‘Homes and Ruins’

BOZAR and the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux will host a discussion event on the theme of home, mobility and liminal identities. The event reflects Finnish artist Anssi Pulkkinen’s mobile installation Street View (Reassembled), currently occupying the streetscape outside Bozar at Rue Ravenstein. Pulkkinen’s installation consists of remains of a ruined Syrian house, transported to Europe in Spring 2017.

A ruin is simultaneously an end and a beginning, guiding its viewer to experience time and space. The migration of people is controlled furiously around the world, while at the same time the flow of both illicit and legal trade in and out of a country in a state of war is constant. Street View (Reassembled) approaches not only the process of the formation of value and function, but also the utopias and realities of human mobility.
The artwork is commissioned by the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux as part of Mobile Home 2017, a joint project of the Finnish cultural and scientific institutes in Paris, Berlin and London that considers home and the meaning of home. The project is part of the programme of the centenary of Finland’s independence.

During the event finger foods will be served by Our House.  A new Brussels based project that gives refugees a platform to express their talents.

Moderator: Chris Keulemans

Chris Keulemans was until September 2014 artistic director of the Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam. He grew up in Baghdad, Iraq. In 1984, he founded the literary bookshop Perdu in Amsterdam, and during the nineties he worked at De Balie, Centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam; first as a curator, later as director. He has published both fiction and nonfiction books, and has written numerous articles on art, social movements, migration, music, cinema and war for national newspapers. He has travelled extensively in order to study art after a crisis in cities such as Beirut, Jakarta, Algiers, Prishtina, Sarajevo, Tirana, New York, New Orleans and Ramallah, visiting many talented artists. For his work in Amsterdam, Keulemans received the honorary pin of the city council, and was appointed district-chroniquer of the Northern part of town.

Guest speaker: Myrna Nabhan

Myrna Nabhan is a Belgian political analyst, freelance journalist and blogger at the Huffington Post, as well as an independent filmmaker. Born in Brussels to a Moroccan mother and a Syrian father, she has lived between Brussels and Damascus. In 2016, Nabhan founded the Cham Consulting Group, a political risk consultancy focusing on strategic sectors in the MENA region. With her first film, Damascus (2017), she wants to “give a voice to all those victims we don't hear enough about, to those who go on with their lives and keep this Syria alive, to a society exhausted by an endless war but desperately trying to preserve glimmers of hope”.

Guest speaker: Aleksi Malmberg

Aleksi Malmberg is director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in Brussels, a foundation focusing on arts, society and cultural dialogue between Finland and the Benelux. As the initiator of Mobile Home(less) project as part of Finland 100 years programme, the institute commissioned Anssi Pulkkinen’s art work Street View (Reassembled), an installation based on ruins of a Syrian home and presented in front of BOZAR 22.6.-20.7.2017. Aleksi Malmberg has previously worked broadly as programmer, producer and writer in the field of culture and arts, for example as head of programme for the Helsinki Festival and executive director for socially engaged Our Festival in Järvenpää.