Karem Ibrahim i Linda Pollack
25th & 27th of June 2011
7:00 PM
Modelarnia & Wyspa Institute of Art


Everything is Exceptional is a performative participatory exchange experience based on language, using text, demands, utterances and slogans emerging from the movements of social and political transformation across the globe. Weather it is derived from Gdansk, Tunis, Cairo, Madison, Philadelphia, Congo, Santiago or elsewhere, the power of expressed voice and its capacity to resonate beyond the individual is a profound phenomenon.

The articulation of words from one voice to another, and their receivership and recitation by another voice implies the presence of voice signature. Every voice has its own signature that effects meaning and outcome, and how content is perceived. This project explores the experience of reciting words in an unfamiliar language, and the shift in sound and meaning resulting from the layering of different voices.

Everything is Exceptional launches on On Saturday, at WYSPA, where you are invited to contribute content from a political movement which originated in your native language, and you are invited to recite contributions by others in a language unfamiliar to you. Saturday will also be the launch of the Everything is Exceptional facebook page, where people around the world can participate in this exchange experience.


Linda Pollack, is an artist and organizer interested in the culture of civic life and how exchange takes root and grows. In Amsterdam she worked for the European Cultural Foundation where her focus was developing projects addressing the war in former Yugoslavia, and arts mobility between east and west Europe. In the United States she founded and directs the projects Habeas Lounge and My Daily Constitution - mobile spaces that foster dialogue about law and shared civic life. She has served as the Freedom to Write Director for PEN International, and has catalyzed a short term theater project that brought the likes of Pakistani playwright Shahid Nadeem and Indonesian poet Goenawan Mohamad to Los Angeles, as an antidote to the dearth of exchange in a post 9/11 climate. She has a degree in Financial Analysis from the Smead School of Business of Penn State University, and Interdisciplinary Art from the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht the Netherlands and University of California San Diego. This summer she launches the project "Everything is Exceptional" at WYSPA Center for Art in Gdansk Poland, in collaboration with Karem Ibrahim.

Karem Ibrahim,London-based artist, born in Cairo, Egypt, 1969, studied in Cairo (art academy) and at UEL and the Slade School of Art (UCL) in London. Participated in national and international art shows and events. Works in a multitude of mediums.Central to my work are my own observations and experiences.Value, in both its theoretical and tangible meanings, is one of the most important issues that I deal with: the way things are seen and used, how fashions are followed and how things are viewed, priced, consumed and discarded. My work also touches on the relationship between the work and the viewer, engulfment, alienation and dislocation within a specific context. Just as my experience of Egypt forms the greater part of my visual and social archive, many of the ideas I am currently exploring come from my present surroundings, namely London. However, I am still stimulated by issues which are of great relevance to the Middle East, such as inclusion and exclusion, borders and crossings, authority and bureaucracy, the dynamics of unequal power, arbitrariness and co-ercion, resistance to power, uneasiness, entrapment, tightness and comfort, availability of space, see-through walls and the world of the in-between.