The A. M. Qattan Foundation has welcomed Viviana Checchia to the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) team as the curator of the 2014 Award. Viviana was selected after an international open call for curatorial proposals was announced in November 2013. With the appointment of the curator at such an early stage, the YAYA is entering a new phase in this, its eighth edition. Viviana joined the independent jury to select the final participating artists, and will be leading what is expected to be an enriching, engaging and interactive process with the selected artists as a way of creating conversations and exchanging ideas on this year’s YAYA theme of ‘Archive’. The six month period that will lead to the exhibition of the artists’ final works will act as both the production phase of the artworks and the research/reflection phase on the subject of the ‘Archive’ in artistic practices.
The YAYA
The Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) is a biennial programme organised by the A. M. Qattan Foundation that encourages, supports and promotes young Palestinian artists. Initiated in 2000 under the auspices of the Foundation’s Culture and Arts Programme (CAP), the award is named The Hassan Hourani Award in honour of one of the winners of the first YAYA, a gifted young artist who died in a tragic drowning accident in 2003.
The Award is open to Palestinian artists, regardless of their place of residence, between the ages of 22 and 30 who work in any area of the visual arts. In 2008, it was decided that artists from the occupied Golan Heights within the same age group would also be eligible. An open call for applications is made locally and internationally. In accordance with the guidelines, applicants submit proposals for a work or related group of works that are to be made specifically for the Award and should not have been exhibited at any other time or in any other venue. Winners of the first prize in previous awards are not eligible to apply.
Ten artists are shortlisted by an independent jury chosen by the Foundation and given financial support and six months to develop and produce their proposed work, after which an exhibition is organised in various venues in the twin cities of Ramallah and Al Bireh, and/or in other locations as may be appropriate. The jury of distinguished Palestinian and internationally renowned artists, curators, commentators and professionals in the fields of culture and the visual arts are invited to Palestine to meet the artists, view the exhibition and select first, second and third prize winners.
The Foundation continues in its engagement with the YAYA finalists by generating opportunities for international residencies and offering support for exhibiting their work both locally and internationally.
The Curator
Viviana Checchia is a curator and critic, and currently a PhD candidate at Loughborough University in the UK. She lives in London and is the Co-Founder and Chief Curator of Vessel in Italy, a non-profit arts organization devoted to developing critical discourse around contemporary art related to social and geo-political issues.
As Assistant Curator at Eastside Projects in the UK she researched and assisted in curating Abstract Cabinet Show and Liam Gillick Two Short Plays. Her projects as an independent curator include In Dialogue at Nottingham Contemporary (2012); There’s something to this (but I don’t know what it is), at Nitra Gallery, Slovakia (2010); and Giant Step, a collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum, Mostyn Gallery and Galeria Labirynt (2012). She was part of the Agora, the curatorial team for the 4th Athens Biennale (2013).
Viviana participated in the Gwangju Foundation Course for International Curators (2010) and the ICI Curatorial Intensive in Derry-Londonderry (2013). Together with Anna Santomauro she is one of the recipients of the 2013 ICI/DEDALUS RESEARCH AWARD.
The Curatorial Statement
The project I will develop for YAYA 2014 together with the nine selected artists will explore, both theoretically and practically, the use of archives and the concept and use of self-historisation.
I aim to create a long term project based on the pro-active engagement of the artists and the curator: the result should be an open laboratory of the archive grounded on a retrospective understanding of the use of archive within contemporary art from the 1990s until today. The project will have the format and dynamic of an archive in itself: looking back and looking forward both in its curatorial development, artistic creation and final formalisation.
My principal interest as a curator lies in the process rather than in the production of the final outcome. Therefore I will give importance to a series of online events the participants will attend, which will run in parallel with the production of the artworks and the exhibition. The final goal is to create temporary source rooms that act as a durational profile to short term projects.
I believe this interest respond perfectly to the shift the YAYA is making towards a more educational turn, a shift that I find extremely stimulating and necessary above all for the artists involved and for the mission of this price as well.
The curatorial approach was designed to respond to the new format of the YAYA as a learning and developing process, a shift that I find extremely stimulating and necessary for the artists involved and for the mission of the Award.
The Artists
A jury of three members were invited to review the artists’ applications with the curator. After intense scrutiny and discussions of the proposed art projects, the decision was made to invite nine artists to participate in the final stages of the YAYA. The nine artists, and the proposed projects are as follows:
Aya Abu Ghazaleh proposed a project titled “Zinco”, a multimedia installation which builds on stories collected from refugee camps in Jordan.
Bashar Khalaf’s “Revolutionary Artists” is a painting project in which the artist revisits artists and their works, artists who at a certain period of the history of the Palestinian struggle had engaged with visual art as a culture of resistance and revolutionary work.
Farah Saleh’s “Son of a Fida’ee in Moscow” is a multimedia installation and performance, in which she translates, through employing material from her own family archive, the experience of a generation of young boys who were sent to Russia by their revolutionary parents to attend schools.
Hamudeh Ghannam’s “Children of the Valley” is a multimedia project in which the artist returns to the four year period between 1952 and 1956 in Haifa, to uncover stories of resistance to the Israeli occupation forces in the city’s only remaining Arab neighbourhood.
“Forgery of History” is a multimedia installation by the artist Hanadi Abu Jamal, in which she proposes to look at the city of Jerusalem as a stage for the falsifying and forcing of historical narratives by the Israeli occupation.
Iman Al Sayyed, in her multimedia work “Reincarnation (WIP)”, looks at her father’s archives and exposes them to the public as a way of reincarnating memories and telling a history that is absent from the formal narratives.
“Between the Earth and Sky” is a multimedia artwork proposed by Mjadal Nateel about the corpses in Israel’s notorious ‘cemeteries of numbers’ and their metaphorical suspension between the earth and sky.
“I’m Sorry For the Metaphor” is Noor Abed’s video, sound and performance project in which she recreates images of the imagination, dreams and fantasies in order to weave new narratives and alternative new histories.
“Captured Still Life”, a video and printed material installation, is Noor Abuarafeh’s proposed work and tackles the politics of the relationship between art institutions and artists/artworks by researching, interpreting, deconstructing and reconstructing material found in the archives of art institutions.