Chahrazad Zahi

Zahi, Chahrazad.jpg
Chahrazad Zahi, Independent Curator and Researcher, Marrakech, Morocco.

Conference Report. December 2024

While writing this report in my living room in Marrakech, Guatemalan artist Edgar Calel's opening question, "Has the sun risen in your heart?", lingers on my mind as I make sense of the (mostly undecipherable) notes I scribbled hastily in my notebook during the three-day CIMAM 2024 Annual Conference in Los Angeles.

The Marrakech, Chi Xot, and Los Angeles triangle is one of many geographical entanglements that interwove throughout the conference. The keynote speeches and discussions traversed contrasting scales, shifting from local narratives and community-focused initiatives in Brussels, Tamale, and Guatemala City to the institutional frameworks of New York, Bilbao, Turin, and Munich. Together, these diverse contexts highlighted the pressing question of the conference: how can museums and cultural practices sustain the needs and realities of their localities? The conference unfolded across three institutional hubs, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and was a much-needed diverse gathering of "feelers and thinkers" (to borrow Eungie Joo's words) echoing the shifting and assembled nature of Los Angeles itself. ––A city of overlapping histories and transformation, which, I must note, I learned much about thanks to my tour bus companion and curator, LA-based Ceci Moss, who described its curious past as a sanitarium capital and its troubled history with urban oil drilling––

The following remarks are admittedly subjectively selected and scattered and cannot fully capture the complexities of the authors' interventions. For the inevitable loss of depth in this recounting, I can only apologize.

*On Day 1, in his keynote address, Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford reminded us, "We are not coming to the table with the same tools (...) And yet, there is a threat of violence in everything we do." These statements challenge us to confront our complicity and our tools–no matter our good intentions, positionality or legitimacy to discuss the subject matter– all while reckoning with the systems we strive to reimagine and make sustainable. Presenting a fresh take on the historical institution's relation to collection preservation, Cecilia Winter framed sustainability as relational rather than merely material, questioning our reliance on scientific evidence and conservation risk-assessments in driving change. Winter, alongside some of the speakers on Day 1, rallied around challenging the notion of the museum as a repository of static archives and reconstructing them as living ecosystems. "Preservation is deferred access", she stated. This temporal reframing deeply resonated and inspired a scenario of a museum where the objects are not solely approached by scientific measurements but are participants in the shared futures they seek to shape. The subsequent architectural keynotes of the first day allowed for conceiving the museum as a breathing part of the landscape. Michael Maltzan's newly completed Quamajuq in Winnipeg challenges the autonomy of the museum and the fortress-like institutional spatial structure. Sara Zewde, through her work on the Dia Beacon site, calls to imagine a museum where stewardship prevails over the dominion of land, objects, and narratives. Zewde favors openness with the landscape itself and calls for a building of a museum "of the land." Both architects rethink the traditional paradigm of an ever-expanding museum, and both insist on incorporating indigenous design and facilitating native cultural expressions. Yet, can we think of this inclusion in a way that is not extractive of indigenous knowledge? How to reconsider a relationship between the museum and indigenous cultural practices? These questions were set to be further developed on Day 3.

*The tension between locality and openness to the rest of the world surfaced strongly on Day 2, starting with Zita Cobb's touching personal account of her upbringing in Fogo Island, Newfoundland, Canada. Cobb presented an economic model in which tourism is in service to the community, and not the other way around. Quoting Gill-Chin Lim, she insisted on the necessity of creating a global network of intensely local places. This view challenges business models that steamroll the earth, its culture and the "mind-numbing sameness that we're doing to ourselves". Centering the place itself, asking it what it needs, with the intent to properly develop "the things that we have and the things that we love", is what leads to a world of "specific and joyful places". Soon after, Mai Abu ElDahab pulled us from the bubble of our reflective note-taking to the urgency of a world set on fire. She reflected on the relevance of sustainability in the face of persistent crises and the menacing silence of our global institutions. How to think of the future of the place in which she/one operates when the reality of Arab suffering is denied in the institutional consciousness? This found echo in the closing remarks the next day, where Travel Grantees urged to bring to the table responsive curatorial strategies in a time of crisis. A hyper-locality that is deeply rooted and sustaining to the community yet open to the world was again the focus of the conversation between Ibrahim Mahama and curator Yesomi Umolu. I was fortunate to hear the artist himself comment on a set of recurring tropes in his projects that oftentimes elude commentators: precarity and temporality. His presentation of his projects in Northern Ghana spoke to these themes and their counterparts in material culture, communal life and architecture. The industrial ruins of the 20th century were the starting point of his talk. Once symbols of progress and modernity, they stand today as relics of broken promises and economic relapse. Against these failed centralized visions, Mahama's insistence on the hyper-local (building The Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in Tamale, Ghana, for and by the community) establishes a methodological link between his public installations and the sustainable emancipatory social practice he proposes. Much was told about an artist's role in affirming collective rights and, indeed, challenging the conventions of the public and private. This view was complemented by Andrea Fraser. Drawing from her ambivalent position as both an artist and a member of the board of directors of the ICA Los Angeles, Fraser gave a compelling invitation to governance structures to include artists and other stakeholders to re-articulate the museum's mission. Only then can we ensure the museum's long-term sustainability.

* If we were to understand sustainability in its clinical meaning (merely in terms of environmental practices and toolkits), I thought to myself, this conference challenges the narrative of belatedness associated with my locale. For once, operating from my context, I'm at the forefront of sustainability, trained to be efficient and resourceful despite the lack of supporting infrastructure. This thought was challenged as I encountered the interventions of Candice Hopkins, Pablo José Ramírez, and Edgar Calel, who were not settling for platitudes. Sustainability, we were shown, is not a checklist but an embodied practice that demands constant negotiation of ethics and values and a reactivation of the traditions of the custodians of the land. I was grateful to witness Candice Hopkins' talk, where she shared how we can learn from Indigenous knowledge when thinking about the practice and methodologies of curating. "The thing called the indigenous knowledge," Hopkins observed, "is the point where the logic of colonialism comes to crisis." A line of thoughts that led to questioning the institutional focus on growth, which she called fundamentally "antithetical to life." Hers was a call to make space for Indigenous curatorial practices, which, as a result, has the power to transform institutions. In a series of poignant statements, her closing remarks warned us about the dominant trend of inclusivity and how it runs the risk of exploiting Indigenous knowledge. She highlighted how Indigenous communities are often treated as "anonymous consultants in times of crisis" and urged us to consider them in a way that benefits the practitioners and upholds their agency. The presentation of Pablo José Ramírez further commented on these points, drawing from José Esteban Muñoz's concept of the Brown Commons. He unpacked what he terms "a shift from representational frameworks to strategies of "performative enunciation" and collective commonality". The Brown Commons as activated by Ramirez highlight connections, moving in between worlds, while still acknowledging specificity and questioning simplified models of identity representation. It found echo in Edgar Calel's projects on ancestral rituals. His practice illustrates the "performative enunciation" discussed by Ramirez, where repeated flux of rituals generates an enunciative, temporarily fixed stability of position and identity. Calel's project with Ultraviolet Projects and Tate titled Ru k' ox k' ob'el Jun Ojer Naoj (The echo of an ancient knowledge) established a historical precedent, as they reached an agreement in which the institution took custody of the artwork for 13 years as opposed to acquiring it. This talk brought us the form of performative enunciation that the ritual brings forth: a position where a crisis and its resolution are articulated, non-violently but nonetheless not passively, in an act of active transformation. A resistance to commodification which illustrates the radical potential of exhibiting brownness as a site of reparative rupture rather than containment.

The closing remarks returned to the themes of the three days, affirming that "working at the pace of trust' (Hopkins' invitation) is central to imagining sustainable, local models for the museum. They underlined the courage required to confront inertia, and envision a museum practice grounded in relational ethics.

As I left Los Angeles, I found myself mostly introspective about my research and my practice, shaped by my 'moving in between worlds'. A life-giving and unsettling sun has indeed risen in my heart, Edgar Calel, thank you for asking. The questions raised over these three days were not easy ones, nor were they meant to be. But perhaps that is the point: sustainability must be a guiding ethos and not a hollow promise. I am left with new questions to pursue. How to advocate for an intensely connected and yet hyper-locality? How do we direct institutions and decision-makers to move beyond the seduction of unchecked growth toward a practice embedded in the commons? This, I think, is the work: to trust in the collective, to keep asking, and to move slowly, at the speed of trust.


Biography

Chahrazad Zahi (b. 1993) is a researcher and independent curator currently pursuing her Ph.D. in art history at Boston University. She holds a master’s degree (2016) in Arts Management from Audencia School of Management in France. Chahrazad's international exposure extends to a research fellowship at Musée Eugène Delacroix in Paris and a stint at Sotheby's auction house in London.

Chahrazad's recent roles reflect her commitment to art education. She served as the co-director at malhoun art space in Marrakech, contributing to the cultural fabric of the city of Marrakech. Between 2020 and 2022, she engaged as a Researcher and Teaching Fellow at Boston University, offering seminars on contemporary art. Past roles include her position as Arts Programme Manager at the British Council in Rabat and as an Arts Project Collaborator at the Foundation for the Development of Contemporary African Culture in Casablanca. Since 2016, Chahrazad has engaged in curatorial projects. Noteworthy among her contributions is her tenure as an Art Curator at L'Atelier 21 art gallery in Casablanca in 2017. Her curatorial projects, like "The promise of a trace" at malhoun art space, “Distance” at the 1-54 London, “My Marock Stars” at A21, “The Passage” at the Sale Medersa or "Gâta Bantu" at CDA Gallery, reflect her dedication to migratory themes.

In 2021, Chahrazad designed and led curatorial workshops entitled “What do we do with theory when working from inside the marble pillars?” in Tahanaout, Morocco, which aimed to reflect on decolonial curatorial processes beyond the illustrative, didactic reference to colonialism. More recently, she facilitated curatorial workshops within the framework of Le Grand Atelier at UM6P University in Morocco.

Her involvement in global organizations like CIMAM, AICA, and AMCA, showcases her commitment to contributing to the broader dialogue on art and culture and promoting a nuanced understanding of African art histories.

Chahrazad Zahi, Independent Curator and Researcher, Marrakech, Morocco, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation, Los Angeles.