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MOMENTUM AiR
Rita Adib
Studio Residency
2 December 2020 – 28 February 2021
Concurrently with her MOMENTUM Studio Residency,
Rita Adib is also taking part in Net//Work, a new British Council Residency
in partnership with Digital Arts Studios (DAS), Belfast and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire
for mid-career artists whose practices engage with digital technologies.
For more information on Net//Work visit:
https://dasnetworkresidency.com
Watch the Studio Visit with Rita Adib presenting her Residency Project:
How can you document the look of a lover?
ARTIST BIO
Rita Adib is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Damascus, Syria and is currently based between Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal and Berlin. She received her degree in architecture from Damascus University, and her degree in fine arts, majoring in sculpture from Concordia University. Her work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions in Beirut and Montreal. She frequently works with public interventions, public sculptures and interactive installations, seeking to collapse the gap between art and viewer, time of creation and time of interaction. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in social activism against political oppression and gender/racial based discrimination.
How do bodies confront and reflect borders? When does time become a barrier and how does the body perceive it as such? Artist Rita Adib explores the relationship between body and time by creating experimental videos where the body is trying to catch the fast movement of the camera as an allegory for racing against time. Adib aims to document the reflection of oneself constantly chasing a lost moment and to deliver the spectrum of feelings observed during that process. This video is shown as an immersive experience, transferring the filmed action onto the architecture of a site-specific installation using projection mapping. The work aims to liberate the moment from its physical space and revive it every time it is cued by the spectator.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes installation, sculpture, painting and video performance. I was born and raised in Damascus, Syria, and moved in 2014, shortly after the beginning of the revolution, to Montreal, Canada, where I continued my studies in art. My work shifted from my former architectural education to sculptural practice focusing on the body as a performative instrument in relationship to public space, and time as an essential factor in measuring that encounter.
My current practice focuses on the performativity of the sculptural piece whether I am the performer, or the participation of the spectator cues the activation of the performance. I explore the possibilities of filming and documenting an action in regards to the question of where would the visual outcome be situated in that liminal space between documentation and video art, and what can be shaped in combining digital art, performance, and sculpture.
Such questions concerning the search for artforms are inseparable from the subject matter of my artistic practice: Borders, both the impalpable and physical, and how does the body face them?
Invisible restraints imprison the body in them. Systematically imposed thoughts about my identity, gender, and sexuality are fed by cultural and sociopolitical factors. In my process to overcome them, my skin becomes a line separating the inside from the outside: the ideas from their visible manifestation. For example, in questioning femininity, long hair is for many the most visible representation of a “full female”. In a liberating process, I decided to disconnect myself from this dynamic. In my art, I explore more possibilities to challenge the invisible restrictions through body movement, documentation, and playing with time by means of editing.
The body also faces the physical borders which can take the form of dividers between countries, check points, social classes. It is the line created to instil separation on the basis of identities, ideologies, beliefs, religions, etc. These barriers become exemplary of discrimination, which can equally transform the body into the obstacle holding itself back.
After my draining experience with barricades and checkpoints throughout years of war which still have not ended, I now question more the absurdity of the concept of the border as a line we are prohibited from crossing. Hence, my work questions the notion of ‘limits’, and how for myself this changes from one place to another, decreasing and increasing according to when and who I am in relationship to my surroundings.
I want to explore these questions: How do bodies confront or reflect borders?
When does time become a barrier and how does the body perceive it as such?
These questions were subsequent to a personal love story that could not continue; our bodies facing political borders drew the end line of this relationship.
While separating, we shared a poem by Mahmood Darwish “we were missing a present”. In this poem Darwish condoles his lover for their separation revealing that timing was the obstacle ending their love story. In response, I’ve had the desire to go back to spaces we occupied together, as a remembrance act, and visit the moments that held our memories.
During this residency, I would like to explore the relationship between my body and time as an obstacle by creating experimentational videos where I will be trying to catch the fast movement of the camera as an allegory for racing against time. I want to document the reflection of oneself constantly chasing a lost moment and try to deliver the spectrum of feelings observed during that process. I want to work on connecting the time of creation and time of reception of a performative action for it to be revived outside of its original space.
After filming this video, I aim to create an immersive experience to transfer the action with its architecture and carry it outside of its temporal frame. I will try to achieve that through projection mapping to transform the indoor space into a momental memorial of that memory. It is an attempt to connect the time of creation and time of reception of a performative action to liberate the moment from its physical space and revive it every time it is cued by the spectator.
Rita Adib Artist Residency Project:
How can you document the look of a lover?
Video Installation on Loop, Original Soundtrack by Akkad Nizamedine
Production Phase (December 2020)
Video Stills – How can you document the look of a lover? (January 2021)
How slow is a glimpse?
How patient is love?
How strong is the border?
How free is a bird?
How light is time?
How deceptive is memory?
How misleading is longing?
While I was filming the action of running around the camera and thinking of my body in relation to a lost moment these questions were triggered.
They accompanied the making process of the video which I shot several times and they shaped the outcome of this experimental video performance.
–Rita Adib
Work in Progress (February 2021)
British Council Net//Work Residency
The British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire and Digital Arts Studios (DAS), Belfast are pleased to announce Net//Work, a new residency for mid-career visual artists whose practices engage with digital technologies. Our partner organisations brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in digital art residencies, and we’re delighted to be partnering with them on this programme.
Consisting of site visits, independent studio time, group critiques, peer-to-peer mentoring and workshops, the residencies offer artists a space for reflection, research, practice and skills exchange around digital artistic practices and technologies while growing their creative and professional community.
This year, however, the residency is moving online and our participating artists are from Egypt, Syria, and UK. The residency will be followed by an online exhibition.
Residency period: 18th January – 14th February 2021
Online Exhibition: 3rd May – 7th June 2021
The British Council was founded in 1934 and is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. Arts is a cornerstone of the British Council’s mission to create a friendly knowledge and understanding between the people of the UK and the wider world. British Council finds new ways of connecting with and understanding each other through the arts, to develop stronger creative sectors around the world that are better connected with the UK.
The British Council Visual Arts team are committed to promoting the achievements of the UK’s best artists abroad. The team connect the UK’s visual arts sector with professionals internationally, focusing predominantly on staging and supporting contemporary art projects in areas of the developing world.
For more information about British Council Visual Arts:
http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org
Digital Arts Studios (DAS)
DAS is a charity operating a shared studio space based in Belfast’s cultural Cathedral Quarter. DAS provides invaluable access to the resources essential to the production of and engagement with digital arts. It provides access to digital technologies, equipment and software and delivers a wide range of related training. DAS runs a full programme of national and international artists residencies, public talks, exhibitions and screenings.
DAS has been running a multi-stranded residency programme since 2008. We have hosted over 35 international artists and 150 UK & Ireland artists, on residencies lasting 2 – 4 months. The residency programme provides skills training, access to state-of the-art equipment as well as providing and encouraging networking opportunities with artists and partner arts organisations. DAS offers support to artists working with digital media and technology from production stage to presentation; providing training during the development of new work and support with presentation and dissemination.
DAS delivers an exciting programme of workshops for artists working with new and emerging technologies via its Future Labs Training Programme. DAS currently works in partnership with the British Council to deliver an international residency programme for digital artists and will be hosting online residencies from January 2021.
For more information about Digital Arts Studios (DAS):
http://digitalartsstudios.com/
Wysing Arts Centre
Wysing Arts Centre is a thriving cultural campus of ten buildings across an 11-acre rural site in Cambridgeshire which hosts experimental and thematic residencies for UK and international artists and delivers a critically acclaimed public programme of gallery exhibitions and events.
Wysing supports artists to make new work, explore new ways of working and make new collaborations. Residencies have emerged from ongoing artistic enquiry focusing on Wysing’s position at the geographic margins of two major cities, Cambridge and London, and at its origin as a space for artistic experimentation and innovation. Across 2020, Wysing is putting broadcasting and digital technologies at the centre of all its activity.
For more information about Wysing Arts Centre:
www.wysingartscentre.org