HOME WORKSPACE PROGRAM 2019-20 | OPEN CALL

Open call | Home Workspace Program 2019-20
Deadline for application: March 8, 2019

Ashkal Alwan announces an open call for applications to participate in the 9th edition of the Home Workspace Program (HWP), taking place in Beirut from October 7, 2019 through July 20, 2020.

HWP is a 10-month study program that enrolls 10-15 fellows per year. The program is open to artists aiming to develop their formal, theoretical, and critical skills in dialogue with fellow artists, scholars, writers, thinkers, and others. Each fellow is granted a merit-based scholarship and a shared studio space. Some of the  program’s lectures, seminars, and workshops are open free of charge to non-enrolled participants.
 

The 2019-20 program consists of three primary modes of inquiry; the Preface, the workshops, and seminars with ongoing mentorship provided by the Advisors. Invited guests this year include Sophia Al Maria, Kader Attia, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Nesrine Khodr, Frank Leibovici, Sandra Noeth, Walid Raad, Yasmine Eid Sabbagh, and Walid Sadek among others.

Timeline of HWP 2019-2020

Home Works 8:
One part of the 2019-2020 program will run in tandem with Home Works 8: A Forum on Cultural Practices, organised by Ashkal Alwan and taking place across Beirut in October 2019.  

Preface:
HWP’s two-week Preface will an in-depth introduction to the program, and to Lebanon’s urban and cultural landscape through site visits and discussions with invited guests.

Workshops:
The Preface is followed by five workshops led by Visiting Professors (VP). The VPs are invited for an extended period of time, alongside guests of their choice, to explore themes, media, and forms affined with their distinct artistic practices.

Seminars:
In parallel, the seminars consist of up to 6 hours of lectures, over a two-day period exploring concepts, histories, and practices close to the guest’s current or former areas of interest.

Haig Aivazian, Daniel Genadry and Joe Namy are this year’s Advisors. The Advisor is a mentor and tutor to HWP fellows throughout the duration of the program.

Click here to apply

Please revisit this page regularly; more information will be released at a later stage.

Admission

Fellows are selected through an open call for applications. Candidates are considered on the merit of their previous work and their proposed projects for 2019-2020 in Beirut. An Admissions Committee selects an initial shortlist of candidates for interviews. Shortlisted applicants will be contacted for a Skype interview on short notice.

All applicants should receive an email confirming receipt of their applications. If you have not heard from us within a week of sending your application, please get in touch.

If you have any questions, please contact hwp@ashkalalwan.org or call Ashkal Alwan during office hours.

Tel. +961 1 423879

Office Hours: Monday – Friday | 10.30am-6.30pm

Eligibility

All artists are eligible, regardless of age and nationality.

With the exception of participants in HWP 2013-14, former fellows are not eligible to reapply.

Applicants should:

• have completed an undergraduate arts-related degree, or have equivalent experience;

• be able to commit full-time to HWP’s assigned schedule. External engagements must be kept at an absolute minimum and should not interfere with the fellows commitment to the program.

Please note that:

• while applicants from Lebanon and the Arab region are especially encouraged to apply, HWP is open to applicants from all nationalities.

• due to the international scope of HWP’s professors and fellows, the program’s language is English. If necessary, fellows are advised to take an English language course prior to the start of/ or during the program.

• collectives and collaborating artists should submit separate applications, and will be considered independently from one another.

Tuition & Financial Aid

HWP is tuition-free; every admitted fellow is granted a full merit-based scholarship.

Fellows are expected to secure additional funding to cover their living expenses and production costs. A limited number of financial support grants are available on a need basis.

Biographies

Haig Aivazian is an artist living in Beirut. Working across a wide range of media, he delves into the ways in which ideologies embed, affect and move people, objects and architecture. Often departing from known events, and weaving in lesser known narratives, he has explored apparatuses of control and sovereignty at work in sports, finance, museums and music.

Sophia Al Maria is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, and aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. For the past few years, she has been carrying out research around the concept of Gulf Futurism. Her primary interests are around the isolation of individuals via technology and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism and industry, and the erasure of history and the blinding approach of a future no one is ready for. She explores these ideas with certain guidebooks and ideas including, but not limited to, Zizek’s The Desert of the Unreal, As-Sufi’s Islamic Book of the Dead, as well as imagery from Islamic eschatology, posthumanism and the global mythos of Science Fiction.

Kader Attia (b. 1970, France) grew up in Algeria and the suburbs of Paris, and takes this experience of living as a part of two different cultures as a starting point for his work. Attia takes a poetic and symbolic approach to exploring the wide-ranging repercussions of Western domination and colonialism on non-Western cultures.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, both born in 1969 in Beirut, collaborate on films, photographs, and installations, often using cinematic fragments to examine the power of absence. They are concerned with the emergence and disappearance of images, particularly archival documents of the effects of the fifteen-year civil war in their homeland that began in 1976. Combining personal histories and political activism, Hadjithomas and Joreige apply a documentary approach to exploring the potency of visual remains.

Frank Leibovici (poet, artist) tried to chron­icle so-called “low inten­sity” con­flicts, via exhi­bi­tions, per­for­mances, books, by means of graphic scores and nota­tional sys­tems taken from exper­i­mental music, dance, lin­guis­tics; pub­lished spam cor­re­spon­dences and 70 hour speeches (let­tres de jerusalem, 2012; libuster, jeu de paume, 2013); worked on the ecology of the art­work - (des formes de vie) - une ecologie des pra­tiques artis­tiques (les lab­o­ra­toires d’aubervil­liers / ques­tions theoriques, 2012); des recits ordi­naires (les presses du reel / villa arson, 2014); refresh! / col­lecting live art (tate modern / koenig, 2012-2014); cur­rently works, with julien seroussi, on a new cycle of exhi­bi­tions (krakow, berlin, the hague) and pub­li­ca­tions (bogoro, ques­tions theoriques, 2016) around the inven­tion of con­tem­po­rary inter­na­tional jus­tice the first trial and the International Criminal Court, the Hague.

Joe Namy is a composer and media artist. His work often addresses identity, memory, power,and currents encoded in organized sound/music, such as the politics and gender dynamics of bass, the color and tones of militarization, or the migration and asylum patterns of musical instruments. His work has been exhibited, screened, and amplified at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, the Berlinale, the Brooklyn Museum, the Beirut Art Center, the Detroit Science Center, and less prominent international dance floors. Some of his projects fall under the sound art platform titled Electric Kahraba, an experimental radio program that operates out of clocktower.org.

Sandra Noeth is a dramaturge, curator and a member of the research cluster: 'Loose Couplings: Collectivity at the Intersection of Digital and Urban Space' at the University of Hamburg. She was Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanzquartier Wien. Her current research focuses on the relation between artistic and political strategies for action, more specifically on the body's role, status and agency in bordering processes.

Walid Raad is an artist and a Professor of Art in the (still-charging-tuition) Cooper Union (New York, USA). Raad’s works include The Atlas Group, a fifteen-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, and the ongoing projects Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut).

Yasmine Eid Sabbagh studied history, photography and visual anthropology in Paris. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. From 2006 to 2011 she lived in Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyre, Lebanon, where she undertook photographic research, including an oral project with young Palestinian refugees and archival work on family and studio photographs. She has been a member of the Arab Image Foundation since 2008. For her collaboration with Rozenn Quéré, Vies possibles et imaginaires (Editions Photosynthèses), she received the 8th Vevey International Photography Award in 2011 and the Arles Discovery Award in 2013.

Walid Sadek is an artist and writer based in Beirut. He is Professor of Arts and currently chair of the department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut.