Amr Hatem & Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Ayoun: Bodies & Places.
Press release, May 2022
aeon
noun
1. an indefinite and very long period of time.
Join us for the opening of the video essay:
AYOUN: BODIES & PLACES
by Amr Hatem & Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld
“The bar is a stage like space on the
Streets of Southern Italy Blågårdsgade where the man person
of the street can make an appearance.
It’s a place where daily life is made into
a spectacle. It’s a place where
“seduction” happens: from the chairs
looking onto the street, people are continuously hurling wisecracks, quips,
and provocations at the passerby.
And the passerby, every time he they get
there, knows that he they will be noticed
And judged.”
– from Pasolini's Bodies and Places,
Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella, 1980, p. 321 (our alterations).
In AYOUN: BODIES & PLACES, Amr Hatem & Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld borrow inspiration from the book Bodies & Places on the Italian filmmaker, writer and thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinematographic oeuvre, reconstructing the books’ logic with regulars, staff and friends around the bar and cultural venue Sorte Firkant in Nørrebro, Copenhagen. The video is a first attempt at creating an archive of gestures, close-ups and places that comment on and listen to each other, without the need for narrative or storytelling.
Featuring: Aida Berisha, Ali Merkouk, Agob Yacoub, Firat Jacob Tas, Marcus Jakobsen, Sultana, Luca Gentile, Marina Dubia, Mathias Horn Radsted, Mira Rostrup & Miran Mehsum Khalaf.
Amr Hatem is a visual artist. His artistic practice revolves around storytelling, disappearance, memory, archives, gestures, choreographies, and affects shaped by experiences of displacement. He is interested in dynamics of remembrance and forgetting, and in particular how archival materials tell and also hide stories, and how bodies also remember through gestures and movements. He holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus University (2010). He attended the Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon (2019) and holds a MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, The School of Conceptual and Contextual Practices (2020).
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld (PhD) is a visual artist and independent researcher. Her work proposes “reparative critical practices” as collaborative audio-visual practices that explore the debris of broken histories and assemble the fragments into new assemblages. Current work explores the entanglement of colonial archives between United States Virgin Islands, Ghana, Greenland, India and Denmark presented in video installations, performative presentations and publications such as Rematerialisations (2022); Voices in the Shadows of Monuments (2022); Whose Gold is This? (2022); Entangled Archives (2020-21); Archives that Matter (2018). She was head of the Institute for Art, Writing and Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen (2019-20) where she was also a postdoc fellow (2016-2020). She is the founding member of Sorte Firkant, a bar and cultural venue in Copenhagen.
Together they have created several video installations including Zamakan (TimeSpace) 2019 – ongoing; Reheet Reef (Smell of Nature) 2022; and now AYOUN: Bodies & Places.
AEON is an exhibition platform for time-based media in a window of the night club Jolene in Kødbyen.
The screen is on air all hours of the day, always for everyone forever. The eternal loop of the exhibited film will connect to future films and thereby create a long abstract narrative with each piece being connected, generating one eternal exhibition that in theory could go on for aeons.
Opening vernissage: June 3, 2022. At 18.
Exhibition period: June 3 - July 7, .2022.