Arab art biennial to showcase work of Rodchenko and Osmolovsky

A contemporary art biennial that focuses on the Arab World will be showcasing artworks from two prominent Russian artists — Anatoly Osmolovsky and Alexander Rodchenko — at this year’s event. Despite starting out as a presentation of art from the Middle East in 2004, Meeting Points Festival has expanded its remit in the wake of the Arab uprisings. This year organisers have decided to exhibit art that either contributes to change or helps redefine the existing social and economic order.

Moscow-based Osmolovsky began his career as a writer before turning to performance art in the early Nineties as a way of protesting against the government, the judiciary, police and other powers that be. Rodchenko, who died in 1956 at the age of 64, emerged in the period that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and is credited with being one of the key exponents of constructivism. Several years later, he denounced traditional painting as dead in favour of poster design, photography and film, which he declared to be free from bourgeois subjectivity.

As well as art and performance, the roving festival will host lectures in a number of cities from September 2013 to June 2014 including Zagreb, Antwerp, Hong Kong, Moscow, Beirut, Cairo and Vienna. This year’s title, Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks, is from Franz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth (1961) about Algeria’s liberation from French colonial rule.