Adania Shibli: We Want to Play

How can play and cunning manifest themselves privately and publicly as tenable measures for challenging oppression and countering tyranny, exploitation and deep inequality? This talk by Adania Shibli identifies instances where play and cunning are both put into practice as means to dupe a state apparatus and its systematic application of violence.

Shibli places special focus on the contemporary Palestinian context, drawing on her own experiences. She argues that Palestinians are increasingly relying on play—including staged plays—and acting in their everyday life and daily movement, in order to retain their existence where it is threatened by the Israeli settler state and its subordinate Palestinian authority.  

The talk is followed by a conversation with writer and editor Chris McCormack, Dr Stephen Wilson and Astrid Korporaal, ICA Curator – Education Partnerships.

Adania Shibli is a writer and cultural researcher focusing on the history of vision in Arabic culture, as well as political and social realities. Her novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays have been published in various anthologies, art books, and literary and cultural magazines. Her most recent books include Tafsil Thanawi (translated as Minor Detail, Beirut, al-Adab, 2016), A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialogue with Edward Said (Berlin, HKW, 2014), and Dispositions (Ramallah, Qattan Publications, 2012).

Shibli was awarded the Young Writer’s Award by the A.M. Qattan Foundation in 2002 and 2004. Since 2013 has been teaching at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her recent curatorial projects include After the Wildly Improbable at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017).

Chris McCormack is a writer and associate editor of Art Monthly. He was commissioning editor of ON&BY Andy Warhol (MIT/Whitechapel) and has contributed numerous essays and texts for catalogues, including James Richards's Requests and Antisongs, Richard Healy's Lubricants and Literature, the MIT/Whitechapel anthology Moving Image and HOME's Transactions of Desire. Alongside his research into vocal development published as part of Voce di testa, this year's Welsh Pavilion in Venice, he curated the exhibition Anarchic sexual desires of plain unmarried schoolteachers and edited the accompanying book.

This event is part of In formation, and is programmed and staged in collaboration with Dr Stephen Wilson and the Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon College of Arts postgraduate community. It stems from We Want Everything, an ongoing research series around the meaning of art and human life external to economic flows.