[JFKI-News] Invitation .. Wed Feb 8 .. Temporary Communities II .. Nicolas Moufarrege at CCA]

["JFKI Culture Department" <culture@jfki.fu-berlin.de>]

Temporary Communities II
Wed, Feb 8, 2023, 18:00–19:00 + dinner afterwards
Venue: CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts, Kurfürstenstraße 145, entrance: Frobenstraße, 10785 Berlin, U
Kurfürstenstraße
. .  .  . .  .  . .  .  . .  .  . .  .  . .  .  . .  .  . .  .
Please register by Mon, Feb 6, with
ckastelan@stanford.edu<mailto:ckastelan@stanford.edu?subject=Registration%20Temporary%20Communities%20with%20Michele%20Di%20Menna>
and ensure you have tested Covid negative in advance.


Nicolas Moufarrege
Mutant International

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Nicolas Moufarrege, Title unknown, 1985

CCA Berlin — Center for Contemporary Arts<https://cca.berlin/en/> and Bidoun<https://www.bidoun.org/> are pleased to
announce Mutant International, an exhibition featuring a selection of works by Egyptian-born Lebanese artist Nicolas
Moufarrege (1947-1985) – his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.

A prodigious visual artist, writer, and curator, Moufarrege made wry, sophisticated, and exuberant work over a
ten-year career that spanned Beirut, Paris, and New York. His practice rethought the Western art canon and Levantine
weaving traditions through irreverent engagements with painting and sewing, graffiti and collage, Pop and the
esoteric. Having launched himself in Beirut in the 1970s, Moufarrege left shortly after the calamitous beginnings of
the long civil wars and moved to Paris, where he started producing large, tapestry-adjacent works. He arrived in New
York’s East Village in 1981, just as an art scene was coming together amid a handful of crumbling tenements. In that
city, he curated unusual, much-talked about exhibitions, penned high-stakes essays and manifestos, and showed his own
unclassifiable artworks. New York is also where he died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 37.

Moufarrege’s sui generis, shape-shifting work remains largely absent from the annals of art history—missing in
Lebanon, as well, despite all the efforts of the last 15 years around art from the broader Arabic-speaking region. But
it is missing, too, from most retrospective looks at American painting in the 1980s or The Pictures Generation. As for
the East Village scene which he was so intimately tied to, he has tended to appear as a footnote, a curiosity with a
foreign-sounding name.

The concise selection of works—tapestries, embroidered paintings, and drawings—as well as archival documents and
ephemera on view as part of Nicolas Moufarrege: Mutant International draws a rich trajectory of artmaking informed by
diasporic yearning and queer jouissance, and shaped through a delirious hodgepodge of references spanning Islamic
calligraphy, superhero comics, cultures of advertising, and gay erotica.

While Moufarrege’s name all but disappeared following his too-early death, CCA Berlin and Bidoun are committed to
bringing attention to his largely unknown body of work, while also using it as a springboard for a broader discussion
about art and erasure, queer aesthetics in 20th century art, and the cultural legacies of the AIDS epidemic. On March
12, a public symposium organized by Bidoun featuring Nick Mauss, Michael C. Vazquez, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Hala Halim,
and others will offer multiple lenses through which to view Moufarrege’s idiosyncratic œuvre, in part by speaking to
and about the cities in which he lived and worked—storied cosmopolitans enclaves, from 1950s Alexandria to 1960s
Beirut, 1970s Paris to 1980s New York.


CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts <https://cca.berlin/en/> is a new institution dedicated to supporting,
producing, exhibiting, and furthering discourse on contemporary artistic practices. Based in Berlin, Germany, it is a
space for education, dialogue and cultivating critical knowledge around art and culture. CCA Berlin’s mission is to
reformulate the relevance of a non-profit center for contemporary arts and seeks to establish vibrant, transnational
exchanges with stakeholders from the cultural, educational, and civic sectors. The institution also aims to bring
together a multifaceted program highlighting process, experimentation, and collaboration, and is committed to engaging
diverse publics.

Based in New York and co-led by Negar Azimi, Michael C. Vazquez, Anna Della Subin, Tiffany Malakooti, Babak Radboy and
a host of Contributing Editors around the world, Bidoun<https://www.bidoun.org/> is an award-winning publishing and
curatorial platform committed to producing new images and ideas from in and around the Middle East. To date their
projects have included exhibitions, books, a magazine, film programs, an itinerant library, talks, performances, and
an online archive of avant-garde media.

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