In March 2013, Tarek Atoui presented WITHIN at the Sharjah Biennial 11 (Sharjah - United Arab Emirats). WITHIN has been developed out the conversation and collaboration of Atoui with Al Amal School for the Deaf and with the support of the Sharjah Art Foundation. WITHIN was a 3 months long composition that started in January 2013 with a dialogue between Tarek Atoui, Council (curators Sandra Terdjman and Gregory Castera), and the teachers and students of Al Amal. These discussions informed the instrumentation and the structure of the composition, and the multiple roles that Al Amal and its students played in the piece, made it a rich platform of encounters and knowledge production. The online essay published by Council out of this experience: The 3rd part of WITHIN was Tacet, a research platform set up by Council who invited Basem Abdel Ghaffar (special need educator, UAE/Egypt), Hansel Bauman (architect, USA), Bless (designers, France/Germany), Hasan Hujairi (musician, Bahrain), Wendy Jacob (artist, USA), Jeffrey Mansfield (designer, USA), Inigo Wilkins (philosopher, UK). Tacet began with an exploration of deaf’s perception of sound which led to a think tank organized in Sharjah, on the diversity of listening abilities: anticipation, tactile sound, visual noise, gestures and the multimodal nature of hearing. This research is published as an online essay and continues to inspire new artistic productions. http://www.houseofcouncil.org/en/inquiries/30_tacet_or_the_cochlear_vertigo

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