Kunstinstituut Melly

The third edition of Tools for Conviviality continues our ongoing work to reimagine our ground-floor bookstore, café, and event space as an active, responsive environment for public life.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme create multimedia installations that engage the politics and poetics of anti-colonial resistance while tracing struggles against dispossession and oppression in Palestine. Working together since 2007, their practice combines moving image, sound, and text to explore how histories of resistance are carried across time.

Hajra Waheed is a multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, sound, sculpture, video, and installation. Her practice explores the nature of power, the human impact of displacement and incarceration, and the transformative possibilities of liberation struggles.

To draw, drawing from, drawing with, drawn to, to being drawn in, a draw–returning to the drawing board as a space to rethink and make new plans for a desired waywardness.

Drawing to leave a mark on paper, on fabric, on the ground […] drawing to create movement [...] drawing to extract [...] drawing in the game of chance [...] drawing to neither lose nor win [...] Departing from the extended sense of drawing, Draw Withdraw Redraw foregrounds recognition, resistance, and reinvention.

To draw withdraw redraw situates us in a state of ongoingness, returning to the same that is not the same. Movement seeks flight without yearning to land. There is constant negotiation, chance-taking and self-preservation, because we never left drawing… because drawing is where we can always pull from…To draw, drawing from, drawing with, drawn to, to being drawn in, a draw.