Permanent Temporariness is the exhibition which opened at NYU Abu
Dhabi Art Gallery on 24 February 2018. It is an exploration of the enduring permanence
of the refugees environment and the concept of ‘temporary people’, by
award-winning, research architecture duo Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti.
Until
2014, Hilal worked within the United Nationals Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East and she continues to work around the
refugee problem for the Swedish Public Art Agency, in northern Sweden, and
leads the ‘spaces for hospitality’ initiative in Stockholm, with the support of
the Arab Foundation for Arts and Culture (AFAC) and the Modern Museet.
Petti
is a Professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art
in Stockholm and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University in the United States.
Together, they founded the Decolonizing Architecture Institute (DAi) with Eyal
Wizman in 2007, a project that explores the political use of land as a tool for
colonization. They also created the Campus
in Camps educational project, aimed at democratizing knowledge and
educational structures within the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem.
The
Dheisheh Camp, the world’s oldest refugee camp, was the inspiration for one of
the works in the exhibition: ‘Refugee Heritage’. ‘Refugee Heritage’ is an
installation of a series of lightbox-mounted photographs taken by an official
UNESCO photographer in the historic Dheisheh camp, in Bethlehem. The
photographic installation explores the politics of space and time, as well as the
paradoxical permanence of temporary spaces. Though quickly assembled as a
temporary living solutions for displaced families, camps such as Dheisheh
became permanent homes for generations of families.
‘Common
Assembly’ is a video installation and concrete steps which comments on the
ironically permanent nature of the crude structural assemblage that occurs in
the refugee environment. Built out of necessity and hastily assembled, the
moveable concrete steps that seem to lead nowhere, like other temporary camp
structures and the refugees’ life in general, lack the careful planning and painstaking
assemblage that would be given to a house or lifestyle that was not caught in
this transitory political and economic situation.
Permanent Temporariness is a moving collection of works that strike
at the very core of human existence. The exhibition includes several installation,
performance and sound works in the gallery and other installation works spread
out over the NYUAD campus. The breadth of the exhibition emphasises the
boundlessness of the refugee problem, as well as Hilal and Petti’s artistic
expression and creativity.
Outside the university’s dining area, ‘The Concrete
Tent’ is a monumental structure, which plays on the paradox of permanent
temporariness - a concrete house in the form of a tent, with billowing, curved
walls belying the unwelcoming temporariness and limited confines of a refugee
family’s home. There is a sad irony to ‘The Concrete House’ and it can, of
course, be understood on so many different levels.
Salwa Mikdadi, Co-curator of the exhibition and NYU Associate Professor of Art
History, has presented Hilal and Petti’s work at the Venice Biennial in 2009 as
part of the Palestine Pavilion. Mikdadi suggests that the Permanent Temporariness works offer ‘the audience new ways of
engaging with this critical and timely topic’.
Her
co-curator, Bana Kattan, curator of the NYU Abu Dhabi Gallery sees the
exhibition as a ‘large-scale, meditative retrospective’. Adding that Hilal and
Petti’s work is, ”both locally relevant and internationally significant, and
this subject matter is particularly resonant now.”
Permanent Temporariness is a beautifully
contemplative exhibition of works that belie not only the stark reality of
human transience, but also the resourcefulness and hopefulness of the human
spirit.
