Adelita Husni-Bey's work focuses on complex questions about gender, race and class using collectivist and informal pedagogical models within the framework of urban studies. Her practice involves the analysis and counter-representation of the hegemonic ideology in Western society. Practicing as both an artist and a pedagogue she activates creative processes, such as role-playing, group undertakings and workshops with students, athletes, lawyers, activists and architects. As part of her methodology, she sets up situations and experiments where her collaborators understand their own relationship to the social and economic power of our present times. In the film Postcards from the Desert Island the artist documents a three week workshop with children from an experimental, self-run elementary public school in Paris, École Vitruve. The school was created in 1962 with the aim of experimenting with educational models based on co-operation and non-competitiveness. To test the potentiality of radical education, Husni-Bey, inspired by the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, asked a group of children aged between seven and ten years, to imagine their school's hall as a desert island and to relate themselves to the new territory. The film documents how the group of children organize and how they relate to problems and imagine a life without institutions or control, and where to draw the distinction between public and private. The work White Paper consists of an ongoing research into the relationship between the notion of property, legislation, and the right to housing under capitalism. It focuses on three countries: Egypt, The Netherlands and Spain. The first chapter White Paper: The Land was presented in Cairo at Beirut. It consists of a video-installation focused on the land rights of people affected by the mega-urban development Cairo 2050, a government-backed and privately funded metropolitan development plan of massive proportions, which threatens the livelihood of many informal settlements such as the neighbourhood of Gezirat al-Qursaya and Ramlet Boulaq. The second chapter White Paper: The Law was supported by Casco and it resulted in a legal document, the Convention on the Use of Space. The document was written through a series of public drafting meetings across the Netherlands in collaboration with squatters, lawyers, housing rights activists, tenants associations and the general public. For the last chapter of the project White Paper: The Imaginery the Convention travelled to Spain, to Móstoles neighbourhood in Madrid and it was hosted by CA2M. The project was carried on in various independent spaces and squatted social centres, where a number of public meetings were held to draw up the Spanish version of the text. The project is documented by a book, White Paper On Land, law And The Imaginary edited by Antonia Alampi, Binna Choi, Jens Maier-Rothe, Pablo Martínez. The Reading / La Seduta, was presented at the Italian Pavilion, curated by Cecilia Alemani, at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The artist organized a workshop in Mannahatta with a group of youngsters which consisted of meetings, discussions and theatre exercises inspired by the Theater of the Oppressed. The activities were focused on participants' connection to the environment and to the exploitation of the earth in relation to complex topics such as technology, use, value, threat and vulnerability. The workshops resulted in a film where the artist designed a tarot deck which was used as a performative device and an excuse as well for participants to talk about their own spiritual, colonial, and technological relationships to the earth and land. The installation was accompanied by a series of sculptures representing luminescent silicone hands.
2014 Il Principe, la Classe e lo Stato, Laveronica arte contemporanea, Modica, Sicily Agency – giochi di potere, NCTM e l’arte, Studio Legale NCTM, Milano
2013 Present Future, solo stand at Artissima, Artfair, Turin
2012 Playing Truant curated by Robert Leckie, Gasworks, London.
2012 Clays Lane Live Archive curated by Shama Khanna, Supplement Gallery, London.
2011 La Montagna Verde. Dove? Nel Deserto. Per Dove? Verso il Nulla, curated by Gabi Scardi, Viafarini-CareOf, Milan.
2011 Lethe, curated by Riccardo Lisi in various venues between Como, Porlezza and Dongo.
2010 DeadMouth, curated by Bruna Roccasalva, Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica.
Selected group exhibitions
Prizes and nominations
In 2016 Husni-Bey was the recipient of the Illy Prize for artists under 35 at the 16th Rome Quadriennale. In 2013 she was nominated for the Furla Foundation prize. In 2012 she won the Victor Pinchuk Foundation award in Kyiv, and she was awarded of the Young Collector’s Prize at the Rome Artfair, resulting in the acquisition of her work by the MAXXI Museum in Rome. In 2011 Husni-Bey won the Euromobil Bologna Artfair prize as ‘Best artist under 30’.
