Listening through the cracks

The exhibition zooms in and out of an unruly gathering of voices, imagining what some of those confabulations might sound like. There is some gossip, rumors are circulating, traveling through time and space. We move through fiction-telling and coded patterns, voices that shape (other) narratives while questioning the frame of proverbial tales, imaginaries, myths and memories. The ground is shaking beneath the multitude, opening up cracks through which testimonies are distorted, memories are glitched, myths are re-written.  Listening through the cracks is an invitation to imagine different relations to time, embodying multifaceted future tenses and delving into the rhythms of an unwritten story.   Born in Casablanca, Ghita Skali studied at Villa Arson in Nice (France) and attended the post-graduate programs of the Fine Arts academy in Lyon in 2016 and De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2018 until 2020. Ghita Skali’s work takes as an initial impulse investigations around anecdotes which appeared in the media and have been later forgotten and / or erased. For example: the construction of an Eiffel Tower in Fez in Morocco, the imprisonment of a spy duck in Cairo, a suspicious cardiological device invented by the king Hassan II, the donkey tails of Rita McBride's sculpture stolen by the inhabitants of Monchengladbach in Germany or the declaration in 2014, of an Egyptian general of the Army pretending he invented a miraculous machine curing Aids. These intrigues and anecdotes left only fleeting traces but they reveal power relations based on mythologies, the reification of fictions and assumptions. They manifest many systems of belief and authority but also irony. Ghita Skali borrows among others the codes of the street interview, the conference, the documentary, the guided tour or the medical congress. In her approach, it is less a question of truth of the anecdote than to map out all the possible ramifications of this narration, the contradictions and dead ends of the many rumors that made it. https://www.ghitaskali.com https://www.instagram.com/ghita_skali Working nomadically between the Middle East, Europe, and North America, and currently based in Berlin, Basma al-Sharif - an artist and filmmaker of Palestinian heritage - explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and nonplace, she confronts the legacy of colonialism and the experience of displacement with satire, doubt, and hope. https://imanefares.com/artistes/basma-al-sharif Golnesa Rezanezhad is a visual artist and researcher based in Ghent. She works with various artistic mediums like drawing, painting, photography, and textile. She works through craftwork, mainly the one practiced by women, to look into women’s choices, everyday performances, and belongings. In recent years she has conducted a research practice in northern Iran with women rug weavers. Since rug and carpet weaving in Iran has been the main export of the country for a long time, especially in the pre-oil economy,  understanding the practice and imaginations around rug weavers is a way for her to challenge the many misrepresentations about them and their craft. Golnesa has presented her research and artistic practice in various international academic and art institutes including Iran, the USA, Belgium, the UK, Austria and Portugal, among other places. https://cargocollective.com/golnesarezanezhad photo credit: Ghita Skali