PHOTOS: ISTVAN VIRAG (C) PUNKT Ø / MOMENTUM 9
RANA HAMADEH (LB)
The Big Board or ‘And Before It Falls, It Is Only Reasonable to Enjoy Life a Little’ (2013-2014)
Visual and performance artist Rana Hamadeh develops research projects that think through systems of justice, militarism, histories of sanitation, and theatre. The Big Board is a part of Hamadeh’s long-term research project Alien Encounters, which considers the notion of “alienness” by looking at the figure of the social outcast and the extra-terrestrial. The Big Board is a sculptural cartography or ‘stage set’ activated through a 60 min lecture-based play. Reminiscent of a war-room map unfurled on a large table, the work charts connections between the techniques and terms shared by the domains of law and hygiene as represented through the archival artefacts. The lecture play, inspired by Sun Ra’s 1974 film Space is the Place, Oskar Schlemmer’s 1926 Diagram for Gesture Dance and Paulus Fürst’s 1656 engraving of Doctor Schnabel of Rome, is an exhaustive deliberation on the notion and gesture of ‘falling’; falling as a form of legal apathy, and as a choreographic gesture. The work leads a journey amidst outer space and land-sea relations plotted through science fiction projections, geo-political territory formation, mining histories and cross-border travel.
