Loulwah Kutbi Awarded In-Practice Residency with Slavs and Tatars in collaboration with Art Jameel and Goethe-Institut Saudi Arabia

Art Jameel, Goethe-Institut Saudi Arabia and Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars are delighted to announce that Saudi video artist Loulwah Kutbi has been awarded the third cycle of the Berlin/Jeddah In-Practice Residency. The residency includes a two-month immersion in Slavs and Tatars’ experimental Berlin studio, during which Kutbi will be embedded as part of the collective, integrating her practice with theirs, followed by a public programme at Hayy Jameel, fully conceived and run by Kutbi.

Loulwah Kutbi is an independent writer, researcher and film programmer based between Jeddah and London. She is interested in cultural trauma in the context of modernity, the politics of memory, essay films and the role played by alternative archives in harbouring memory and countering collective cultural amnesia in the digital age. Focusing on the political economy of knowledge production, she advocates for an understanding of culture and belonging as influx and exilic while drawing on the productivity of ruination and apocalypse in forging historical futurities. By engaging with archives through speculative narration, her work seeks to expose the mechanisms of memory-experience barriers and and unveil the connections between networks of action and symbols, organisations of power, culture and science to activate a culture of remembrance that is in dialogue with historiographic failures and hauntings. For her residency with Hayy Jameel and Slavs and Tatars, she intends on working with found footage, archives and lecture performances to disarticulate the hegemonic language of representation within Muslim communities and orientalist archives of colonialism and anthropology.