Meeting Points was an international multidisciplinary contemporary arts event that took place every two years. It was initiated by Mophradat, and realized in collaboration with various partners and hosts. Meeting Points took the Arab world as a starting point to open up questions that were not limited to the scope of that region but posed questions of and to art, which were of broad relevance. Each edition was programmed by different international curators, and investigated new models for artistic production and presentation. Meeting Points deliberately considered the conditions in which art is produced versus the logic of supply and demand; pushed that art be communicated as a language rather than as PR and marketing; and acknowledged the public as an interlocutor rather than a consuming audience.

Initiated in 2004, Meeting Points was originally envisaged as a touring multidisciplinary arts festival aimed at creating connections and facilitating exchange between artists and arts organisations within the Arab world. Over the course of its past seven editions, the festival took place in cities such as Cairo, Alexandria, Tunis, Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Brussels, Berlin, Athens, Moscow, Vienna, and Hong Kong.

Both Sides of the Curtain

Meeting Points 8 invited curators to imagine and interrogate models for the production and presentation of contemporary arts, developed through their research in the Arab world. Inspired by German artist Oskar Schlemmer’s experiments with art at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, it aimed at inventing ways for new kinds of art to be created and shared between artists and publics. Many of Schlemmer’s ideas at the school were developed through social events where costumes and choreographies were put to practical use and tested. It is this logic of considering art as a form of enthusiastic developing and sharing of ideas — an interaction that creates a community — that shaped Meeting Points 8 into a space where participants moved along together on an expedition through different sites and times. 

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Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks
Curated by What, How & for Whom (WHW)

This edition forayed into the interwoven topics of revolution and counter-revolution, agency and co-optation, in an attempt to show how waves of hope rise and sink again — the rhythm of expectation and disappointment. It did so in an attempt to point out our need for stubbornness and endurance in critical times, and to claim our right to optimism, wrestling it back from the language of advertising so that it may once again offer us new alternatives and perspectives. Elaborating degrees of identity and difference between the past and the present, the project adjusted to the specific geographies and histories in which it was realized.

The exhibition traveled from September 19, 2013 to August 31, 2014, visiting Gallery Nova (Zagreb), M HKA (Antwerp), Para Site (Hong Kong), V-A-C Foundation (Moscow), CiC (Cairo), and Beirut Art Center (Beirut).

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Locus Agonistes: Practices and Logics of the Civic
Curated by Okwui Enwezor

This edition was conceived as a response to the various scenarios of rupture between antagonistic political camps and civic critical cultures unfolding in contemporary Arab societies. At the core of the responses to these transitional challenges is a rising dimension of Civic Imagination and, within this context, artistic practices and their critical logics provide opportunities for constructing and constituting models of civitas, which in turn induce fresh demands for emancipatory and civic techniques.

The exhibition traveled from April 27, 2011 to March 31, 2012, visiting KVS (Brussels), ARGOS (Brussels), The House of World Cultures (Berlin), Onassis Cultural Center (Athens), Beirut Art Center (Beirut), and Makan (Amman).

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Curated by Frie Leysen and assistant curator Maha Maamoun

This non-themed edition of Meeting Points was considered as an invitation to see and reflect. To see how artists view and engage with the society they live in, and, by extrapolation, to ask how they see the world around them. What are their thoughts, passions, critiques, worries, and concerns? How do they see their role and formulate their position in their varied social, political, and cultural contexts? How can their vision inspire and nourish us, as well as invite us to grow out of the simplifying clichés with which we try to understand the world? In addition to its own curated program, two projects were also presented with the framework of Meeting Points 5: DVtheque, a traveling library of films from the Arab world, and “Unclassified,” an invitation to a curator or curatorial team in each of the six cities to propose an artistic program tailored to their location.

Meeting Points 5 took place from November 1, 2007 to January, 2008 and toured in Alexandria, Amman, Berlin, Brussels, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Rabat, Ramallah, Minia, and Tunis.

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