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
Seh Mullah Parviz Khatibi Farsi (no subtitles) 1985, 53 min Parviz Khatibi was an iconoclastic intellectual, active across countless media, who kept one foot in popular entertainment and the other in political activism. During the Shah’s regime, Khatibi relentlessly published a satirical weekly named Haji Baba despite harsh censorship and several arrests. After the Islamic revolution, Khatibi continued the publication of the paper both in Iran and later in exile in New York and Los Angeles. In the realm of popular culture, he was a successful playwright, a key figure in the golden years of Radio Iran where he hosted a popular four hour morning show, an accomplished film directer (over 20 pictures under his belt) and a successful songwriter. Most notably, he penned the lyrics to Vigen and Delkash’s Bordi Az Yadam - one of the most iconic songs of Persian pop history. His gift for sharp but poppy lyrics is evident in Seh Mullah (1985), a made-for-television satirical musical mocking the then leaders of the Islamic Republic. In characteristic Khatibi style, the play utilizes popular folk and joke musical tropes combined with found footage and video effects to voice fervent political commentaries. The mullahs, played by actors donning clumsy masks and fake beards, are often seen singing, dancing and being chastised by their wives. In one scene Khomeini, with a baseball bat in his lap, calls Saddam Hossein on the telephone to share his woes and suggest a war between their countries to solve all their problems. Khatibi himself appears throughout as a diegetic narrator. Watch Parviz Khatibi’s Seh Mullag on UbuWeb
Curated by Negar Azimi and Babak Radboy for Bidoun
With Vartan Avakian, Steven Baldi, Walead Beshty, Haris Epaminonda, Media Farzin, Marwan, Yoshua Okon, Babak Radboy, Bassam Ramlawi, Mounira Al Solh, Andree Sfeir, Rayyane Tabet, Lawrence Weiner, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck
11th December 2009 - 6th February 2010
Vartan Avakian
Wall text, Walead Beshty Rayayne Tabet, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin Lawrence Weiner, Babak Radboy
Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War) Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu Japanese and Arabic with English subtitles 1971, 70 min Co-edited by Red Army (Red Army Faction of Japan Revolutionary Communist League) and PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) In 1971, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, both having ties to the Japanese Red Army, stopped in Palestine on their way home from the Cannes festival. There they caught up with notorious JRA ex-pats Fusako Shigenobu (see “Jasmine on the Muzzle,” Bidoun 17 Flowers) and Mieko Toyama in training camps to create a newsreel-style agit-prop film based off of the “landscape theory” (fûkeiron) that Adachi and Wakamatsu had developed. The theory, most evident at work in A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), aimed to move the emphasis of film from situations to landscapes as expression of political and economical power relations. In 1974 Adachi left Japan and committed himself to the Palestinian Revolution and linked up with the Japan Red Army. His activities thereafter were not revealed until he was arrested and imprisoned in 1997 in Lebanon. In 2001 Adachi was extradited to Japan, and after two years of imprisonment, he was released and subsequently published Cinema/Revolution [Eiga/Kakumei], an auto-biographical account of his life. Watch The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War on UbuWeb
January 15-16, 2010: Hassan Khan, Kevin Mitchell, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie February 13: Kevin Mitchell, Shumon Basar, Antonia Carver March 20: Douglas McLennan, Murtaza Vali April 16-17: Haytham El Wardany, Clare Davies, Hassan Khan May 17: Negar Azimi, Murtaza Vali
In January 2010, Bidoun Projects, in partnership with the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) launches a course of workshops that focus on writing about art and offer the opportunity for critical debate.
The monthly get-togethers will be led by renowned critics and curators from Egypt, Lebanon, USA, and the UAE including Hassan Khan, Kevin Mitchell, Negar Azimi, Haytham Al Wardani, Antonia Carver and Clare Davies. This “informal art school” provides an opportunity for debate about contemporary art, and facilitates links between artists, curators and editors based in the UAE, the region, and beyond.
The course launch weekend takes place January 14-17, 2010 at Shelter Dubai. Further day-long workshops take place on February 13, March 20, and on dates to be confirmed in April and May.
The call for applications has been closed but places may come available. For more information, please visit the Workshop’s Facebook page.
Course Tutors
Sasha Anawalt is director of USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Programsat the University of Southern California, where she founded the Masters degree program in Specialized Journalism (The Arts). In October 2009, she directed and produced with Douglas McLennan the first-ever virtual National Summit on Arts Journalism, streamed live from USC Annenberg. She wrote the best-selling cultural biography, “The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company” (Scribner, 1996). Anawalt’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, SoHo Weekly News, Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com), KUSC and MSNBC-online sites. Anawalt served on the 2006 and 2007 Pulitzer Prize Committee juries for criticism.
Negar Azimi has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Artforum, and Frieze, among other art magazines and newspapers, and has been published widely in books and exhibition catalogues. A senior editor of Bidoun, Negar is based between Cairo, Beirut and New York. She is a member of the Arab Image Foundation. Recently, she and Babak Radboy curated the exhibition “NOISE,” at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut.
Shumon Basar studied architecture at Cambridge University and the Architectural Association, London. He worked for Zaha Hadid Architects, most notably as a lead designer on the acclaimed Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Since 2000, he has been Unit Master and Co-director of the Summer School programme at the Architectural Association; Co-founder of multi-disciplinary collective, sexymachinery, who make magazines, performances and exhibitions. He is architecture editor at Tank magazine; and has written for a number of publications, including Modern Painters, Blueprint and AA Files.
Antonia Carver (course organizer, with Alia Al-Sabi) is director of Bidoun Projects and editor-at-large for Bidoun magazine. She contributes to books, magazines and newspapers, primarily on contemporary art and film in the Middle East. Recent publications include PROVISIONS: Sharjah Biennial 9 (ed, with Lara Khaldi), and With/Without:Spatial Products, Practices and Politics in the Middle East (co- editor, with Shumon Basar and Markus Miessen). Antonia is a programmer for the Dubai and Edinburgh international film festivals, specializing in film from Iran and the Arab world.
Hassan Khan is an artist, musician and writer who lives and works in Cairo, Egypt, where he has instigated and directed series of “criticality workshops.” As an artist, selected solo shows include Gezira Art Center, Cairo (1999),Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (2004), A Space Gallery, Toronto (2005), Gasworks, London (2006) Le Plateau, Paris (2007) and Uqbar, Berlin (2008). Khan has also participated in the Istanbul (2003), Seville (2006), Sydney (2006), Thessaloniki (2007),Contour (2007),Gwangju (2008) biennales as well as the Turin (2005) and Yokohama (2008) triennalles, amongst other international group exhibitions. He has composed soundtracks for theater and performed his music in venues around the world and his album tabla dubbwas released on the 100copies label. Khan is also widely published in both Arabic and English, his latest publication Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El-Azma was published by the Contemporary Image Collective earlier this year.
Seattle-based Douglas McLennanis an arts journalist and critic and the founder and editor of ArtsJournal.com, the leading aggregator of arts journalism on the internet. Each day ArtsJournal features an array of links to stories from more than 200 publications worldwide. Douglas has written on the arts for numerous publications, including Salon.com, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the London Evening Standard. He has won several awards for arts criticism and reporting, including a National Arts Journalism Program Fellowship at Columbia University and a Deems Taylor/ASCAP Award for music journalism. He was recently named one of 100 Outstanding Graduates of the Juilliard Schoolof Music for the school’s centennial.
Kevin Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Architecture in the School of Architecture and Design and currently serves as Director of Undergraduate and Graduate Programs at the American University of Sharjah (AUS). Professor Mitchell co-chaired the 2008 conference Instant Cities: Emergent Trends in Architecture and Urbanism in the Arab Worldand co-edited a volume of selected essays published by The Center for the Study of Architecture in the Arab Region. Recent publications appear in Dubai: Growing through Architecture (Thames & Hudson, in press), The Courtyard House: Between Cultural Expression and Universal Appeal (Ashgate, in press), The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century (Harvard Graduate School of Design/Harvard University Press, in press) and Dubai: City from Nothing (Birkhaüser). An essay on architecture in the Gulf was awarded a 2009 research prize by the International Art & Architecture Research Association (IAARA) in conjunction with The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat).
Murtaza Vali is a Sharjah — and Brooklyn — based critic and art historian. He is a contributing editor at ArtAsiaPacific, and was co-editor of its 2007 and 2008 Almanac issue, an encyclopedic year-end review of contemporary art across Asia. He is also a regular contributor to Bidoun and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, Art India and Nukta. He has penned catalog essays on various artists, most recently Reena Saini Kallat and Emily Jacir. Also a freelance curator, his recent exhibition “Accented,” was presented at BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, in early 2010, as part of their Lori Ledis Emerging Curator Program.
Haytham El-Wardany was born in Cairo 1972 and currently lives in Berlin. He works as an author and journalist, and has been involved in numerous cultural and publishing projects both in Germany and Egypt. As a writer, he has published two collections of short stories in Cairo, including Jama'at Al-Adab Al-Naqis (The League of Incomplete Literature) known for its innovative approach, covering a range of styles from reportage to formal experimentation.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer who lives and works in Beirut. She has contributed numerous essays on contemporary art and visual culture to catalogues, anthologies, and journals, including texts on the work of Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad, experimental music, urban intervention, video, and performance art. Over the past decade, she has written for_ The New York Times, _The Times of London, and The Village Voice, among many other newspapers and magazines. Previously the arts and culture editor of The Daily Star, she is currently a contributing editor for Bidoun, a critic for Artforum, and a staff writer for_ The Review, the weekly cultural supplement of _The National. She earned a BA in English literature and international relations from the University of Virginia, an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and an MA from the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. She was a 2007 fellow in the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program in Los Angeles.
The Black Banana
Ben Hayeem
1976, 71 minutes, 16mm, color
Together with Anthology Film Archives, Bidoun presented an encore screening of Ben Hayeem’s unmissable, unfathomable wonder. Born and raised in Bombay, Hayeem (1933-2004) made a number of well-regarded films and was close with experimental film pioneers Maya Deren and Slavko Vorkapich. Early in his career he joined the Living Theater group in New York and became the only Indian Jew to play a Chinese Priest with a Yiddish accent in a Brecht play. This comedic, cross-cultural experience must have set him down the path to the rather incredible and risque happenings in The Black Banana.
The original promotional notes inform us that, “In this zany, ribald Middle Eastern comedy, young Jews, Arabs and Texans revolt against the parental and conventional authority, represented by old-fashioned Jews, Arabs and Texans…Despite its message of peace and good will between Jew and Arab, The Black Banana has the distinction of being the only film ever banned in Israel because its mixture of nudity and religious satire offended the Israeli censorship board.” Hayeem protested the banning dressed only in Black Banana filmstrips until a compromise of partial magic marker censorship was reached.
The Black Banana was preceded by Ben Hayeem short films Papillote (1964, 10.5 minutes, 16mm) and Flora (1965, 6 minutes, 16mm) and introduced by Ben’s sister, Vilma, who plays the role of the paper bag in Papillote.
Tuesday, December 22 at 8:00 PM Anthology Film Archives: 32 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10003
Born in Leninakan, Armenia in 1938, Artavazd Ashoti Peleshian is an influential director of poetic film-essays. His films utilize a cinematic method developed by Peleshian called “distance montage” to capture everyday life in a manner which transcends documentary. Sergei Parajanov has called him “one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema.”
“Eisenstein’s montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage creates a magnetic field around the film… Sometimes I don’t call my method "montage”. I’m involved in a process of creating unity. In a sense I’ve eliminated montage: by creating the film through montage, I have destroyed montage. In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision, so as a result montage has been destroyed. In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don’t mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning.“ —Peleshian
Wednesday, December 16th at 6:30 PM
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute: 19 Washington Square North, New York, NY 10011
Please join Bidoun and NYU Abu Dhabi for an encounter between philosopher Sadik Jalal Al-Azm, famous for his controversial and censured works on religion, politics and culture in the Middle East, and Bilal Khbeiz, an independent poet, essayist and journalist in exile, bringing both men’s personal experiences to bear on a discussion of the Arab intellectual as political, cultural and social construct.
Space is limited. Please RSVP to 19wsn.rsvp@nyu.edu.
Tuesday, December 22 at 8:00 PM
Anthology Film Archives: 32 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10003
Bidoun is thrilled to co-present with Anthology Film Archives an encore screening of Ben Hayeem’s unmissable, unfathomable wonder. Born and raised in Bombay, Hayeem (1933-2004) made a number of well-regarded films and was close with experimental film pioneers Maya Deren and Slavko Vorkapich. Early in his career he joined the Living Theater group in New York and became the only Indian Jew to play a Chinese Priest with a Yiddish accent in a Brecht play. This comedic, cross-cultural experience must have set him down the path to the rather incredible and risque happenings in The Black Banana.
The original promotional notes inform us that, “In this zany, ribald Middle Eastern comedy, young Jews, Arabs and Texans revolt against the parental and conventional authority, represented by old-fashioned Jews, Arabs and Texans…Despite its message of peace and good will between Jew and Arab, The Black Banana has the distinction of being the only film ever banned in Israel because its mixture of nudity and religious satire offended the Israeli censorship board.”
The Black Banana will be preceeded by Ben Hayeem short films: Papillote (1964, 10.5 minutes, 16mm) Flora (1965, 6 minutes, 16mm) Total running time: ca. 90 minutes.
In November 2009, Bidoun launched a new, monthly exhibition project aimed at highlighting the work of art photographers based in the UAE.
A wide range of images from the selected photographer’s portfolio will be shown each month on two flatscreen lightboxes at Shelter in Al Quoz. Bidoun is selecting photographers based in the UAE, focusing on those working independently, without the support of an agency or gallery. The Portfolio Project aims to provide an outlet for the many particularly talented and dynamic artists working with photography; this will be their first solo project exhibition in the Gulf.
Hind Mezaina
November 1 – December 1, 2009
First up is the well-established Dubai-based artist Hind Mezaina, who specializes in Lomography. Hind has become known for her observational eye, whether working in the UAE or on travels abroad. In sequence or shown individually, her images tend to create surreal, compelling narratives, often from the most mundane, frequented subjects. “My photography is a combination of using low-fi analog cameras and a mission to document the world we live in,” says Hind. “My tools include cameras like the LC-A, Diana+ and Instant Cameras. The simplicity of these cameras gives me the freedom to concentrate and capture the subjects and emotions I want. I love experimenting with techniques like multiple-exposure and cross processing because the results are always surprising—the mundane can have a new and fresh look.”
Recent group exhibitions in 2009 include ‘Art Below Tokyo’, Tokyo; ‘Kalimat’, DUCTAC, Dubai; ‘Silent Conversations’, Tashkeel, Dubai; Emirati Expressions, Gallery One (Emirates Palace Hotel), Abu Dhabi; ‘Dubai Underground’, Like the Spice Gallery, New York; ‘My Name is Robot’, thejamjar, Dubai; ‘For the Love of Polaroid’; and SAANS Downtown, Salt Lake City; and ‘Pillar of Art’, Art Below, Berlin.
Mohamed Somji
December 7, 2009 – January 10, 2010
Leaving behind a decade of marketing and sales experience in the corporate world, Dubai-based photographer Mohamed Somji now looks at the world through a different lens in the most literal sense of the word. His transition was sparked by 9/11 and the dramatic change in world affairs that ensued thereafter, urging him to find ways to express and promote social awareness through photography. He is now working on several long-term projects with a variety of themes, one of which is the documentation of the lives of migrant workers, aiming ‘to go beyond the rhetoric and controversy’ and instead documenting and studying 'the everyday lives of the workers […] and what motivates them to come here and then stay here’, Mohamed says.
Mohamed describes the selection of images showcased in the Shelter – 'the work I have selected as part of the Bidoun Portfolio project is derived mainly from my earlier personal and travel work. With the bulk of my photography being commercial assignments, its liberating to work on your own terms and free of any constraints. I enjoy photographing people in their natural surroundings and try to reveal a little bit about themselves and their character through their expressions or mannerisms. I enjoy the unpredictability of the street and roam the streets and alleys of cities in pursuit of those small moments.’ Mohamed’s work can be viewed on his website, http://www.seeingthings.ae and his photoblog, http://photoblog.mohamedsomji.com
Four years committed photographer now, Mohamed also runs Gulf Photo Plus (GPP) which is a Dubai-based community resource 'committed to promoting the value of photographic literacy’ through a variety of workshops, activities and events. For more information on GPP, visit www.gulfphotoplus.com
Zeinab Hajian & Aisha Miyuki Ansari
January 10, 2010 – February 10, 2010
Zeinab Hajian was born in Tehran, Iran in 1986. She studied Visual Communication Design at the American University of Sharjah and since 2006, has been mainly engaged in the study of both photography and typography to construct an all-encompassing visual communication discipline. Her photography projects revolve around photojournalism and creative photography. Zeinab believes photography is more 'like a device, which documents an event, an opinion, and a point of view worth looking at’. Her work in photojournalism is marked through the investigation of the subject matter through the development of the photographic essay, revealing with it the process with which a story unfolds. Hajian has participated in a number of group exhibitions and has held a solo exhibition called “Photo-graphic” in 2009.
Aisha Miyuki Ansari, of Japanese-Pakistani origin, was raised between Japan, the U.A.E and the U.K. She first majored in Visual Communication at the American University of Sharjah for two years before she moved to Illinois in 2008 where she currently studies Photography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aisha’s multi-cultural background and movement between places put her in confrontation with the notion of “home” and the elements that make it so. As someone who feels like a foreigner everywhere she goes, the conventional definition of “home” being a person’s country of birth or origin seemed hollow and unrepresentative. Aisha’s attraction to photography as a medium for expression developed as a reaction to 'the idea of 'becoming a foreigner’ which eventually got her interested in space and its relationship to people. She describes this process saying that 'space transports a viewer into what is obvious or mysterious, and it allows us to listen to the silences while we patiently wait for it to speak. When we are ready, it gives us the opportunity to pause, linger or respond. There is no definite answer in what we create, but it provides all the necessary questions to understand or realize something that has been true or false to us. I do this with photography, and it is important that I do because I co- exist with it. It is my bread and perhaps it is my “home”’.
the shelter t +971.4.434 5655 p.o.box 11370 Dubai, UAE
The first incarnation of the traveling Bidoun Library & Project space took place this past weekend at Abu Dhabi Art. The collection features over 200 publications (and growing) selected by team Bidoun; BAS, Istanbul; and Samandal, Beirut. Listening stations were curated by Bidoun’s Hassan Khan and Tiffany Malakooti. The space was design by Dubai-based Traffic with typography by the Khatt Foundation. Next stop: Art Dubai, March 2010!
Downlaod a PDF of the Bidoun Library catalogue here.
NOISE
Curated by Negar Azimi and Babak Radboy for Bidoun
December 9, 2009 – February 6, 2010
BEIRUT – From the din of cultural initiatives, exhibitions, symposia, biennials, group shows, and surveys mounted to confront, mediate, meditate, cross-pollinate, advocate, decry, valorize, deny, expose, represent, reconsider, reappraise, reify, or, better yet, to re-unveil what it means to make, show, and sell art in the Middle East, Bidoun magazine responds with NOISE, an exhibition opening December 9 at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut.<!–more–>
Between the first generation of post-9/11 cultural survey shows and the reflexive gymnastics of the next generation—which aimed to problematize the legitimacy of yet another regional survey while managing, miraculously, inevitably, to deliver one—Bidoun attempts to close its eyes and tune its ears to the white noise of the white cube, wondering how much it matters which city, region, country, or peoples surround it.
As it happens, it does matter, but perhaps not in ways expected. Rather than curating works to illustrate problems plucked from a readymade critical lexicon, NOISE attempts to let these problems arise from, and give rise to, the works themselves, opening the door to the unexpected, and even to the uninvited. The exhibition’s point of departure is the space itself. Its location in Beirut gives it its critical acoustics, but it retains the conceited platonic generality of any clean post-industrial art space, anywhere in the world.
Included in the show are a number of special commissions. A text piece by Lawrence Weiner runs along the gallery’s windows facing the Dora Highway. On the roof, a large neon sign by Vartan Avakian spells out SFEIR-SEMLER (the gallery was previously unmarked) in Devangari script, facing the newly emigrated Asian population in the neighborhood below.
In one room of the gallery hang the unsold works of Syrian modernist painter Marwan from a retrospective earlier in the year. The room housing the modernist works is dominated by an obtrusive white cube, leaving the paintings impossible to view except at an uncomfortably close proximity. Alongside a series of photorealist paintings of exhibition catalogs from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, artist Steven Baldi has sealed off one entire side of the gallery with a glass wall, forcing visitors to retrace their steps to see the show in its entirety. Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin contribute a sculptural installation that tells the story of a cultural moment born of the Cold War that continues to have eerie resonance today. And Babak Radboy has installed a section of gallery wall on loan from the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, along with a photograph of the corresponding hole left by its removal.
Also included is a new series of photographs by Walead Beshty printed from film damaged as it passed through Beirut’s airport security, as well as glass and copper sculptures destroyed in shipping, and a cartographic ping-pong table by Rayyane Tabet that traces the strange contours of a cultural exchange between an American drinking game and one of Lebanon’s most famous explosions.
Scattered throughout the space are a series of polaroids by Haris Epaminonda taken from the insides of obscure books and magazines, alongside an enigmatic video piece.
Yoshua Okon presents one and a half videos on the state of cultural production in his native Mexico, and Mounira Al Solh and Bassam Ramlawi make their painting debuts.
Also making her exhibition debut is gallerist Andrée Sfeir , as herself.
Monday, October 26th at 7pm — Free! The Kitchen: 512 W 19th St., New York, NY 10011
Join Bidoun for an evening at The Kitchen, FREE!, in commemoration of our fall issue, “INTERVIEW,” with added eclectica drawn from the world of our winter issue, “NOISE.” See gallerist Tony Shafrazi narrate his operatic epic MOOGAMBO. Witness an encounter between writer Gini Alhadeff and writer cum flamenco dancer Hampton Fancher. Indulge in burlesque! And competitive whistling! All of this plus illustrated readings by Abou Farman, Lucy Raven & Tiffany Malakooti, with music by Fatima Al-Qadiri.
Bidoun and Semiotext(e) presented a screening of two rarely shown works depicting outsiders’ visions of Morocco, introduced by celebrated novelist Abdellah Taïa, Morocco’s first openly gay writer, who discussed the fascination that Moroccan literature, landscape and culture have exerted over American expats and travelers.
An American In Tangier, Mohamed Ulad, 1993, 27 mins
Leaving the US for Tangier, Morocco in 1947 when he was 37 years old, the American writer Paul Bowles remained there until his death in 1999, immersing himself in Moroccan culture. In addition to the classic novels he is best known for, Bowles translated numerous stories by Moroccan storytellers (Mohammed Mrabet, Larbi Layachi and others) and compiled two LP recordings of traditional Moroccan music. An American in Tangier is an intimate conversation in which Bowles reflects upon his life in Morocco.
Print courtesy of Cinematheque de Tanger and LACMA.
Chronicles/Morocco, Michel Auder, 1971-71, 26 mins Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva, Michel Auder, 2002, 36 mins
Auder alternately refers to the Chronicles as video diaries or novels that are Proustian in nature. Edited almost thirty years apart, Chronicles/ Morocco and Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva together are a study in Auder’s approach to his memories. The footage is all from the same trip that was a family vacation. Tension developed between the couple and Viva left a few weeks into the trip, while Auder remained for several more months. Auder subsequently edited Viva out of the first version. He also misdated the trip by accident. It took place in 1972, not 1971. Considering Chronicles/Morocco a construct of emotional convenience unfaithful to memory, Auder decided to supplement the first version with a fuller account. The two works feature almost entirely different footage. There are, however, sections where one can see where Auder has omitted Viva. The star of the 1971 version is a young Moroccan Adonis who appoints himself tour-guide for a group of Europeans, including Michel. The camera follows his charming antics as he flaunts his nubile body and rather blunt but effective skills as a hunter. The supplement, Morocco 1972, stars Viva and Alexandra, continuing the theme of mother and child as it was poignantly established in Auder’s other diaries.
Abdellah Taïa +
An American In Tangier, Mohamed Ulad, 1993, 27 mins
Chronicles/Morocco, Michel Auder, 1971-71, 26 mins
Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva, Michel Auder, 2002, 36 mins Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at Light Industry, Brooklyn
7:30pm, $7 More information here.
** X INITIATIVE
548 West 22nd Street, New York, NY
Through October 24, 2009**
Stacks of free copies of the latest issue of Bidoun will be available at the colony of geodesic domed tents in the simulated San Gabriel Mountains at X INITIATIVE . The stack(s) will be guillotined into a number of slices, like a cake, or a sandwich. So we will be giving away free issues, but with one small change…
