Conferences and debates
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Rethinking Al-Andalus through the artistic work by Nicène Kossentini
October 20, 20166:00 p.m.
CóRDOBA
Casa Árabe headquarters (at Calle Samuel de los Santos Gener, 9).
6:00 p.m.
Free entrance until the event’s capacity is reached.
In French and Spanish with simultaneous translation.
This conference will be held as a prelude to the official opening of the exhibition Fugitive.
The event, a prelude to the official opening event of the exhibition Fugitive by artist Nicène Kossentini (7:30 p.m.), will include the artist’s participation, as well as that of the expert on Islamic art from Al-Andalus José-Miguel Puerta Vílchez, Christine Buci Glucksman (a philosopher and aesthetics expert) and Sabrina Amrani, director of the art gallery bearing her name.
The goal of this round table discussion is, on the one hand, to contextualize and rethink the artistic sense of Al-Andalus, and on the other, to highlight the artist’s work and artistic and aesthetic feeling, the result of an artistic residency which she completed last fall at Casa Árabe’s headquarters in Cordoba.
The work on display, which entails Kossentini’s return to drawing and watercolor painting and largely uses Islamic geometrics and the aesthetics of its architectural ornamentation inspired by the Cordoba Mosque, is distanced from classical Islamic design. Beyond just delving into the decorative structures of Al-Andalus from a purely theoretical perspective, it focuses on an existential search in which the artist poses questions about the contradictions and mutability of life and memory.
Nicène Kossentini (1976) recently held a solo retrospective exhibition in Muratcentoventidue, Bari (Italy) and was nominated for the Abraaj Art Prize of 2016. The most notable of her recent group exhibitions include The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists (National Museum of African Art, USA, and at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany); Effervescence (Institut des Cultures d’Islam, France); Songs of Loss and Songs of Love (Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea); Still Fighting Ignorance and Intellectual Perfidy: Video Art from Africa (Kunsthalle, Brazil); El Iris de Lucy (Lucy’s Iris, MUSAC, Spain), etc. Nicène’s work has recently been acquired by the British Museum and is present in public collections like that of the Fondation Blachère (France), Sindika Dokolo Foundation (Angola), Kamel Lazaar Foundation (Tunisia) and the Museum of Modern Art (Tunisia).
© Nicène Kossentini
Casa Árabe
Sabrina Amrani