Meeting Points 8: Both sides of the curtain

The exhibition is the eighth edition of Meeting Points – a multidisciplinary contemporary arts project that takes place every two years in several cities in Europe and the Arab world. Meeting points is a place to imagine and interrogate models for the production and presentation of contemporary arts, developed through research in the Arab world. Inspired by German artist Oskar Schlemmer’s experiments with art at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, Meeting Points aims at inventing ways for new kinds of art to be created and shared between artists and publics. Many of Schlemmer’s ideas at the school were developed through social events where costumes and choreographies were put to practical use and tested. It is this logic of considering art as a form of enthusiastic developing and sharing of ideas—an interaction that creates a community—that is shaping Meeting Points into an expedition through different sites and times. Both sides of the curtain began in Cairo last May, moved on to Brussels in December, and now arrives in Beirut for the spring.