Berlin, 19 August 2019 – In technical drawings, a station point is the point from which a perspective is constructed. Anything that is located behind it, or in its blind spot, will be absent from the drawing. Innab’s Station Point probes spatial representation as a way to reflect on the entanglements of architecture and power. The exhibition unfolds across three chapters that organise the gallery space.
The show opens with a letter from Saba Innab to Malevich, highlighting the blind spots of European avant-gardes and registering the impossibility of love between a Palestinian architect and the modern art movements that nourished her education.
The second chapter moves from intimate intuition to historical investigation. From Renaissance “ideal cities” to modern colonial settlements, Innab traces architectural authority through the persistence of central perspective as a mode of visual control that continuously produced spatial and legal marginalisation.
Is there a way out of the frame? The third chapter attempts an answer. A set of columns and beams constructs a single vanishing point. At its base lies a ruin made of claustra blocks, cut and arranged in a set of underground tunnels and inverted domes. Upon looking at this landscape, one´s gaze is systematically interrupted. The artist turns vulnerability into a proposition for an alternative politics of space. Within an uninhabitable world, the exhibition makes a plea for dwelling otherwise.
Saba Innab was born in Kuwait in 1980, and is an architect, urban researcher, and artist practising out of Amman and Beirut. Through mapping, model making, design, and drawing her work explores the suspended states between temporality and permanence, and is concerned with variable notions of dwelling and building and their political, spatial and poetic implications in language and architecture.
Omar Berrada was born in Morocco in 1978 and is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he co-organises the IDS Lecture Series.
Reema Salha Fadda is a writer, editor and researcher, primarily focused on contemporary art practices from the Middle East. She is completing her DPhil at the University of Oxford, working on the political economy of Palestinian artistic production. Her writing has been commissioned by e.g. Sternberg Press, TANK magazine, Frieze, Art Papers, Ocula, Institute for Palestine Studies, and Ibraaz, where she was Commissioning Editor of Reviews. In addition to developing a lecture series on Arab visual cultures for The University of Oxford and Darat al Funun, she has programmed cultural events in Palestine, Cairo and London.
A cooperation of KFW Stiftung and ifa in the context of the series "Untie to Tie" by ifa Gallery Berlin