉伯语诗人阿多尼斯和马哈茂德达瓦什的个人通信影响的艺术家的令人愉快的古怪，形式主义的抽象石雕和绘画。在Mana Maamoun的视频“亲爱的动物”（2006）中，Mana Maamoun的视频展示了一位毒贩变成了山羊般的动物（来自埃及作家Haytham El-Wardany的故事）：神话与个人交融的方式经验。在Bait Al Serkal的遗产之家，开罗的艺术家Anna Boghiguian展示了一个令人印象深刻的回顾展，她的一生作品（从都灵的里沃利城堡出发）展现在未来世界，蜜蜂已经灭绝和曾经交易过盐的船只被搁置（盐商，2015）。除了帆船，艺术家书籍，拼贴画和绘画作品（例如90件套的绘画套件，未完成交响曲（2017），还有她的开罗工作室的真人大小的代表作，以及一个隐藏的房间，其中一只蜜蜂从巨型蜡滴下耳朵（生命的隧道，2012年），就像历史的虚幻转向的超现实颂歌一样。

Speakers pointed to our need, in the arts and elsewhere, of modes of cultural intersectionality: welcoming differences of geography, context and intention. Artists Dale Harding, Naeem Mohaiemen and Zineb Sedira showed how terms such as ‘Global South’ and ‘Third World’ are themselves conflictual: the now-derided nomenclature ‘Third World’ was once associated with theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s positive notion of a ‘Third Space’. Mohaiemen spoke of networks of radical Southeast Asian publishing in New York city in the run-up to 9/11; Harding, of museums as sites of tension and exclusion for his partly-indigenous Australian family.

发言者指出我们在艺术和其他领域都需要文化融合的模式：欢迎地理、语境和思维方式的差异。 艺术家Dale Harding，Naeem Mohaiemen和Zineb Sedira展示了“南半球国”和“第三世界”等术语本身是如何冲突的：现在被嘲笑的术语“第三世界”曾与理论家霍米K.巴巴关于“ 第三空间“的积极概念联系在一起。 Mohaiemen在9/11之前谈到过纽约市激进的东南亚出版网络；哈丁博物馆是让他的大部分土著澳大利亚家庭紧张和排斥的地点。

Reversing the dominant ‘gaze’ emerged as a common concern, for example in filmmakers John Akomfrah and Reem Shilleh’s presentation about the ‘militant image’; or, in the Kuwait-born artist Mounira Al-Solh’s presentation, partly about her decade spent in Japan. Malian writer, filmmaker and theorist Manthia Diawara offered some insight into how to connect disparate lands and political activism, relating négritude, 1960s pan-Africanism and pan-Arab movements. Diawara followed cultural theorist and poet Édouard Glissant (who died in 2011) on a cross-Atlantic trip that ended in Glissant’s native Martinique: ‘I accept my opacity,’ Glissant says: ‘everyone likes broccoli, but I hate it. But do I know why?’

扭转所主导的“凝视”成为一个普遍的问题，例如电影制片人约翰阿库姆拉和雷姆希勒关于“好战形象”的报道; 或者是在科威特出生的艺术家Mounira Al-Solh的演讲中，部分是关于她在日本度过的十年。 马里作家，电影制片人和理论家曼蒂亚迪亚瓦拉提供了一些关于如何将不同的土地和政治活动联系起来的见解，关于négritude，1960年代的泛非主义和泛阿拉伯运动。 迪亚瓦拉跟随文化理论家和诗人埃杜阿尔·格里桑（他于2011年去世）参加了以格利桑特的故乡马提尼克岛结束的跨大西洋之旅：“我接受我的朦胧，”格里森说：“每个人都喜欢西兰花，但我讨厌它。 但是，我知道为什么吗？“

Unsurprisingly it was that the older participants who had the most to say. Reading a new text, ‘Art and Resistance’ (2018), Rasheed Araeen spoke of the expectation he met in the UK, when he moved from Pakistan in 1964, that he make art representative of his identity: ‘my experience of being defined by this continued imperialism was so shattering that I could not ignore it’. He penned manifestos and founded journals such as Black Phoenix and Third Text to bring these issues to the fore. ‘My point’, Araeen stated, ‘is that imperialism has not ended and is still here, and it influences the production of art and its legitimation’, adding: ‘without resisting and confronting it we cannot produce anything worthwhile.’

不出意外的那些最有发言权的资深参与者。 拉希德·阿兰在阅读新文本“艺术与抵抗”（2018年）时谈到了他在英国遇到的期望，他在1964年从巴基斯坦移居时，他以他的身份为艺术代表：“我的经历是由这种持续的帝国主义造成的，它因此变得如此破碎以至于我无法忽视它“。 他撰写宣言并创办了诸如“黑凤凰”和“第三版”等期刊，以便将这些问题提上日程。 阿兰说：’我的观点’是，帝国主义还没有结束，现在仍然存在，它影响着艺术的生产及其合法性’，并补充说：’如果不去抵制和抵抗它，我们就不能创造任何有价值的东西。

That no common language of resistance emerged in ‘Active Forms’, seemed apt. The best artists here demonstrated that the way forward lies in encouraging hybridities and syncretism – the very ‘creolization’ spoken of by Glissant. If we don’t embrace the strange unwieldiness of the pluralities of our time, we’ll fall back into the dichotomous medievalism of The Song of Roland, which presaged: ‘ye are likely to fight such a battle as was never fought before.’

“积极的形式”中没有出现共同的抵制语言，似乎是合理的。 这里最优秀的艺术家表明，前进的道路在于鼓励混杂与融合 – Glissant所说的非常’creolization’。 如果我们不接受我们这个时代多元化的奇怪的笨拙，那么我们就会回到罗兰之歌的二分法中世纪主义之中，他们指出：“你们可能会像以前从未战斗过的那样的战斗。

The 10th March Meeting, ‘Active Forms’, 2018, ran at Sharjah Art Foundation from 17–19 March.

第十届三月会议——行为格式，2018年3月17-19日在沙迦艺术基金会举办

_{Main image: Zineb Sedira, Sunken Stories (detail), 2018, wooden boats, resin, stainless steel and steel reinforcement bars, dimensions variable, installation view, SAF Art Spaces, Sharjah. Courtesy: Sharjah Art Foundation}

Zineb Sedira，沉没故事（细节），2018年，木船，树脂，不锈钢和钢筋条，尺寸可变，安装视图，SAF艺术空间，沙迦。 鸣谢：沙迦艺术基金会

For the three-day event in the UAE, the best works and talks were ones in which geographical and cultural hybridity shone through in all its messiness