Simiyya (Arabic for “epistemology of wisdom”) together with Anna Engelhardt, Joud Al-Tamimi and Jovana Maksić invites to a Friday afternoon at Kunsthal Aarhus.

During the first part of the event Mandus Ridefelt and Assem Hendawi will present and show a series of short video essays produced by artists and researchers in the framework of Simiyya. These Video Capsules cross through investigatory, documentary, mythological and conceptual registers – an emerging patchwork or iterative compilation with its gaze set on a synoptic view of the layers of authoritarian image management and life within its fold. The series of video capsules will be screened continuously at Kunsthal Aarhus between the 2nd and 5th of April.

In the second part of the event, Simiyya will be in conversation with artist Anna Engelhardt, curator Joud Al-Tamimi, and scientist Jovana Maksić. Drawing upon a workshop held at Kunsthal Aarhus on 2-5 April, we will discuss the role and development of independent arts organizations in strategizing asymmetric and internationalist solidarity. We will trace emerging relationships between worldbuilding aesthetics, arts-infrastructural developments, and towards ways of safeguarding and weaponizing cultural practices at times of surging repression and violence globally and particularly in Palestine.

Participants at the event:
Joud Al-Tamimi, Anna Engelhardt, Jovana Maksić, Simiyya (Assem Hendawi, Mandus Ridefelt, Mostafa Elbaroody).

It's free to attend, but we recommend securing a seat on Billetto.

SIMIYYA – Capsules of the Undead. Dispatch 1#
On show at Kunsthal Aarhus: 02.04.24 – 05.04.24.

Please visit Simiyya’s website to watch the video capsules, extended reflections and a new interview with Mikkel Bolt:
simiyya.xyz

SIMIYYA is a platform for research, cultural production, and experimentation through thought forms and aesthetics. The platform operates through the formation of production-oriented research units and artistic formats. We engage the questions of technology and science, as it applies to both local and global political landscapes with a particular focus on the SWANA-region. Nomadic in context and symbiotic in structure, Simiyya embarks on a long-term commitment to spectral knowledge production and transdisciplinary artistic practices.

Our core activities include hosting interdisciplinary events, workshops, and screenings; supporting and commissioning research and artistic projects; providing a digital space for the exchange of ideas; and establishing symbiotic partnerships with like-minded organizations, initiatives and individuals.

Joud Al-Tamimi is an artist and curator. Her work explores value systems, insurgent economies and anticolonial futurities. She holds a bachelor's degree in Politics and Economics (2015) and a master's degree in Near and Middle Eastern Studies (2016) from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She worked as a curator at Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan from 2019-2021.

Anna Engelhardt is an alias of a research-based video artist and writer. Her investigative practice follows the traces of material violence, focusing on what could be seen as the ‘ghost’ of information. The toxic information environments she deals with stem from structures of occupation and dispossession. Interested in the data haze around political events, she reconstructs their genesis by working through the tension between evidence and fiction.

Jovana Maksić is a researcher interested in the interaction and evolution of culture, cognition, sociality, and communication of human and nonhuman primates. She grew up in Serbia and studied neuroscience in Shanghai, New York, Berlin and Frankfurt, focusing on human and nonhuman (rodent and primate) brains in the laboratory. Maksić also conducted primatological field research in the Caribbean together with a colony of feral rhesus macaques. She also engages with ethnomusicology, philosophy of technology, and political activism in the Western Balkans. She is currently based in Berlin where she maintains and moderates the Trust community.

Assem Hendawi is an artist and filmmaker. His work focuses on the ideas of “public space” and spaces that could be or spaces to come: the non-private space, the virtual owned space, and space that is accessible by imagination. Architecture and systems theory are recurring themes in Hendawis production that recently has been shown at f.x. Berlinale Forum Expanded, Edith-Russ-House for Media Art and TANK-TV. He currently lives and works in Egypt.

Mandus Ridefelt is a researcher and curator living in Copenhagen. His work manipulates the relationship between natural sciences and arts through analytical, organizational, and poetic means. Mandus is currently exploring higher-dimensional aesthetics and how science grapples with not knowing. Mandus has recently worked with Diakron, Medical Museion, Ars Scientia, Society for Multidisciplinary and Fundamental Research, Copenhagen Science Slam, and REAL-Lab at the IT University of Copenhagen.

Mostafa Elbaroody is a Cairo-based architect and visual artist. Elbaroody’s practice incorporates different forms of digital image production, from generative design to immersive/interactive experiences as ways to imagine and articulate more representative and viable imaginaries for our co-dependency within ecological and technological systems. He is currently pursuing his independent studies as a researcher at The New Centre for Research & Practice. As an architect, he has worked on local projects and international competitions as well and extensive teaching of computational design.