ACT Lecturer Lara Baladi is featured as part of Me, Family, the new digital exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. The exhibition, which opened on October 28, 2020, is live until March 21, 2021. As part of the exhibition, there will also be a series of artist talks, hosted on Mudam’s Instagram page.
Lara Baladi’s ABC: A Lesson in History is a series of artworks, which stems from the artist’s ongoing project Tahrir Archives, an archive of data she has collected since 2011 on the Arab uprisings and other global social movements. The title, ABC: A Lesson in History, is borrowed from the core work of this series, an ABC primer of revolution inspired by 1950s propagandist educational books. Along this alphabet, the video Anatomy of a Revolution, refers to John Berger’s essay, ‘The Look of Things’, and invites viewers to connect the dots, while The Game, a large scale, Monopoly-like, collage, narrates the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath. Ryan Aasen (SMACT ’20) worked on Anatomy of a Revolution. ABC: A Lesson in History dissects the structure of revolutions, suggesting a reading of history from a global perspective.
March 8, 2021 | Lara Baladi on the value of memory, mythological and socio-political narratives, connection between History and revolution. Live interview conducted by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera.
Lara Baladi (b. 1969, Beirut, Lebanon) is an internationally recognized Egyptian-Lebanese multidisciplinary artist and lecturer in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT). Her artistic practice spans photography, video, sculpture, architecture, and multimedia installations. Through a process of investigation into popular iconography and archives, her work questions collective memory between personal histories, history, and mythologies.
About the Exhibition:
Curators: Francesco Bonami, Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera and Luigi Alberto Cippini, assisted by Sarah Beaumont
Platform Concept: Base Design
Location: mefamily.mudam.com
Artists: Doug Aitken, Sophia Al Maria, Yuri Ancarani, Darren Bader, Lara Baladi, Clément Cogitore, Christian Falsnaes, Harun Farocki, Simon Fujiwara, Ga Ram Kim, Thomas Hirschhorn, Olia Lialina, Karolina Markiewicz & Pascal Piron, Eva & Franco Mattes, Li Ming, Mario Pfeifer, Wong Ping, Cheng Ran, Cindy Sherman, Marianna Simnett, Rudolf Stingel, Jordan Wolfson
Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean announces the launch of Me, Family, an online platform presenting works by 24 artists from 14 countries. Accompanied by a new publication, public program and collection displays at the museum, this online platform is part of an extensive project Me, Family. Portrait of a Young Planet, that takes inspiration from the iconic exhibition The Family of Man curated by Edward Steichen (1879, Bivange, Luxembourg – 1973, West Redding, Connecticut) for the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1955 and presented on permanent display at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg since 1994.
Intended as a portrait of humanity at the beginning of the 21st century, Me, Family. Portrait of
a Young Planet reflects on a broad range of subjects that include technological progress, digital innovation, pleasure, fun and individuality as well as the darker aspects of alienation, social inequality, war and identity crises. Addressing topical issues that relate to the flow of information and data in our globalized society, the artists featured on this platform variously confront a complex reality that is at once frenetically connected and under constant surveillance.
Conceived by Base Design in collaboration with curators Francesco Bonami and Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera and architect and curator Luigi Alberto Cippini, this interactive platform invites visitors to become real-time avatars, or virtual entities interacting with each other and immersing themselves in the artworks that are presented in a hitherto unseen format.
An associated program, available on the platform and on Mudam Instagram account during live interviews, gives the possibility to hear artists, scholars and curators around thematics related to the works presented on the platform or contemporary events. These contributions are intended to activate the platform as a space for debate.
Alongside Me, Family, the public program, available on the platform, activates it as a space for
discussion and debate, taking the opportunity of the online format to gather around contemporary topics. The title of the program takes its name from the famous movie 8 1⁄2 (1963) by Federico Fellini, which explores continuous self-doubts and uncertainties that are revealed through an existential crisis with no way out.
During live interviews conducted by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera, on Mudam’s Instagram account, artists presented on the platform will have the possibility to elaborate on contemporary subjects, such as migration, artificiality of images and advertising, social media in relation to political, economic and cultural issues, global social movements and personal data in the digital era.
