Aissa Deebi: Cairo/New York/Venice
Exhibition
04.04.2015 - 30.05.2015

The exhibition will present recent and new work by Aissa Deebi including “The Trial” (2013) which was exhibited at the 55th Venice Biennale. Conceived in Cairo, the two-channel video installation consists of a reenactment in English of a speech by Daoud Turki at the Haifa courthouse in 1973 as a defendant during a military trial. In this speech, Turki tried to advance an idea against the paranoid Zionist fantasy of conflict toward the larger idea of a socialist class struggle. The brilliance of his rhetoric and the fullness of his reasoned argument, in which he criticizes Zionism for pitting Jews against Arabs, is caught in an address almost from Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which echoes throughout as the tone of an idealist caught in the jaws of a heinous militaristic state. The installation and related new work navigates complex political terrain and resonates deeply with the continued struggle for freedom in the region.

Curated by: Amr Assaad and Nada Shalaby

The following events are being held in conjunction with the exhibition:

April 6 | National Representation: The Palestinian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Panel discussion with Aissa Deebi, Bruce W. Ferguson, Shady Elnoshokaty, Nada Shalaby and Amr Assaad.

April 7-8 | The Creative Process: An Introduction to Visual Research
Workshop led by Aissa Deebi, Amr Assaad and Nada Shalaby
Two-day workshop for young artists providing practical visual research tools for creative work.

About the Artist
Aissa Deebi is a Palestinian artist and a scholar based in New York. His early work investigated the complexity of daily practices in post 1948 Palestine. Later, his work tackled issues of immigration and alienation, where he produced a body of works that interrogate the complex phenomena of cultural-migration Diaspora reality. Deebi held several positions teaching art and design at a number of institutions including the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (U.K.), Centro de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey Design (Mexico) and Chulalongkorn University (Thailand). In 2010, he joined the American University in Cairo where he founded the Visual Cultures Program and served as director of the program and the Sharjah Gallery. He is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Design, College of the Arts, Montclair State University (U.S.).
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