Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks

The exhibition Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks at the Institute for African Studies was the final chapter of the  Meeting Points 7 festival of contemporary art.

The project, organized in collaboration with the Young Arab Theatre Fund, presents the works of twenty artists at the dynamic research institute. The venue of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for African Studies does not easily correspond to the requirements of the “white cube” gallery space, and the organizers were faced with the task of avoiding associations with the symbolic capital of this institution, to ensure that the exhibition did not look like a nostalgic celebration of international solidarity during the anti-colonial liberation struggle.

The title of the project is taken from a quote from The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the book by philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon which was written as a reflection on the Algerian Revolution. Ten thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks was conceptually designed as a dialogue whose non-linear parts proceed, contradicting and completing each other.

The exhibition openly acknowledges its own status as a temporary intruder in academic institutions and attempts to reconcile anti-colonial issues with the contemporary class struggle. The exposition, curated by the What, How & for Whom (WHW) curators symbolically takes a stance against the process of “accumulation by dispossession”, described by David Harvey, the restoration of colonialist relations, the renewal of the stereotypes and rhetoric of the Cold War era, the neo-imperialism of transnational and international organisations, the imperial ambitions of states as they play out in the contemporary geopolitical constellation.