​هنا وهناك - ساو باولو ​
Here and There -  São Paulo Edition 

​Performance / Installation - 2017
Performer: Tania Maalouf
400 x 270 cm / Various cotton and polyester fabrics
by Roy Dib

Produced by 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil
​and presented on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of October 2017 at the Sesc Pompeia

​
​In 2013 people in Aleppo starting taking down the curtains from their balconies, sewing them together and raising them in the streets between neighboring buildings to protect themselves from snipers on the other side of the city. We will not know how they felt. This is a performance.  

Here and There – São Paulo Edition extends Dib’s narrative engagement with spatial demarcation and political reality through consideration of material and form. A curtain partially concealing a ‘here’ and a ‘there’ that exist because of it.  

Tania was sitting here (Sesc Pompeia) and sewing this curtain on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of October 2017. She was distributing a text in form of talismans for the audience, chipping the invented boundary between here and there, bit by bit, and transforming it into another boundary, a Hijab (Arabic for Talisman that actually means Concealer), between its wearer and evil. After she left, the audience is confronted with a deteriorated boundary, devising a more permissible route between a fictional ‘here’ and ‘there’.  

Here and There mocks safety in an already safe space, and highlights the fact that materials don't only do what they are born to do.  

One usually does not need a shield at Sesc Pompeia, but materials of this performative shield find their way out of it and manifest on selected necks of its visitors, as talismans that adopt the bodies of their wearers as ‘here’ – bodies that transform from their audience to their reasons to be.

Text by Raafat Majzoub