On Sunday 11 December, the Toronto Reading Group will conclude with the final session of their current Reading Group, which is focused on If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’s research field of Edition VI – Event and Duration (2015–2016).
The Toronto Reading Group is organized by Jacob Korczynski and for this edition is hosted by 8-11. For its fifth and final meeting, the reading group will continue its discussion of “event and duration” in relation to an as yet unrealized event with an ongoing duration: the self-determination and sovereignty of Palestine. This will be addressed through two distinct bodies of work, beginning with Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti's research into The International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which was initially presented in Beirut in 1978:
The International Art Exhibition for Palestine was inaugurated in Beirut (Lebanon), in March 1978, and was intended as the seed collection for a museum in exile. Inspired from The International Resistance Museum for Salvador Allende, the museum took the form of an itinerant exhibition that was meant to tour until it could repatriate to Palestine. Organized by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), comprising almost 200 works, donated by 200 artists from nearly 30 countries, the exhibition remains one of the most ambitious, in scale and scope, to have ever been showcased in the Arab world until this day. Tragically, during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, sustained heavy shelling destroyed the building where the works were stored as well as the exhibition’s archival and documentary traces.
Khouri and Salti’s research, anchored upon the memories of artists, critics and cultural organizers, draws unsuspected cartographies across time and geography, and asks questions of how solidarity can be sustained and where alliances may be formed when the stories of The International Resistance Museum for Salvador Allende, the Artists of the World Against Apartheid, Art for the People of Nicaragua, the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, the International Brigades of Anti-Fascist Painters, the Japan Afro-Asian Latin American Artists Association and the 1974 and 1976 Arab Biennials intersect with The International Art Exhibition for Palestine.
The second text is Peter Wollen's short science-fiction story Friendship's Death, which documents his encounter with an extra-terrestrial in Jordan during the events of Black September in 1970.
Participants are asked to view a talk by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti about their research into The International Art Exhibition for Palestine from September 2015 at Artists Space prior to our meeting on December 11:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo8k0z6q-Kc&t=3582s
Copies of Friendship's Death will be distributed for reading out loud together on the day of the event.