Ashkal Alwan

HOME WORKSPACE PROGRAM 2024

My work is grounded on an implicit or explicit relationship with politics and power relations at
different scales. Lately I have been increasingly interested in the way in which politics constitute a
theater which has led me to consider the possibilities of that theatricality; to work with actors and be
able to generate fictions that point out the political paradoxes that often underlie spaces such as
supermarkets, malls, restaurants creating and reusing logos, symbols and institutional esthetics, and
narratives outside or even inside artistic institutions, considering this as evidently crossed by the
same power structure. Moreover, I would like to be able to use the methodologies of my artistic
practice to generate processes that can operate outside of the art system, I believe that the ability to
generate fictions, to make performative interventions that play with public space and with political,
economic or social dynamics, has a broader horizon outside the artistic field, and in this sense,
admitting the contradictions embedded in these. In this way, I recognize that this notion of
experimentation and openness is only possible through the infrastructure of art, and the resources
such as this residency

However, this is not separated from constantly organizing with others, building spaces of visibility to
gather, consolidate and participate with different communities of artists, trying to find visibility and
build community through different strategies.

My interest in your program comes from this need of sharing and collective making, as well as
generating spaces of representation to avoid leaving the agency of the LatinaAmerican narrative that
is to say, to prevent institutions from totally establishing frameworks of enunciation, which
traditionally operate under legitimized formulas of cultural neoliberalism.
In this way, I believe that we are currently witnessing a depoliticization of opacities and that it has
been a characteristic of art until now to exhaust the content of words through a constant
instrumentalization of language. In this sense, I am interested in using this residency space as a place
to speak from my condition of enunciation, but not about it. I am interested in what reality
constitutes, conceptually and pragmatically. How it is shaped by language, as well as institutions
through legitimacy, truth, originality, how this determines political positions.

On the other hand, related to this need of organizing spaces, I believe that a large part of my interest
in continuing to participate in residency processes like this comes from always doing from a place
that is often parallel to a certain institutionality. I recognize that there is something contradictory in
this, and it is necessary to participate in the institutions precisely because of the parallel processes
that develop outside of them. As an artist working in Colombia, I value the importance of generating
ties with people who are also interested in participating in contexts outside of their own, in this
sense I believe that participating in this residency enables a transnational dialogue that seeks to
generate