Curated By: Nur Shkembi | Date: 16 February 2018
eleven is a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers. The collective aims to establish an independent creative platform from which the alternative narratives and autonomous voice of Muslim artists can be expressed, shared and experienced. As a nationwide collective of creative thinkers and practitioners, eleven uniquely straddles contemporary art, academia and grass roots community engagement with the intent to amplify the intellectual, robust and dynamic conversations about Muslim artists in Australia. This is articulated through the member’s respective art practice, curatorial practice, writing, academic research and community outreach strategies.
For the collective, contemporary art offers a functional duality; firstly, within the arts there are the means to disrupt the hegemonic discourse whilst interrogating issues of identity, religiosity, politics, gender, colour, race and class within the binary of contemporary culture and tradition. Secondly, it makes provision for the agency of the artist’s personal narratives to elucidate, inspire and transcend the ordinary. The collective also draws on the variegated perspectives of the human condition to implicate the experiential and universal forms of communication as shared through the arts; including the spiritual to the political, the personal, domestic and the mundane as it is being played out in the current socio-political climate.
Eleven engages the following artists and writers: