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The petition thingy would not open :-( -----Original Message----- From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stephen Vincent Sent: 12 April 2011 21:38 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Sharjah Director Jack Perekian's dismissal This may be of interest to this list: As you know by now, the director of the Sharjah Biennial, Jack Persekian, who was widely respected by many artists and curators, was fired �on orders from Sheik Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah, because of the local outcry (read: misunderstanding) surrounding Mustapha Benfodil�s installation. Here is a very touching and eloquent letter from the artist in response: � Because art is free to be impolite� ��������It is with a profound astonishment that I have heard that Mr. Jack Persekian, director of Sharjah Art Foundation, has been dismissed as �punishment� for allowing an artist invited to the Sharjah Biennial total freedom of expression. I am the artist in question. In this thrust, my installation � Ecritures sauvages � [It has no importance/Wild Writings] has been censored and removed from the Biennial. In writing this press release, I wish to express my profound indignation after this shameful act and my solidarity towards Mr Persekian and his fantastic team. ���������I would like to clarify matters concerning the piece I presented at the Sharjah Biennial. Since the central theme of this 10th edition is betrayal, I wanted to question through my installation the resonance and dissonance between a writer and his society. As such, the installation works on three levels: texts, sound and graffiti. The central piece is a parody of a football match involving 23 headless mannequins. The T-shirts worn by one team are printed with extracts of my writings (novels, theatre, poetry), whereas the other team contains a hybrid of material taken from Algerian popular culture and other urban signifiers (songs, jokes, popular poetry, recipes, board games, etc). Of course, my texts (particularly the graffiti) are not terribly �polite�. In fact, I refer to the extent of social and political violence that surrounds me. This is what my literature feeds off. It is perhaps a fault of mine to have naively believed that life is not polite. And that art is free to be impolite and impertinent. ��������The incriminated text is a monologue (The Soliloquy of Sherifa) which is taken from my play � Les Borgnes � [One-Eyed People], which has been performed in many countries, cities, festivals, in Paris, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Montreal, and in Algiers also (part of my series �� Pi�ces d�tach�es � Lectures sauvages � / Spare Parts-Wild Readings). Audience member and a part of the organisers have criticised this text as obscene and blasphemous. May be the words and the description can be interpreted as pornographical. The truth is that this sequence is an hallucinatory account of a young woman�s rape by fanatic Djihadists claiming to be of the same radical Islamism experienced in my country at the culminating point of the Civil War in the 1990s. The words may be chocking but that is because nothing is more shocking than the rape itself and all the words of the world can not tell the atrocious suffering of a mutilated body � and what is told here is sadly not a fiction. This has been interpreted as an attack against Islam. Allow me to clarify that Sherifa�s complaint refers to a phallocratic, barbarian and fundamentally liberticidal god. It is the god of the GIA, the Armed Islamic Group, this sinister sect which has raped, violated, massacred, tens of thousands of Sherifa in the name of a pathological revolutionary paradigm, supposedly inspired by the Coraniq ethics. Without wanting to justify myself, I must simply underline that my own Allah has nothing to do with the devastating destructive divinities claimed by the Algerian millenarian movements, those legions of Barbarian Beards who have decimated my people with the active complicity of our security apparatus. Finally, I would like to add that at this particularly intense juncture for Arab societies, it appears rather regrettable to spoil this opportunity to place Liberty at the heart of the debate and deal with the future from this point. Indeed, the curatorial team of the Sharjah Biennale highlighted the impact and pertinence of this challenge in tandem with the march of Arab peoples towards democracy. As such, I would like to pay homage to the curators, Rasha Salti, Suzanne Cotter and Haig Aivazian for their exceptional work and for trusting me. It seems to me a good sign of the cultural and political healthiness if Art meets the street and artists listen to the whispering of the real life. Moreover, a bit of imagination in positions of power is rather welcome. I really hope that, in its impetuous course, this cycle of Arab revolutions, which has shaken our tyrannical and medieval political regimes, will challenge our imaginaries, tastes, aesthetic canons and thought processes. May it contribute to refresh our signs and words. Our guardians of virtue would rather meditate this beautiful arab Democratic Spring and stop repainting the walls every time a kid draws on his insolent dreams. Mustapha Benfodil, Writer. Algiers 6 April 2011 There is a petition that you can sign here�http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/sharjahcall4action/�if you would like to show your support.� �