Raafat Majzoub’s project will open at the Mills Gallery
Artist Raafat Majzoub’s exhibition, “Grounds,” will hold its opening reception and curatorial walkthrough at Boston Center for the Arts on Jan. 21, from 6-9 p.m. According to a press release, Grounds “brings together a variety of Majzoub’s excerpts to weave a conversation about
intimacy and collaboration, and inspire a meditation on collective futures with exhibition
visitors. It presents grounds for the validity of the artist’s fiction, and creates new grounds
for shared realities to come.” It will be on display at the Mills Gallery from Jan. 15 through Feb. 20.
Beginning in 2012, Majzoub has been developing “an autobiography of another Arab world” called “The Perfumed Garden.” Excerpts from it have been published through film, audio, visual, text, and as public installations.
The work is “an act of claiming power,” for Majzoub. Grounds will be drawing from The Perfurmed Garden and serves as “an invitation to reconsider truth as multiple. To change. To engage. And to share. It presents grounds for the validity of our collective fictions and creates new grounds for shared realities to come.”
In a statement, Majzoub commented on his process as an artist:
I’m critical of how we use the terms reality and fiction. I do not see them as opposites. Reality is a form of fiction that has been activated by power structures that benefit from it. Power structures decide what you think is real. My work in fiction is positioned in this reality–making process. I am not only interested in the imagination, but also in the reification of alternate possibilities. Writing becomes a form of architecture. And fiction can be seen as a tool for collective worldmaking that is intimate, speculative and political.
Shira Laucharoen is a reporter based in Boston. She currently serves as the assistant director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. In the past she has written for Sampan newspaper, The Somerville Times, Scout Magazine, Boston Magazine, and WBUR.
