Selected Research Projects 2008 - 2013

These Projects are established as a platform, concentrating on the border between visual arts and social fields. They can take the form of an audio-visual observation, an artistic and scientific exploration. The goal is to explore the manifold approaches of interaction and interconnection between these genres. I include Installation, lecture, Performance, Grafic, Video, Photography or film screenings.

ARTS

INTERDISCIPLINARY

RESEARCH

LABORATORY

by Youssef Tabti


 

By Belinda Grace Gardner


“As a critic and curator based in Hamburg, Germany, I have followed Youssef’s work, which encompasses a wide range of media, for a number of years and have written about his soundscapes, installations, and video pieces, and have introduced these in the context of various exhibitions. What continues to fascinate me about his both complex and poetic approach as an artist are the sensitivity and intensity with which he addresses and investigates current and historical social and political questions, often conflating issues of the cultures that have formed his aesthetics and his view of our world in his work. Born in Paris as the son of a French mother and an Algerian father, and currently residing in the North German harbor city of Hamburg, Youssef conjoins his Arab and his Western heritage in the themes he explores. His dual socialization has given him a unique, polyvalent perception that incorporates a simultaneous ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ awareness, which serves as a rich, multi-level basis for his art practice.

It is the substance of real life and the complex and many-voiced poetics derived from people’s yearnings, wishes, and hopes that come alive in Youssef’s work, which make the latter simultaneously so exciting and moving. For this reason, among many other aspects, I remain keenly interested in Youssef’s aesthetic approach that is always acutely and literally tuned-in to the fields of his exploration. The artist’s inherently ethical, profoundly magical, and highly engaged work deserves to find a larger international audience, as does its subtlety that might at times be overheard in the clamor of more aggressive approaches rampant in today’s art scene.

I thus wholeheartedly support Youssef Tabti’s work, which its uniqueness and politically charged beauty always touches upon questions that not only address his individual existential sensibility, but questions relevant to the human condition as such.”



Belinda Grace Gardner is a lecturer in the department of Theory and History who takes English-language teaching events. Born in 1960 in Durham, North Carolina, USA, she studied literature and linguistics at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She lives in Hamburg, working as a freelance art critic and author, editor, curator and tutor.