TransArts: Rana Hamadeh. Queer/ing Justice

Vortrag

Rana Hamadeh’s lecture will lead a journey through the recent works that she has been producing under the umbrella of her ongoing multi-faceted project, Alien Encounters. An incubator for a continuously growing series of performance/theatrical, cartographic, auditory and text-based work, Alien Encounters aims at further complicating the notion of ?alienness?, understood broadly as the condition of estrangement with regard to the law. Building upon the proposition of provincializing planet Earth (in response to Dipesh Chakrabarty?s call for Provincializing Europe (2000)), the project can be seen as an expanded inquiry into possibilities of queering the spatial imaginaries that constitute our contemporary understandings of justice both in conjunction as well as in antagonism with notions of legality and legal subjectivity. The evolving series of propositions throughout the project?s chapters depart each time from different theoretical and contextual anchors. They map out outer-space and land-sea relations plotted through science fiction projections, geo-political territory formation, cross-border travel and migration flows, towards mining and transport histories, corporate and military pockets and state-sponsored sites of violence, and play out an intense scrutiny of the relations of criminology, epidemiology and theatre.

Rana Hamadeh is a performance and visual artist from Lebanon based in the Netherlands. Invested in a curatorial approach within her artistic practice, she works on overarching discursive projects that operate as umbrellas to a growing series of plays, choreographic/cartographic works, sound and text-based works and writings. She initiated in 2011 her ongoing project, Alien Encounters, which thinks through the relations of legality, justice and theatre. Her work has been shown a.o. at The Showroom/London, IMA/Brisbane, Nottingham Contemporary, Western Front/Vancouver, the Liverpool Biennial, Moscow Biennial, The New Museum/New York, CCA Wattis Institute/San Francisco, EVA International, Lyon Biennale, The Lisson Gallery/ London, Beirut/Cairo, Witte de With/Rotterdam, and the Van Abbemuseum.