Public Programme | Fehras Publishing Practices – Borrowed Faces: Future Recall
The Mosaic Rooms announces the public programme accompanying the exhibition Borrowed Faces: Future Recall, with Fehras Publishing Practices. The programme features artists, collectives, and thinkers who engage with the expanded themes of Fehras Publishing Practices‘ work. It invites us to rethink and reimagine the archive, the library and its future, to challenge the parameters of institutional archiving, and to enquire into the role of analogue publishing and translating both historically and in the present.
The programme launches with an artist tour through the research hub, the novel Borrowed Faces and the new project Future Recall. Two discussions will explore the politics of publishing and transnational solidarities during the Cold War, focusing on the cosmopolitan publishing capitals Beirut and Cairo. Vijay Prashad will chair a panel on Lotus magazine and Afro-Asian archives, with researchers Reem Abou-El-Fadl, Anaheed Al-Hardan and Tariq Mehmood. In the panel Books and Agents, Nida Ghouse, Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam and Elizabeth Holt will present their research on Lotus Magazine, the archives of Franklin Book Programs and the Cultural Congress of Freedom. Curator Hammad Nasar and artist Rasheed Araeen will discuss publishing in London, with the predecessor of Third Text, Black Phoenix, an anti-imperial, independent publication, both founded by Rasheed. Artists will shed further light on archives and cultural production of the cold war period: Mark Gergis and Yamen Mekdad will play musical gems from Syria’s cassettes’ and vinyls’ era. Falgoush will do an online takeover to highlight the fertile period of artistic practice before the late 1970s in Iran.
Artists, collectives, writers and curators will further engage with their takes on archives, publishing and language. In *Always already poltical, writers and poets Quinn Latimer and Sophie Collins join curators Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot to discuss the politics of language in poetry and the visual arts. Artist Urok Shirhan will reflect at the relations between language, image, and power in a new iteration of Arabic Letter ‘Seen’ Arabic Letter ‘Wow’. In a multidisciplinary performance, LUMIN collective imagines long-term borrowing to propose a new form of a library. mother tongues collective will invite to a collaborative translation party focusing on magazines from the archive and library room in the exhibition.
In a new commission in collaboration with The British Library, a mini comic zine will be e-published by an artist in response to the archives held in the library and in Fehras’s exhibition.
A reading group will host artist-led discussions based on selected texts linked to the exhibition.
Families can enjoy the exhibition with an art activity booklet, designed by Marwan Kaabour and participate in Shubbak Family Day and an art workshop led by artist Dia Batal.
Image: Fehras Publishing Practices. Courtesy of the artist collective.