More than 400 applications from all over the world have been sent to CDA-Projects Grant for Artistic Research and Production-2011 and the grant has been awarded by the unanimous decision of the invited jury members Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Pauline J. Yao and İz Öztat (CDA-Projects Grant Manager) to Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti for their project titled "The International Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine". The jury also decided to make an honorary mention of the projects proposed by Beatrice Catanzaro, Burak Delier, Four Faces of Omarska, Labaorotorio 060, Önder Özengi, Erich Pick, Orit Ben Shitrit, Hong-An Truong, Erc van Hove and Amir Yatziv.

Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti
The International Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine

The International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine was inaugurated on March 21st, 1978, in Beirut and open to the public until April 5th of that year. In addition, a two-month long workshop for local emerging artists was organized alongside it with some of the international artists invited to Beirut. Organized by the Unified Information Office of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the show included approximately 200 works by 197 international artists from approximately 29 countries. The initiative was inspired from the Salvador Allende Resistance Museum in Exile, undertaken by Chilean artists in Paris in 1973 after the Pinochet coup. The works were donated with the aim of constituting a seed collection for a museum of international modern art in solidarity with Palestine, in exile.

In comparison with large-scale exhibitions and biennials organized by neighboring Arab states, the International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine was remarkable in scale, scope and international outreach. The fact that it took place in Beirut, in the midst of the civil war, makes it furthermore hard to imagine how it could have been executed. For Palestinians, it represented a stupendous feat, the recognition of world-acclaimed artists of the righteousness of their revolution. It also marks a crystallization of the mobilization of the solidarity network of the international revolutionary left. The works were housed in a building used by the PLO, in 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Beirut, it was bombed to rubble. The institutional archival traces of the exhibition were destroyed.

The research project will reconstitute the story of the exhibition, pieced from unearthing documents from archives of artists and participants as well as recorded testimony. It seeks to explore the network of solidarity the international, anti-imperialist left, as well as articulations of political engagements in the 1960s and 1970s. The project will ultimately take form as a staging of the exhibition in documents and other materials, as well as a publication that will map and reflect critically on the intricacies of the investigation and the process of research.

Honorary Mentions

Beatrice Catanzaro (works and lives between Nablus and Jerusalem)
A Needle in The Binding: An Archive for The Prisoner's Section of The Nablus Municipality Library

The prisoner's book section of the Nablus Municipality Library hosts approximately 8000 books read by Palestinian political prisoners between 1972 and 1995 and 870 handwritten notebooks. These were part of the political detainees' libraries of two Israeli prisons in the West Bank in Nablus and surrounding. Both jails were closed down in the aftermaths of the Oslo Agreement and books and notebooks were collected by the Palestinian Authorities and donated to the Municipality Library in 1995.
A needle in the binding - an archive for The Prisoner's Section of the Nablus Municipality Library, consist of generating an on-line open archive mapping the narratives of ex-prisoners addressing their personal relation with books; in order to unfold the multiple dimensions that the production of knowledge (and informal educational systems) has in spaces of confinement, through the display of its witnesses: the books and the persons.

Burak Delier (works and lives in Istanbul)
Futures, Derivatives & Other Options

By conducting a statistical and mathematical analysis of a series of Rodchenko and Pollock works, a "Pollock Code" and a "Rodchenko Code" will be created, which can then output "derivatives" of Pollock and Rodchenko paintings, as well as, perhaps, creating a Rodchenko version of a certain Pollock painting and vice versa. The aim is to conduct a speculative research on the use of statistical and mathematical abstraction, extrapolation of dream and nightmare scenarios that financial capitalism -what one could call the economical model of hyper-modernism- relies on to manage the present day.

Four Faces of Omarska (the group was formed in 2010 in Serbia)
Knowledge Production as A Common Good

Four Faces of Omarska project questions the strategies of memorial production from the perspective of those whose knowledge and experience has been subjugated and excluded from public remembrance and public history. How to think the memorial from the present perspective, revealing continuities and discontinuities between all three epochs of the Omarska mining complex and exposing the continuation of segregation politics of concentration camp Omarska from 1992 to this very day, by different means. The project is constituted of networks of human relations, experiences, opinions and discussions on the three eras and four faces of the Omarska mine:

1. The Omarska mining complex, surface mining site and metal deposits in Bosnia and Herzegovina during socialism;
2. The Omarska camp, a place of mass killings and torture during the 1990s' wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia;
3. The Omarska mining complex, owned by the multinational company Arcelor Mittal;
4. Omarska as the filming location of the historical ethno-blockbuster Sveti Georgije ubiva azdahu [St. George Slays the Dragon], a recent Serbian film production.

Laboratorio 060 (Lourdes Morales and Javier Toscano)
(works and lives between Mexico City and Paris)
La Causa

A research on labour culture, precarity and the possibilities of artistic action. We are currently developing a framework to disseminate practical information from the labour field into the public domain.
www.lab060.org

Önder Özengi (works and lives in Istanbul)
Like a Rolling Stone: Labor in Contemporary Art

The research project mainly focuses on the notion of "work/labor" in a broad sense; and in particular, its emergent "new" appearance in the practices of people working in the field of contemporary art in Turkey. The research aims to discuss the process of institutional turn in recent years through its relation and influence to artistic practice, the working conditions of art producers/workers and the livelihood economies that emerged in contemporary art field.

Erich Pick
Tautological

Tautological deals, in terms of a video installation, with the material based and conceptual processes of the (re-)production of space, based on two "protagonists": the architect Bruno Taut and the city of Istanbul. Particularly, I'm interested in Bruno Taut's socialist and utopic ideas, positions that are suggested through his architectonic designs, fictional urban planning, rapturous texts, and stage plays. In the city of Istanbul I'm interested in the unplanned development of the last decades and the current municipal and institutionalized remedies.

Orit Ben-Shitrit
VIVE LE CAPITAL

Pascal works on Wall Street and surpasses greed to become a prominent philanthropist. Greed surpasses Pascal because he works on Wall Street. VIVE LE CAPITAL is a deliberation on a love/hate relationship with money. The plot pirouettes between the protagonist's soliloquy in French, and two dancers who respond in various transgressive behaviors. The three of them travel to the time of Cosimo De Medici and visit the roots of our banking system; they also pay homage to the French Revolution by embodying John Law, the first Ponzi schemer in history who caused the bankruptcy of Louis the 14th's monarchy.

Eric van Hove (lives and works in Brussels)
V12 Laraki

Pondering the economic and social dynamic between the European & African industry, the V12 Laraki is a project which will take place at the Dar Al-Ma'mûn artist residency in Marrakesh. It aims at de-constructing a Mercedes V12 engine down to every single component (around 200 of them) before duplicating each element bit by bit in over 50 different local materials with the help of 35 master craftsmen from various regions in Morocco. These copied elements are then re-assembled into another V12 engine which composes the final piece.
www.transcri.be and http://dam-arts.org

Hong-An Truong
A Measure of Remorse

Using structuralist filmmaking as an allegory for the relationship between political history and subjective experience, A Measure of Remorse interrogates two events: the making of WWII Nanking atrocities into an historical event, and the 2004 suicide of Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, which brought overdue attention to Japanese military atrocities committed against the Chinese in WWII, and erupted in controversy when the Japanese scholars challenged the Chang's research. The installation will include archival footage, photographic images, as well as newly performed and filmed scenes, using digital video, 16mm film, and 35mm slide projection. The project will result in a multi-channel installation that examines the performativity of historical events and the production of historical knowledge simultaneous with its cultural and institutional repression.

Amir Yatziv (lives and works in Berlin)
Between Art and the Criminal World

By investigating the representations of art institutions by using the criminal world, this project will establish a firm link between art and crime. It's no wonder that the topic of art theft is a perfect meeting point of these two worlds.