“Home is a slippery concept, whatever its discrete manifestations may be. The “exile’s return” is as much an archetype as is the traveler’s departure and subsequent return.”
Renée Green, from Peripatetic at “Home,” 1995
On the occasion of the exhibition Sager Al-Qatil: The Primacy of Plot at the MMAG Foundation in Amman, Professor Renée Green, and ACT Alumnus Yusef Audeh (SMACT ’17), will participate in a parallel program to the exhibition.
Organized by Audeh in collaboration with the MMAG Foundation’s Noura Salem, Sager Al-Qatil: The Primacy of Plot examines the artistic work of late Palestinian artist Sager Al-Qatil (1959-2004), focusing on his output during two decades of political extremes, the 1980s and 1990s, two decades marked by the beginning of the First Intifada, and the Oslo Accords.
Envisioned as a contemporary account of tragedy, The Primacy of Plot is an exhibition featuring three groupings of 24 paintings and drawings based on motifs within Sager’s body of work, ranging from estrangement and escapism to motherhood, masculinity and psychotropics.
On March 24th, Renée Green will be screening her film Some Chance Operations (1999), followed by a conversation with Audeh. The film explores the notion of an archival form, in this instance film, as an unstable memory receptacle that can vanish. History and how it is made is meditated upon as one of many chance operations that the film reflects upon, providing points of entry from which to consider Sager’s atypical existential and artistic trajectory
On March 25th, Green will read her reflections and observations of Sager’s life and work, focusing on his peripatetic existence and compulsion to draw in new and unfamiliar contexts, and how this compulsion resonates with her own peripatetic existence and extensive travels to produce work in different locales around the world.
Taking its cues from a concept used by Aristotle in Poetics to describe the imitation of action and life, the exhibition and parallel programs demonstrate Sager’s uncanny and obtuse outlook on life, using themes borrowed from psychoanalysis, gender studies and philosophy.
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