Bidoun Library & Project Space @ 98 Weeks
April 17 – May 15, 2010
98 Weeks Project Space, Ground Floor, Chalhoub Building, Off Nahr Street, Facing Spoiler Center, Before Jisr Hadid, Mar Mikhael

Opening: Saturday April 17, 5pm, with readings by Bidoun contributing editors and writers Shumon Basar and Wael Lazkani and a conversation with the comics’ collective Samandal.
Debate: Saturday May 8, 5pm, with a panel including Abboudi Abou Jaoude of Al-Furat Publishers.
This iteration of the library coincides with the launch of 98 Weeks’ new research project on avant-garde journals and popular magazines stemming from moments of modernity in the Arab world. 98 Weeks’ collection of publications will be on permanent display at the 98 Weeks Project Space.
The 98 Weeks Project Space is open daily from 3pm to 7pm, except on Sundays.

An American in Tangier
Mohamed Ulad-Mohand
English, Arabic and French with French Subtitles
1993, 27 min
A seldom seen portrait of an aging Paul Bowles and his life in Tangiers. Featuring Mohammed Mrabet and music by Bowles.
Watch An American in Tangier on BubuWeb.

April 7, 2010, 6:30 PM
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute: 19 Washington Square North, New York
What does the future hold? Speculations on the political, economic and social future of the Middle East are common in many spheres. Political economists Kiren Aziz Chaudhry and Saskia Sassen join Mishaal Al Gergawi, curator and critic, for an informed discussion, building on each other’s perspectives to propose potential directions for regional developments with implications for arts and education internationally.
This event is part of Romanticide: Love, Loss and Co-dependency in Art and Cultural Politics, a NYU Abu Dhabi Lecture Series in New York City co-sponsored by Bidoun.

We are proud to announce that we have once again been nominated for an Utne Independent Press Award, this time in the “Arts Coverage” category.

Forms of Compensation
Babak Radboy or Ayman Ramadan
March 23 — April 14, 2010
Townhouse Gallery: 10 Nabrawy Street, off Champollion Way, Downtown Cairo

Forms of Compensation opens this Tuesday March 23 at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo.
‘Forms of Compensation’ is a series of 21 reproductions of iconic modern and contemporary artworks, with an emphasis on sculptures, paintings and prints by Arab and Iranian artists. The series was produced in Cairo by craftspeople and auto mechanics in the neighborhood around Townhouse Gallery, commissioned by Babak Radboy and overseen by Ayman Ramadan, working from installation shots of the original artworks, along with the instruction that each copy should differ in one small way from its referent.

March 10, 2010 at 6:30 PM
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute: 19 Washington Square North, New York
After insistent vague realizations (signs of consciousness or merely the platitude of self-serving delusion?) the artist investigates: the normalizing institution and its stifling horizons; the relationship between value and aesthetics; willful misreadings by 101 critics; the charged moments of transactions and loss; and last but not least the artist’s secret anger–the drama and its pleasure.
This event is part of Romanticide: Love, Loss and Co-dependency in Art and Cultural Politics, a NYU Abu Dhabi Lecture Series in New York City co-sponsored by Bidoun.

Each year, Bidoun Projects presents a series of new video programs with the aim of exploring various thematic concerns and highlighting video art practice in and around the Middle East.

The programs are launched at Art Dubai (March 17–20, 2010) in the Art Park–an underground space for talks, film and video–and then travel on throughout 2010 to venues in the region and beyond.

This year’s programs are curated by Bidoun and guest curators Masoud Amralla Al Ali , Aram Moshayedi , and the duo of Özge Ersoy and Sohrab Mohebbi.

Program One: Cloudy Head
Curated by Bidoun
Running time: approximately 35’

Bidoun Projects’s latest video program brings together works that reference the power of collectively produced codes of communication and highlight the artist’s ability to tap into this power and make it their own. The assembled works engage the hyper-expressive, sometimes hysterical, voices born of these conditions.

The dense streets of a megalopolis are evoked in a percussive translation of street talk, while the romantic promise of YouTube as a venue for self-representation is interrogated through clips of body builders that relate to one artist’s awareness of his own agenda. The thin line between absurdist theater and political demonstration points to the failure of video itself, and Ravel’s Boléro is rendered magical in the presence of a Brazilian street prophet. Somewhere between investigation and homage, polemic and testimony, these videos attest to the failure and eloquence of collective languages as well as their transformative power.

Deaf Countries — Eyad Hamam
2009, 2’; courtesy of the artist

Red, Green, Black and White Indians — Sobhi Al Zobaidi
2007, 43”; courtesy of the artist

Cloudy Head — Justine Triet
2009, 4’58”; courtesy of the artist

Camaraderie — Mahmoud Khaled
2009, 10’30”; courtesy of the artist



80 Million — Eslam Zeen El Abedeen and Mohamed Zayan
2009, 3’41”; courtesy of the artists

Nástio’s Manifesto — Nástio Mosquito
2008, 4’8”; courtesy of the artist

Arabic Home Interiors: An Introduction — Vartan Avakian
2009, 3’40”; commissioned by Tokyo Wonder Site, courtesy of the artist



Adhan — Haroon Mirza
2009 , 4’30”; courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

Program Two: Hollywood Elegies
Curated by Aram Moshayedi
Running time: approximately 50’

“Hollywood Elegies” is the title of one of many pieces of writing Bertolt Brecht composed while living in Los Angeles, from 1941 to 1947. Brecht’s poetry from this period reflected his dissatisfaction with the social and cultural conditions of his newfound home in exile. The six stanzas that comprise this particular text describe the overwhelming presence of the Hollywood industry in the world around him. There is the sense from these passages that Hollywood existed for him less as a specific geography and more as a disorienting state we all experience, no matter the time or place.

The videos that make up this program may or may not refer directly to Hollywood as a location, but in them we find propositions that relate, in sideways or direct fashion, to the current conditions of production, exhibition, and distribution throughout cultural realms. While Hollywood is no longer regarded as a dream factory, its mechanics, for better or worse, still seem to operate.

Shoving — Hirsch Perlman
1994, 12’; courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

Untitled (Ladera Heights) — Drew Heitzler
2007, 46”; Courtesy of the artist; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

The Dictator — David Lamelas and Hildegarde Duane
1978, 15’; courtesy of the artists

NastyNets.com sent you a video postcard — Nasty Nets
2010, 6’; courtesy of the artists

The Cockpit — Tracey Rose
2008, 3’; courtesy of the artist and DBA Christian Haye, New York

Instructional Film — Walead Beshty
2010, 10’ (excerpt); courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, New York

Untitled — Jordan Wolfson
2007, 3’; courtesy of the artist and Johann König, Berlin

Dimples — JMS and Miljohn Ruperto
2010, screenplay (a text supplement); courtesy of the artists and Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles

Program Three: Strike a Pose
Curated by Özge Ersoy and Sohrab Mohebbi
Running time: approximately 35’

Support structures for the arts—biennials, art fairs, and global museums—are more ambitious these days than ever. With the unprecedented increase of interest in contemporary art and the controversial expansion of the art world into a new universal class, without essentialist boundaries or regional claims, more and more media outlets are covering art matters.

The role of the mass media on contemporary society has often been viewed with suspicion by artists. However, contemporary art now seems to adapt to mass-media semiotics without contesting their set standards and formats. Is the art community simply testifying to the invincible power of the spectacle and the regime of the visual? Or is it taking its time to shape its strategies and experimenting with newly discovered possibilities, reframing its representation for a more inclusive viewership? How can art practitioners contribute to the formation of a mass-media representational format specific to the arts? Furthermore, can they contribute to the formation of a lexicon that uses mass media in more engaging modes, as opposed to only establishing a critical distance?

This program comprises a selection of video clips in a variety of formats including news, updates, behind-the-scenes shots, artist interviews, and promotional clips; together these investigate the limits and the possibilities that the mass-media video genre can offer to the art community. The program includes—among others—Twitter with Marina Abramović; Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari announcing Whitney 2010 artists; Tirdad Zolghadr, Lamya Gargash and Dr. Lamees Hamdan on the UAE Pavilion in the Venice Biennale; a Vernissage report on the 11th Istanbul Biennial; and excerpts from the half-hour television shows created by Circular File and commissioned by Performa.

The List: Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari announcing Whitney 2010 artists — Pierce Jackson and the Whitney Museum of American Art
courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art
2010, 1’42’’



Venice Biennale: UAE Pavilion — Bloomberg Tate Shots
courtesy of Tate
2009, 3’51’’

30 Seconds at MoMA: Staff—Tamsin Nutter — Thilo Hoffmann
Commissiobed by and courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
2008, 53’’
Rudolf Stingel. LIVE at Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin — VernissageTV
courtesy of VernissageTV
2010, 5’58’’

MoMA Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers [60-second trailer] — Doug Aitken
courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Modern Art, New York
2006, 1’02’’

11th International Istanbul Biennale 2009 — VernissageTV
courtesy of VernissageTV
2009, 7’46’’

30 Seconds at MoMA: Staff—Andy Haas — Thilo Hoffmann
courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
2008, 0’59’’

Twitter With… Marina Abramović — Bloomberg Tate Shots
courtesy of Tate
2009, 7’ 20’’

Circular File Channel, Episode 1 (2005) — Performa.
commissioned by and original presented by Performa 09; courtesy of the artists and Performa
2009, 4’11’’ (excerpt)

*Program Four: Exploding Nostalgia
*Curated by Masoud Amralla Al Ali and Antonia Carver

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in short filmmaking in the UAE, driven in part by initiatives such as the Emirates Film Competition and the Gulf Film Festival, both founded by curator Masoud Amralla Al Ali. Although most continue to see themselves as filmmakers rather than artists, some Emirati directors have begun pushing the medium and their subjects, often making use of surreal, experimental imagery and drawing as much on traditions of oral poetry as on existing cinematic styles in the region. The films in this program reflect early efforts as well as more recent films, and range from nostalgic, whimsical tales from the northern emirates to introspective studies, via abstract illustration; they are bound together by their combined reflection on today’s connections to the traditions and landscape of the UAE.

Haresat Al Ma'a (The Water Guard) — Waleed Al Shehhi
2007, 11’29”; courtesy of the filmmaker and Reflective Group of Art Production

Mirror — Saleh Karama Al Amri
2003, 3’12”; courtesy of the artist

Wajeh Alilq (Stuck Face) — Manal Ali Bin Amro
2007, 6’03”; courtesy of the artist

My Way — Khalil Abdulwahed Abdulrahman
2005, 6’50”; courtesy of the artist

Amal’s Cloud — Rawia Abdullah
2009, 9’18”; courtesy of the artist

Video #2 — Ahmed Mohammed Sharief
2003, 5’; courtesy of the artist

Art Dubai 2010
March 17–20, 2010
Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai
In 2010, Bidoun Projects is the curatorial partner of Art Dubai, responsible for programming a series of non-commercial exhibitions, commissions, screenings and educational events that engage with the fabric of the fair. Our projects at the fair are kindly supported by the Emirates Foundation.

The projects range from A New Formalism, a group exhibition, including Hazem El Mestikawy , Iman Issa , Mahmoud Khaled and U5 , that looks at new and expanded formalist practices, to a series of commissions that dwell on the spectacular, temporal nature of an art fair. These include new installations by Ebtisam Abdul-Aziz and Vartan Avakian , and a set of ice sculptures designed by Farhad Moshiri. Nikolas Gambaroff and Matt Sheridan intervene at Madinat Jumeirah with Nowhere for Nothing, a stoop designed to encourage loitering.
Bidoun Projects has commissioned Sophia Al Maria , Khalil Rabah and Daniel Bozhkov to act as guides, conducting narrative and performative tours of the fair. (Places are limited: please sign up in advance at the Art Projects Desk.)

Babak Radboy and Ayman Ramadan, Forms of Compensation
Forms of Compensation, an exhibition situated within Art Dubai’s gallery halls, is a series of reproductions of iconic modern and contemporary artworks, with an emphasis on sculptures, paintings and prints by Arab and Iranian artists. The series was produced in Cairo by craftspeople and auto mechanics in the neighborhood around Townhouse Gallery, overseen by artists Babak Radboy and Ayman Ramadan, working from installation shots of the original artworks, along with the instruction that each copy should differ in one small way from its referent.

Alice Aycock, Sand/Fans, 1971
This year’s projects also dwell on the nature of documentation. A trio of artists and writers (Shumon Basar, Haig Aivazian and Naeem Mohaieman) are ‘in residence’ at the Global Art Forum and at the Art Park Talks, mapping the (naturally contested) conversations and moments – both those remembered and in real time. In keeping with the Global Art Forum’s theme of ‘Crucial Moments’, Alice Aycock’s seminal 1971 installation Sand/Fans, with sand sourced from the UAE desert, will be recreated.
Bidoun Video in the Art Park features guest curators Sohrab Mohebbi and Özge Ersoy along with Masoud Amralla Al Ali, Aram Moshayedi, and Bidoun Projects, shown in a screening room and in the Bidoun Lounge in daily screenings hosted by the curators. A dynamic discussion programme includes talks and performances looking at the relationship between archives, art, music and film, in collaboration with the online avant-garde archive, UbuWeb.
The Bidoun Library is a collection of books, catalogues, journals, music and ephemera that traces contemporary art practices as well as the evolution of the various art scenes of the Middle East. At Art Dubai 2010, the resource space features a selection of innovative artists’ and children’s books (as well as music and films) published by Kanoon, Iran’s Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, founded in 1961, which was an incubator for some of the country’s most celebrated artists and filmmakers, including Abbas Kiarostami, Amir Naderi and Farshid Mesghali.

Saturday February 27th, 2010 at 6pm
Rodeo Gallery
Tütün Deposu / Annex building
Istanbul

Istanbul’s Rodeo Gallery will be screening Baadeh Sabah (The Lover’s Wind) this Saturday February 27th.

Cabinet Space
February 26, 2010, 7pm
300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn
FREE; no RSVP necessary

Bidoun and Cabinet co-present a screening of the film version of Bijan Mofid’s lauded 1967 avant-garde play Shahr-e Gheseh (City of Tales). Set in a mythical city populated by various animals, Shahr-e Gheseh is an allegorical fable in which the fate of a visiting elephant strangely echoes the fate of Iran under the modernity espoused by its rulers in the twentieth century.
Program in Farsi (film has NO SUBTITLES; discussion following also in Farsi)
Ab-Dough-Khiar and other refreshments will be provided.

They Do Not Exist (Laysa lahum wujud)
Abu Ali Mustafa
Arabic with English subtitles
1974, 25 min
Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali in 1974, They Do Not Exist takes its title from the infamous Golda Meir quote. Abu Ali, one of the first Palestinian filmmakers and founder of the PLO’s film division, began making films in 1968 in Jordan, along with Sulafa Jadallah and Hani Jawhariya. After Black September, Abu Ali and the others had to leave Jordan but continued making resistance films in Lebanon.
Abu Ali’s contribution to Palestinian cinema is significant, as well as his contribution to international cinema. He worked with Jean-Luc Godard (who apparently has said his soul is Palestinian) on the film Ici et Ailleurs. Godard is “a great filmmaker; dedicated, creative and imaginative. We were both concerned to find the right film language appropriate to the struggle for freedom,” says Abu Ali.
Watch They Do Not Exist on UbuWeb

February 10, 2010 at 6:30 PM
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute: 19 Washington Square North, New York
Historian Omnia El Shakry outlines recent trends in contemporary artistic production in and about the Middle East, while critically exploring the prevalence of binary understandings of the region as trapped between local ethno-nationalisms and global neo-liberalisms, or between politics and aesthetics.
Omnia El Shakry Associate Professor of History, University of California Davis
This event is part of Romanticide: Love, Loss and Co-dependency in Art and Cultural Politics, a NYU Abu Dhabi Lecture Series in New York City co-sponsored by Bidoun.

FOXP2
Wednesday, January 27th at 6:30 PM
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute: 19 Washington Square North, New York

Please join Bidoun and NYU Abu Dhabi next Wednesday for FOXP2, an event moderated by Clare Davies. FOXP2 is a dérive in the spatial and mental fields usually ascribed to a lecture. Constantly shifting back and forth between the authorial voices of a politician, a naturalist, and an art historian, the lecturer drifts between the passionate and the irrational, stopping at various stations of historical, artistic, socio-political, and personal significance. This event will include performances by Bassam El Baroni, Curator, Co-Director of the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum and Manifesta 2010; and Kenny Muhammad, known as “the human orchestra.”
Space is limited. Please RSVP to 19wsn.rsvp@nyu.edu.
This event is part of Romanticide: Love, Loss and Co-dependency in Art and Cultural Politics, a NYU Abu Dhabi Lecture Series in New York City co-sponsored by Bidoun.

Bidoun is sad to learn that Bahman Jalali passed away on Friday at the age of 65 in Tehran. Jalali was not only a photographer who captured the Iranian Revolution and the war that would ensue, but was also an avid and keen photo collector, as well as a beloved professor of photography whose legacy continues to be seen in the generations who followed him. We salute him and his memory.

Art Dubai 2010
March 17–20, 2010
Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai
In 2010, Bidoun Projects becomes the curatorial partner for Art Dubai, taking on all non-commercial programming at the art fair. The Art Park will feature video programs curated by Bidoun and guest curators Masoud Amralla Al Ali , Aram Moshayedi , and Ozge Ersoy & Sohrab Mohebbi , plus a series of talks and performances co-curated with UbuWeb; a group exhibition looks at new and expanded formalist practices; and Bidoun has commissioned new performances and sculptural works that interact with the fabric of the fair. We will update you nearer the time, but hope to see you in Dubai this March!

The Opening Ceremony of the Burj Dubai was to take place at 8pm on January 4th. I had been hearing from the always-consistent, sometimes-reliable Dubai rumor mill that the masses would so crowd the malls and courtyards surrounding the tower for the festivities that it was vital to get to the scene by 5pm. I tried to verify the validity of all this, only to get vague responses like, “You know, that’s Dubai Time for ya!”. When I asked what that meant, I got an even vaguer, “Who knows? Sometimes its on time but other times something stupid happens”. Regardless, we decided to heed the warnings and managed to get out of the house by 5ish (which is pretty admirable by general Middle Eastern standards). We had called for a taxi, but when it didn’t show, my dad came up with an abrupt and messy plan which called for all of us to stand at different points along the stretch of road and make independent taxi-hailing efforts. Despite all logic, this worked and we were soon on our way. The taxi driver had a strange laugh and my father looked at him as though insulted by his audacity. <!–more–>
The roads weren’t as crowded as the lack of taxis or my brother’s phoned in ‘2-million-people-at-the-Dubai-Mall-already’ report would have indicated. Looking over my shoulder, I caught the silhouette of the city’s previous trophy wife, the Burj Al Arab, who’s shape now reminded me of a pregnant lady in contrast to the Burj Dubai’s slender, leggy sexiness. I was forsaking one for the other, and what made it worse was that they shared a name. I felt strangely guilty, but this is Dubai and in Dubai, we move on to bigger and better things.
Looking forward, I caught a glimpse of the guest of honor, the Burj Dubai. A gleaming reverse icicle rumored to be based on the structure of a desert flower, the tower is in a word, beautiful. I’ve often thought that if I had to design the world’s largest tower, this is what I would design. This is not significant because I am an architect (because I am not), but because I feel very strongly about myself. Other people always seem to say that it reminds them of the tower from the Lord of the Rings, but I don’t know how to process that information because I haven’t seen the movie.

After a fairly smooth 20 minute taxi ride (my dad eventually gave up on trying to subconsciously regulate the driver’s laughter), we pulled up to the entrance of the Dubai Mall and caught the first hints of Burj Fever. The arriving automobile cue was lit up by intermittent red brake lights as it vomited passengers onto the curb and into the growing madness. The interior foyer of the mall (if you can call it that) was draped in appropriately nationalistic dressing and all the megatron screens were playing either images of the Burj or other images of the Burj. As crowded as the place was, it lacked the requisite sense of urgency. The giant aquarium was no less popular than any other day and the shops were being patronized in a non-recessionary manner. It was a classic Dubai crowd; they were there, but they were not in a hurry.

By the time we got to the escalators, the multi-level human bunching was beginning to take form and I had a sudden flashback of a day in the early 80’s when a visit from Muhammed Ali (in promotion for powdered milk company Nido, I believe) had jam-packed Dubai’s Al Ghurair Centre. That was almost 30 years ago now, and the two crowds were very similar, sharing the same sincerity and enthusiasm. We have always been a spectacle-loving people around these parts; the spectacles have just accelerated along with the expectations we have of them. There’s something that binds Dubai’s drastically diverse Diaspora and days like these make me realize that the distinction is in their deliberate embrace of the extraordinary.

We inched our way out of the mall exit that poured people out around the Dubai Fountain, a man-made lake that is positioned exactly where a giant puddle would be if the Burj was, in fact, a reverse icicle. It was much more crowded outside than I had expected. The density of bodies was at the level where you internally curse people who brought babies with them, and you don’t bend over to tie your shoe laces if they come undone. Despite the numbers though, the crowd demeanor was calm and cautious, almost out of respectful obedience to the behemoth that towered over all of us. Heads were tilted at unnatural angles and outstretched arms dangled digital cameras that struggled to fit the entire structure in an LCD screen that was not designed with these things in mind.

We were supposed to meet some friends at Shakespeare & Co., a restaurant across the water with an outdoor terrace that looked out onto the Burj. This required crossing a bridge which normally posed no challenge greater than being asked to take a semi-romantic photograph of a newly wed couple who found the combination of water, bridge and building too good of a backdrop to pass up. Today though, the bridge looked like a photo taken right before a disaster. My normally risk-averse parents remarkably plowed ahead despite my warnings and joined an inert group of people that seemed permanently lodged into the infrastructure of the bridge. I considered following them so that we could all die together and save on funeral costs, but a kandura-clad security dude next to me started yelling into his walkie-talkie, “We need VERY security, PLEASE!”. His tone was of the variety that you only hear on recorded emergency calls replayed in the wake of a great tragedy, so I backed off and chose life. I took one last picture of my parents’ barely visible heads (just in case).
Before we embarked on the alternate route, I turned and glanced at the Burj as a plane with a trail of smoke (turned hot pink by the sunset) flew by, and I foolishly said “wow”, breaking the seal on a word that I would be grossly overusing all night. Our new mission was to walk all the way around the lake, up around The Address Hotel and around the outside of the Souq-Al-Bahar. People were scattered everywhere, aggressively filling up memory cards with identical photos of the same thing, as if it was the most natural reaction to seeing something incomprehensible. You could almost see them calculating how much of the cost of their digital cameras they were earning back just by being there. As we swung around the outside of the souq, we saw an entire promenade of palm trees draped in amazing, glittering lights. This light drenched walkway was a perfect symbolic tribute to a city that presumes that as good as nature is, there’s still room for improvement.
When we finally got to the restaurant, we joined our party on a full but reasonably civil outdoor terrace. A standing row of people had already locked down the balcony area which overlooked the Burj and lake, with their torsos pressed against the railings as if they suspected the tower might moonwalk. For its part, the Burj was dark and silent, as if it were entranced in a pre-game locker room ritual. I imagined it wearing headphones listening to “Eye of the Tiger”. Ironically, at this point noone really knew what we were actually waiting for, but whatever it was we knew it wouldn’t be underwhelming. It was still an hour to showtime, but if there’s anything we know how to do in Dubai it’s kill time. We ate zaatar, smoke shisha and took pictures of one another.
At 8pm sharp, the water jets of the Dubai Fountain stirred and gave life to swaying streams that shot up rhythmically to the sounds of the majestic national anthem of the UAE. When we were kids, they would play that music at the start of the limited daily television programming on Dubai Channel 33 that started around 4pm. To us, it was a signal that the cartoons were about to start. This felt very much the same. The excitement was building, and the crowds hugged the concrete barriers a little tighter, finalizing their desired positions for what could be a life highlight. Everyone loves cartoons, after all.

In the silence after the anthem, random crowd murmurs faded to the backdrop as my best friend announced, “They changed the name to Burj Khalifa”, tilting his iPhone screen towards me as if I wouldn’t believe him otherwise. People started chiming in with opinions and projected motives, offenses and defenses, “I heard”s and “I knew it”s. It seemed only polite to have invited the Dubai rumor mill to the Burj’s grand opening. As if on cue, our distraction was broken by the sounds of fireworks from around the Dubai Mall area off to the right. I ran back far enough to catch a glimpse, and caught a few final seconds of an impressive but very regular firework show. It was as if the organizers were reminding us what a normal pyrotechnic display looked like before they blew our minds. This was the control experiment.
“Is that it?”, “That can’t be it, right?”. Suddenly, the lights went on in the tower. The top was glittering and each balcony partition below it was illuminated and smoke poured out of each of them like hot breath against the pitch black of the cool night. There was dead silence And then it began. Within seconds, the world’s largest tower exploded into a insane barrage of fireworks that shot off of its surface and out into the sky, running up and down the steel frame with perfect timing. It was one of those situations where you barely have time to register how amazed you were at what happened a second ago before the amazement doubles up and knocks you over again. And then that keeps happening over and over again until you’re making faces that are reserved for rollercoasters and bedrooms. In that moment, I realized how much the cost of overcoming my cynicism was, and I knew I’d probably never be able to afford it again.

After what seemed like every 4th of July celebration since 1776 compressed into a 20 minute span ended, the crowd was already ecstatic. The people, having first been overwhelmed, eventually regained composure and started cheering the tower on, realizing that we were all on the same team and that this victory could and should belong to us too. Applause rang out as the cracking of fireworks fell silent and the tower stood there in its own afterglow, surrounded in smoke, beaming colorful lights in every direction and almost heaving with pride.
Everyone rejoined their groups and excitedly recounted their own personal experiences of the event, as if there was more than one way to have an architectural orgasm. They compared photos that looked remarkably similar to one and other, stealing some of the building’s glory with self-centered boasts like “Dude, I really got an amazing shot of this part, see?”. We sat under the wooden slatted roof as the myriad floodlights shot out from the Burj and swung around in a display that embarrassed the 20th Century Fox logo and looked like a hundred helicopters pursuing a hundred escaped felons.
My parents who had left the scene immediately when the show had ended called me an hour later from the taxi line, not having left the premises yet. My father (an accountant by education but not in excitable times like these), estimated 5,000 people in line behind him and 2,000 people in front of him. (He also estimated that there were at least 4,000 people total in line). We decided to stick around a little longer and wait for the streets to clear up, no matter how fuzzy the fuzzy math was.
We headed to a swank waterside bar around the corner to get some drinks. Our outdoor seats were so close to the tower that you could only comfortably see its first 20 stories from where we were sitting. By the time the second round of drinks had come out, we grew tired of telling Burj stories and the conversation had shifted to global politics. By the time they announced the last call for drinks, we had practically forgotten we were sitting next to the biggest thing mankind had ever built. We got in a cab at 2am and called it a night, wondering what we should do tomorrow.

Head 1975, 16mm, 12 minutes
Yawning 1975, 16mm, 2:20 minutes
Itch 1975, 16mm, 4:30 minutes
Untitled 1976, 16mm, 4:25 minutes
Thinker 1975-6, 16mm, 6:40 minutes
Staggeringly simple films: a man itching his back, a man thinking, a man yawning, but like the works of Samuel Beckett, these minute gestures stand in as grand statements of the human condition, akin to the films of Bas Jan Ader and Marcel Broodthaers. Rarely seen, these are gems of Armenian avant-garde art and are gestures of deviance; political commentaries that positively reverse the image of isolation current among cultural pessimists, as a seizure of space in a world of standardization, of the mass society. Hamlet Hovsepian’s film is not only the result of a small revolt against the deadly passivity of this society. The reduction it carries out, its silence, gives a universal turn to the meaning of emptiness, to the abstract space, and the frequently extended time.
View Hamlet Hovsepian’s films on UbuWeb

January 10, 2010—February 10, 2010
the shelter
t +971.4.434 5655
p.o.box 11370
Dubai, UAE

In November 2009 Bidoun launched a new, monthly exhibition project aimed at highlighting the work of art photographers based in the UAE.
The Portfolio Project this month will be featuring two former students of the American University of Sharjah, Aisha Miyuki Ansari and Zeinab Hajian, both of whom were taught by AUS professor and artist Tarek Al Ghoussein. The novelty of compositional experimentation and thematic exploration that marks academic work in art photography distinguishes the January series from previous month’s artists Hind Mezaina and Mohamed Somji.
More information on the artists on the Portfolio Project’s page