PAST

From different shades of the political spectrum, nationalism has reemerged as a critical theme to understand the disputes that shape our time, raising questions about the duration and scope of this new regressive cycle. In this context, the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil | Imagined Communities borrows the title of Benedict Anderson’s classic study of the rise of nationalism to investigate how poetics stemming from the South have been addressing the phenomenon. Without losing the geopolitical focus, the curatorial team of the 21st Biennial intends to expand the repertoire of questions and broaden the diversity of the voices we hear. Thus, they consider stateless communities, indigenous peoples, religious or mystical communities, communities uprooted from their original lands, fictional, utopian, and clandestine communities, or those constituted in the subterranean universes of sexual experiences and dissident bodies.

Awartani's participation in the biennale comprises of her video piece 'I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I'd forgotten you. I was dreaming'. The work is composed of two elements: an installation and a video. In the former, Awartani lays down a patterned floor using sand colored with natural dyes. In the latter, we see the inside a house of Hejazi architecture, a common style in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before its westernization from the 1950s onwards, where she meticulously sweeps away a similar installation until it disappears completely. Besides celebrating and preserving the geometric art of Islam, the artist creates a radical relationship between time and aesthetic contemplation, ephemerality and eternity, in a powerful convergence of Islamic mysticism and issues of contemporary Western art.