The artistic and curatorial practices seminar proposes to engage critically with the present-day global neoliberal regime of production of excess and conditions of extremeness, with a focus on the reality of the African continent using the economies of natural resources as its investigative thread. Hunger Incorporated refers to the right to basic sustenance and the threat of lack of access to nutrition, the hunger for resources resulting from exponential economic growth, hunger as constant craving and the relentless inability for satiation, hunger as blind ambition, hunger as the impetus for compensating a lack or lag, hunger as compulsive accumulation and the stand-in for utopia, and hunger as one of the allegorical and sublimated manifestations of anxiety. It also refers to the market-driven economic regime’s systemic production of needs, conditioning and control within the logic of neo-liberal capital, from the anxiety of the quotidian relationship to the real, to the looming superlative promise of dystopia. While the economies of extraction, processing and transport of oil, coal, metals and minerals have been the constitutional marrow of twentieth and twenty-first century capitalism, their economies have been notably abstracted from visibility, representation and narrative, rigs and mines are often cordoned with stringent policing. The seminar will plumb this constellation of questions, themes and representations through a series of lecture by economists, curators, artists and art historians, workshops conducted by artists and filmmakers, film screenings and exhibition reviews.

About Rasha Salti

Rasha Salti is an independent film and visual arts curator and writer, working and living in Beirut (Lebanon). She co-curated The Road to Damascus, with Richard Peña, a retrospective of Syrian cinema that toured worldwide (2006), and Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s until Now, with Jytte Jensen (2010-2012) showcased at the MoMA in New York. She was one of co-curators of the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial for the Arts, in 2011. She co-curated with Kristine Khouri Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the Exhibition of International Art for Palestine (Beirut, 1978), at the MACBA in 2015 and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in 2016. Salti edited Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Filmmakers (2006, ArteEast and Rattapallax Press), Beirut Bereft, The Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict, a collaboration with photographer Ziad Antar (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2010), and I Would Have Smiled: A Tribute to Myrtle Winter-Chaumeny co-edited with Issam Nassar, in 2010. In co-curation with Koyo Kouoh, Salti is working on Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, a three-year research, exhibition and publication project.