On Tuesday the 12th of March at 6pm you are welcome to join us for a discursive Publics Event and Permanent Temporariness book launch with artists and architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) followed by an in-conversation with curator and educator Bassam El Baroni.

Since their first work, Stateless Nation at the Venice Biennial in 2003, and throughout their recent architectural interventions in refugee camps, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti’s artistic practice has explored and acted within, and against the condition of permanent temporariness permeating contemporary forms of life.

In their ambitious research-based projects, art exhibitions are both sites of display and of actions spilling into other contexts. Their practice challenges the conventions of built architectural structures and critical learning environments through interventions into dominant collective narratives and the production of critical political imaginations, and by the re-definition of words and the formation of new civic spaces.

Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory and the Royal Institute of Art, 2018) is a book, a catalogue, and an archive that accounts for fifteen years of research, experimentation, and creation that are marked by an inner tension and a visionary drive that re-thinks itself through collective engagement. It is the result of the profound desire of its authors, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, to look back in connection with the eponymous retrospective exhibition that was inaugurated at the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery on February 24, 2018, and at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven on December 1, 2018.

General discussion and drinks will follow after the talk.