Sakiya, founded in 2016 by architect Sahar Qawasmi and artist/ACT Professor Nida Sinnokrot, started out as a nomadic enterprise and has since become permanently located on a natural and historic site within the Ein Qiniya hills outside of Ramallah. The site was gifted to them by a family from Jerusalem, and the pair have spent the last few years renovating and rewilding this land. Self-dubbed ‘a progressive academy’ that’s dedicated to agricultural research, Sakiya integrates local agrarian knowledge with ecological processes and contemporary art. The organization’s activities include food production, exhibitions and conferences, as well as residencies and workshops enriched by a network of artists, writers, ecologists and craftspeople, both from the region and abroad. Sakiya’s force lies in the educational model it has created that roots pedagogy within the landscape, cultivating knowledge exchange and strategies of subsistence that seem all the more radical and necessary in the face of genocide and environmental collapse. Its ultimate goal is to challenge ‘the demographic divide that characterizes cultural production and consumption in Palestine.’
About the Power 100 List:
The Power 100 list is an annual tally of who and what made art happen during the past 12 months. It’s a structural portrait of international contemporary art, identifying and accounting for the figures and faces who have created, inspired and crafted the art we see. And sometimes it questions the extent to which contemporary art can be or is truly international in the first place.
Still, at heart (though heart has nothing to do with it, as it’s obviously just a matter of objective measurement, a ‘science’ if you like) it’s an attempt to illuminate how and why certain forms of art are being presented in one place, to imagine how they might manifest in another and to trace some of the strings being pulled to make that happen. It includes the artists and collectives who create the work, the curators, gallerists and museum directors who display the work, and the funders who stump up the cash to make and buy the work. The artists here (or anyone else here, for that matter) aren’t necessarily just the ‘most successful’ (whatever that means) or most visible or circulated; power is also about influence, and having the sway of emotion and insight, a spark that creates a ‘school’ around an artist.
Read more here.
About ArtReview:
Founded in 1949, ArtReview is one of the world’s leading international contemporary art magazines, dedicated to expanding contemporary art’s audience and reach, and tracing the ways it interacts with culture in general. Aimed at both a specialist and a general audience, the magazine and its sister publications, ArtReview Asia (launched in 2013) and a quarterly Chinese edition of ArtReview (published in partnership with Yishu Shijie and launched in 2022), feature a mixture of criticism, reviews, commentary and analysis alongside commissioned artist projects, guides and special supplements.
