Painting + Printmaking Professor Rola Khayyat Co-Curates “Ellipsis, folds of memory”

“Ellipsis” brought together artists, filmmakers, and scholars from the Middle East and the Balkans

Painting + Printmaking Assistant Professor Rola Khayyat was the co-curator of “Ellipsis, folds of memory”, the first iteration of a larger curatorial project between Beirut, Lebanon and Sarajevo, Bosnia that recently convened in Sarajevo for a series of talks, workshops, performances and screenings. 

“Ellipsis” brought together artists, filmmakers, and scholars from the Middle East and the Balkans whose works probe, speculate upon, and reclaim archives and narratives in the context of the intimate, hidden, left-over, displaced, suspended and overwritten. 

The project began at the Kamen artist residency in Bosnia in 2021, when Rola and co-curator Koštana Banović, hailing from Lebanon and Bosnia respectively, met, and by virtue of their countries’ shared conflicted pasts, together began to explore the collaborative capacities of thinking through possible futures. 

The program was structured around three thematic modules: the first journeying through ships and the sea, the second ruminating on ruins and ruination, and the third activating personal narratives. 

Moving between material and metaphorical objects, “Ellipsis, folds of memory” investigated what produces them, what defines them, and how they impact individuals and cities on levels from the visual and formal to the political and literary.

“Ellipsis” is funded by VCUarts Qatar, and is in partnership with the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Manifesto Gallery, Kuma International, VII academy, Atelje Figure, artTrace Foundation, and Kamen Foundation.

This is the first installment of “Ellipsis”. A follow up event is planned for Beirut in 2024.