Ashkal Alwan announces the 9th edition of Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices taking place in Beirut between November 2023 and November 2024. This edition will gradually unfold into three chapters at Ashkal Alwan, the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut Art Center, Madina theater, Metro Al Madina, the Sunflower theater, and the Sursock Museum.

Ashkal Alwan's flagship forum features group exhibitions, artist projects, and commissions; talks, panels, and readings; music, dance, and theater performances; film and video screenings; and publications, and has consistently taken place in Beirut since 2002 in spite of perpetual instability.

The 8th edition of Home Works opened, not auspiciously, in Beirut on the first evening of what became the October 2019 uprising. The following day, it was indefinitely postponed. Today, Palestine has entered an extremely dark cycle of violence and bloodshed, which Lebanon is not immune to, forcing us to consider how to confront an unbearable present and bleak future. We are convinced that Home Works remains of vital importance to our many communities and critical discourse, especially in resisting the rise of fear-mongering and the unfolding institutional moral crises.

We will be opening on November 30th Intimate Garden Scene (in Beirut) at the Sursock Museum, an exhibition that revisits forms of critical artmaking in Lebanon from the 1990s onward. The title is a reference to Ashkal Alwan’s inaugural project, at Sanayeh Garden, Beirut (1995). The exhibition draws on lived experiences and acts of writing a subjective history and prompts us to consider what it means to tend to Lebanon’s recent woes from the vantage point of everyday life. An accompanying film program will run bi-weekly starting in January 2024.

On December 1st, Jack, a solo exhibition by Simone Fattal opens at Ashkal Alwan, featuring an intimate collection of drawings produced in 1971, presented for the first time. The works muse over a nightly encounter between Fattal, her friends, and a band of young musicians passing through Lebanon on their way to India.

The second chapter of Home Works 9 will open on April 25th, 2024 in Beirut, while the third and final chapter will take place in November 2024.

Intimate Garden Scene (in Beirut) will run at the Sursock Museum from 10am to 6pm, Wednesday to Sunday.

Jack will run at Ashkal Alwan from 11am to 6pm, Monday to Friday.

Read more: https://ashkalalwan.org/program.php?category=2&id=515