Nour Shantout

A Poem from the Future: Untitled

2018

 

Is a futuristic history museum, which presents objects and outfits from our time, it is a counter-archive of a dystopian society, where memory, history, and archiving are questioned. In a way that relates to techniques that are used in Natural History Museums, Nour Shantout`s work challenges the very notion of preservation.

The collected work-clothes, and other elements of contemporary labour that we see at the exhibition are accompanied with replicas of the signs of an Imperial Treasury museum in Vienna “Schatzkammer”. While preserving historical heritages is usually done from a dominant perspective and it reproduces fascism, archiving itself in a contemporary emancipatory way, becomes a way to acknowledge a counter-archive as a social practice, to overcome and decolonize a past of political domination. Imagine what if labour, the engine of the neo-liberal society is something from the past, would its museum be poetic?

*"The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content"
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

 

 

*Preis inkl. Steuer, exkl. Rahmen.

"My work focuses on subjugated heritage, counter-memory, counter-history, labor and alienation, from a post-colonial feminist perspective. I am interested in questioning the overly familiar aesthetics of museums as ‘heterotopias’ and learning sites.
With the intention of doing so, I developed a specific way of creating my work through multiple layers, this includes research, field-work and learning -to unlearn- as a decolonial practice. After the Syrian revolution, I left my hometown Damascus. In the time since, I have lived in Beirut, Paris and Vienna. These three cities have specific art (making) traditions, challenges, and problems which interested me and it left an enormous impact on the way I think of political art-work and the aesthetics of politics.
A significant part of my practice is undertaken in challenging geopolitical zones. For instance, I work as an artist and researcher in what are already over-researched places – such as Shatila, or in post-war Damascus and its suburbs. It is very difficult work that lends itself to tensions between myself and the participants, and I am sensitive to the lack of trust in the communities I seek to engage with. My work does not aim to overcome this tension, but to engage it. As such, I use Indigenous methodologies, such as narrative methodology, which aim to reinforce earning the participant's trust by facilitating the sharing of my own experiences and stories of Palestinian embroidery transmitted through my family via my grandmother."

Nour Shantout

ARTCARE - Rechte Bahngasse 30-32 | 1030 Wien

Work	#2240
Anfangsdatum	26/09/2024 09:37
Enddatum	19/06/2025 13:59
Aktueller Preis	9.600 €
Total fällig	9.600 €