MMAG

Mohammad and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh
Foundation for Art & Culture
​Amman, Jordan

​March 2018

​The Language of the Body 1
A collaborative workshop with Sara Elkamel
​

The workshop directs attention to the languages bodies speak during habitual and everyday activities, and explores translating those languages into different media.

When the late writer Kathy Acker set out to write about bodybuilding, she couldn’t, which prompted the question: What makes the language of bodybuilding different from ordinary language? Participants will read and discuss Acker’s essay, The Language of the Body, using it as a starting point for creative practice. Bringing together artists, writers and creative practitioners, the workshop investigate the possibilities of representing bodily languages into written and visual forms. Translating from one medium to another, participants play with misunderstandings, gaps, and translation errors as they probe the elasticity of meaning.​

Informed by the participants personal creative practices as well as the current exhibition Acts of Translation, participants focus on producing texts and various forms of visual expression during the workshop. Participants experiment with their bodies’ capacities to enact their writing and visual materials, assembling them into a final presentation by the end of the workshop.

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Kathy Acker The Language of the Body​

كاثي آكر   رفضًا للغة الاعتياديّة: لغة الجسد 

October 2018

​The Language of the Body 2
A collaborative workshop with Sara Elkamel

Over the course of the workshop, we use performance, writing and drawing to explore how our bodies occupy and move through space. Informed by excerpts from Sara Ahmed’s seminal book, “Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others,” we think about the relationship between the body and its dwelling places. We reflect on the notion of orientation, which Ahmed describes as the question of “how we come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn.” Orientation, she suggests, is about feeling at home.

In the transgressive spirit of “Playing Innocent,” the current exhibition at MMAG, we explore notions of disorientation, strangeness, and losing our way. Exploring both micro-movements and counter-cartographies, we consider the body as a map, the body as a map-making device, and the body as a tool to defy existing maps. While it still traverses written and visual art forms, this workshop focuses more intently on performance. In addition to daily activities, we work collectively towards a final public performance.

Sara Ahmed Orientations

Sara Elkamel
is a freelance journalist and writer, born and raised in Cairo.
After completing a Master of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication (2013) at the American University in Cairo’s School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, she relocated to New York, where she pursued a Master of Arts in Journalism (2015) at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Also in New York, she was associate editor on The Huffington Post’s international team. Before then, she was reporting in Cairo — primarily on arts and culture — for local and international publications. Alongside her work in journalism, Elkamel has been pursuing her passion for poetry and creative writing; she has participated in various fiction and poetry workshops in Cairo and New York. Her writing has appeared in Ahram Online, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, GlobalPost, Guernica, Riwayya, and elsewhere.

November - December 2018

Imaginary Drawings
​

“It’s my ambition to become a homeless orphan.
I don’t want to be at home, where home means
​‘secure knowledge’, ‘mastery’, ‘lack of doubt.’”
Jimmie Durham, artist.

Imaginary Drawings is an invitation to explore the idea of becoming a homeless orphan in the world of drawing. Embracing the paradox of simultaneously wanting to feel home and homeless, this course offers reflections on what home means, both physically and mentally. Practical exercises, readings and discussions encourage you to challenge your drawing skills by practicing freedom from learned rules. What can be gained by unlearning a skill you try to master? 

This 7-week drawing course aims for playful transgressions that might take you to places where you don’t know what to expect. In this process you dare yourself to leave your comfort zone and challenge what you know. Course activities include making your own drawing tools, reducing control, improvising, translating non-visual experiences into a visual language and animating drawings with stop motion techniques. Adopting a nomadic mindset where comforts are diminished, and seeing common things in unfamiliar
or strange ways, to doubt what you know and
​what is familiar.