Youness Atbane

In a museum of contemporary art, an artist falls into a coma after an accident with one of the exhibited artworks – thus begins the new piece by the artist Youness Atbane, who lives and works between Berlin and Casablanca. During the coma-induced dream state of the protagonist, three performers and the artist himself contemplate the role of museums in the context of the Middle East and North Africa as well as the objects they exhibit.

In museums, curators, financiers and insurances companies create and reflect symbolic and aesthetic values – as well as (geo)political ones. In the Middle East and North Africa, museums also play a central role during wartime: In the 80s, snipers shot at civilians from the museum roofs in Beirut; in 2003, Western coalition partners spared local museums during the bombardment of Bagdad; in 2014, the IS stormed the museum of Mossul and shattered its artefacts.

The special role of the museum, its ambivalence towards politics, its power of defining an artist’s situation – those are the core concerns of Atbane. «Immortal Object for a Dead Artist» is the final part of a trilogy, the second part of which was awarded the ZKB Acknowledgment Prize in 2018. Atbane questions the status of objects, the meaning assigned to them and the identities they allegedly assume. Inspired by situationism and phenomenology, he again bestows objects with their inherent ambiguity. (zts)