Spacemakers

The Keeper - 15 minute film. Single screen film shown in a group exhibition as part of Edinburgh Art Festival. Artists included were Taysir Batniji, decolonizing.ps (Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman), Jawad al Malhi. Films and videos by Nikolaj Bendix, Hala Elkoussy, mounir fatmi, Bouchra Khalili, Judy Price, Basma Sharif and Solmaz Shahbazi.The Delfina Foundation presents The Spacemakers, a group exhibition, which explores artistic perspectives on the immediate challenges of creating a home in some of today’s most diverse and harried urban areas. 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 it, 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 contemporary urban landscapes? Taking Palestine as its starting point and spanning examples from Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, New York 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.