26 Jul 2010

The Delfina Foundation and Beyond Borders present the Spacemakers at Edinburgh Art Festival

The Delfina Foundation presents The Spacemakers, a group exhibition that explores artistic perspectives on the immediate challenges of creating a home, in some of today’s most diverse and harried urban landscapes.

With Taysir Batniji, decolonizing.ps (Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman), and Jawad al Malhi. Films and videos by Nikolaj Bendix, Hala Elkoussy, mounir fatmi, Bouchra Khalili, Judy Price, Basma Sharif and Solmaz Shahbazi.

The planning and construction of a home articulates personal needs as well as the necessity to improve on one’s general living circumstances. Ideals of a secure home of bodily comfort, and the creation of borders to protect them, significantly inform our social and spatial existences. Notions of home as personal space and as political territory are undeniably intertwined, and in urban areas throughout the world, the relationship between one and the "other" is also informed by spatial organisation strategies, led by economic and political decisions.

How do architecture and urbanism inform social infrastructures and cohesion? How do personal desires for the materiality of a home intersect with wider socio-political agendas and ideologies in the formation of urban landscapes?

Taking Palestine as its starting point and spanning examples from Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, Paris and the U.A.E., The Spacemakers offers a global measure of the immediate challenges of producing habitats in epicenters of social, economical or political tension.

The Spacemakers is taking place across two venues (Edinburgh College of Art – Tent Gallery and Sleeper). It is part of a biennial series of events produced by Beyond Borders Productions Ltd.

For related events visit The Delfina Foundation website or www.beyondborders2010.com