Dear reader,

The public program of Massinissa Selmani: 1000 VILLAGES concluded last week with an online conversation between Massinissa Selmani and architect and scholar Samia Henni. This marked the end of several weeks of presentations and conversations in relation to the exhibition. Previous participants include Joanna Lombard, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Emma Dominguez Martinez, Jonas Dahlberg and the curator of the exhibition Natasha Marie Llorens.

The exhibition 1000 VILLAGES investigates the structure of history in Algeria and the 70s and the urbanism plans to create a new model for society. As Natasha Marie Llorens writes: “Massinissa Selmani’s work is fundamentally concerned with the structure of contemporary history, or how people make sense of the events they are living through. The artist’s aesthetic process is elliptical, yet rigorous: he sifts through anecdotal language, faded, and idiosyncratically categorized newspapers, poetry, philosophy, and rumors. Selmani is an artist who draws: the medium’s modesty mirrors his dedication to the experience of those who stand outside the grand narratives of history, or adjacent to the centers of power”.

As an endnote to the exhibition we want to bring to your attention Naima Morelli’s piece on Massinissa Selmani for Flaunt Magazine.

Sunday 15 December is the last day to visit the exhibition during regular opening hours. The exhibition is then open by appointment until 22 December, at: booking@indexfoundation.se

Read more about the exhibition here:
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The director(s) of Index conclude every year with a personal letter reflecting on the past year’s exhibitions, public programs, educational projects and other important moments of the institution.

“Time is out of joint. Not just time as the times we live in – violently disrupted as they are; saturated with war, genocide, and fascist advances – but time itself, the very progression of it. At Index, we’ve spent this year trying to understand these fluctuations: time vertiginously sped up as we’ve raced through algorithmic video feeds, guided by Index Teen Advisory Board in their search for clues on future institutional use of moving image, and time dislocated as we’ve trailed the meticulous movements of artistic research parsing structurally neglected material. In that research, we’ve seen history refuse linearity, mixing progress with regress, adding nuance to polarized notions”.

Read the full letter here:
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