Permanent Temporariness
Alessandro Petti & Sandi HilalApril 19, 2019 16:00 – 18:00
Permanent Temporariness is a book, catalogue and archive that accounts for 15 years of research, experimentation and creation that are marked by an inner tension and visionary drive that reimagined through collective engagement. It is the result of the profound desire of its authors, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, to look back in connection with the eponymous retrospective exhibition that was inaugurated at the Art Gallery at New York University Abu Dhabi on 24 February 2018 and at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven on 1 December 2018.
Since their first work, Stateless Nation, at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and through their more recent architectural interventions in refugee camps, the artistic practice of Hilal and Petti has explored and acted within and against the condition of modern-day permanent temporariness. In their ambitious research and project-based practice, art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill into other contexts: architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the redefinition of words and the formation of civic spaces.
This book is organized around 14 concepts that springboard into 17 different projects. Each project is the result of a larger process of collaboration and is accompanied by texts and interviews that contextualize and expand the interventions.
Supported by the A.M. Qattan Foundation through the VAFF Project.
