Sabine Bitter, Huda Lutfi and Helmut Weber

Shifting Perspectives: Maps, Spaces, Places and the Urban 2024-2025

The series of works Shifting Perspectives have been realised by artists Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber and Huda Lutfi within the framework of the international project IMAGINE CLIMATE DIGNITY. Research and exhibition in Cairo have been generously supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum Cairo. Shifting Perspectives is presented at the Künstlerhaus Vienna in the exhibition IMAGINE CLIMATE DIGNITY from February 28th - June 9th, 2025.

IMAGINE CLIMATE DIGNITY,  is curated by Barbara Höller and Simon Mraz; a joint project of the Austrian Ministry for European and International Affairs, the Austrian Cultural Forums, and the Künstlerhaus Vereinigung. 

From the CLIMATE DIGNITY webite: In late 2023, artists living and working in Austria were invited to submit art concepts for this group of topics in cooperation with self-selected international colleagues and for 14 destinations within the network of Austrian cultural foreign relations: Belgrade, Brussels, Istanbul, Cairo, London, Madrid, New Delhi, New York, Beijing, Prague, Rome, Sarajevo, Tokyo, and Warsaw. The projects selected by a jury of experts (Silvie Aigner, Günther Oberhollenzer, Tanja Prušnik, Deborah Sengl, and Christoph Thun-Hohenstein) will be shown at each of their selected destinations over the course of 2024/2025. The current exhibition at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna presents all the resulting works together in a group show. The exhibition shows that Climate Dignity is not just a concept but an obligation to act. The research of the participating artists and the works they produce can lead the way, with knowledge and courage, in resisting the ongoing devastation of our world. 

Project description

Geographical and national territories are being reshaped today by the effects of climate change, as ice recedes to expose new coastlines or floods reshape waterways; at the same time, new territorial struggles and land grabs remap borders through aggressive warfare and colonial expansions. Maps, historically tied to imagining, shaping and claiming territories, have never been innocent tools for orientation, but today they needed to represent new physical geographies and are also tied into territorial battles where nations and regions are being reshaped by war and politics.

With their series of three maps, Shifting Perspectives, Bitter, Weber, and Lutfi, challenge the classic Western perspective of how to look at, and how to draw, a fluid world. This shift is realized in these collaboratively realised works by deploying the beauty and abstraction of historic Arabic maps. The elaborate maps always place the source of the River Nile, and therefore south, on top of the map. With this shift in position, perspective and emphasis, Bitter, Weber, and Lutfi work through the knowledges embedded in the Arabic maps to imagine how climate dignity takes shape and is spatialized to in relation to changing geograhpical and political territories.

This shift is deployed at various scales but coheres on the urban, in particular contemporary Cairo and at its rapid urban developments in destabilize the relations of spatial, social and climate justice. The series Squaring the Circle addresses the loss of public spaces and places in the militarized city by using a multi-perspectival layout from Arabic maps that folds the urban space represented in the map to create empty centres within the image. This empty center urgently asks how the complexity, the life, and the spatial, political, and climate struggles of the city can be reimagined and remapped as a public sphere.

Biographies

Huda Lutfi’s practice has been sensitive to her surrounding social and cultural climate. Moving between metaphorical and literal visualizations, her work is playful, subversive and at times equally as harsh as the conditions it reacts to. The artist re-appropriates discarded objects, elements from a boisterous street culture, and political allusions into her narrative. In parallel to her interest in materiality, a continuous meditative undercurrent is equally present throughout her work, which is inspired by both her academic and personal interest in Sufi spiritual practices and existential questions. A historian by training, Lutfi is a self-taught artist based in Cairo. A former Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo, Huda holds a PhD in Islamic Culture and History from McGill University in Montreal. 

Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Vancouver- and Vienna-based artists, collaborate on projects addressing the politics of how cities, architecture and urban territories are made into images. Mainly working in the media of photography and spatial installations, their research-oriented practice engages with specific moments and logics of the global-urban change as they take shape in neighborhoods, architecture, and everyday life. Their ongoing research includes projects such as “Educational Modernism,” “Performing Spaces of Radical Pedagogies”, and “Housing the Social.” Sabine Bitter is professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.