Bidoun at Art Dubai 2010 Update

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.
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.)
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.
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."
www.bidoun.com

Occasional Doodles

Have just started posting our conversations with Bikem in English. Please visit OCCASIONAL DOODLES OF AGITATED MINDS.

Who are we?

Bikem Ekberzade a photojournalist based in Istanbul. She has worked for major news agencies, magazines and newspapers, no need to mention the names here. What she has witnessed on the field led her to start documentary projects that ran alongside her photojournalistic assignments, feeding financially from the assignments to later have lives of their own. The Refugee Project is one example. She lives half the year in Istanbul, half the year on the Aegean coast, still travels to odd places, and experiments with longterm projects. She has one book, and is about to finish her second one. No, no kids. Just books.

Özge Ersoy is currently a graduate student at Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She's a victim of perennial curiosity about everything. When asked to be more specific, she says she's interested in artists' initiatives, art institutions, cultural policies, and culinary delicacies in the Southeastern Mediterranean countries. She likes smelling old books and speaking with her cactus, called Mahmut. She is also a founding editor of online arts and culture magazine, BoltArt. Lives and works in New York, NY.

Zero dB

"On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights musicians are uniting against the use of music to torture by joining www.ZerodB.org The Zero dB project (zero decibels = silence) was launched today by legal charity Reprieve which represents over 30 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Many of Reprieve’s clients - and hundreds more held in US secret prisons across the world - have been subjected to deafening music played for hours, days and often months on end in order to ‘break’ them.

Zero dB aims to stop torture music by encouraging widespread condemnation of the practice and by calling on governments and the UN to uphold and enforce the Convention Against Torture and other relevant treaties.

Reprieve’s client Binyam Mohamed from North London - still held in Guantanamo Bay - suffered 18 months of torture in a Moroccan secret prison. During this time his penis was routinely slashed with razor blades, yet he describes the sensation of feeling his sanity slip during psychological torture as even more horrific. He spoke to Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, his lawyer, in Guantánamo Bay:

“They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb.... There was loud music, [Eminem’s] ‘Slim Shady’ and Dr. Dre for 20 days.... The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night.... Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.”

There is a long and growing list of supporters who are outraged by the use of music to torture: James Lavelle of UNKLE, Matthew Herbert, Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, Massive Attack, The Magic Numbers, Elbow and Bill Bailey have so far pledged their support of the initiative and made statements against the use of music to torture.

Musicians and the wider public are making their own silent protests against music torture which are being shown on zerodb.org. A series of silent protests and actions are planned through 2009."

TransDance: 3, Cairo

"TransDance: 3 aims at bringing the audience to more intimate settings with the body in movement, presenting dance in different non-dance spaces, creating conversations with choreographers, offering a chance to have a first hand dance experience, and more..."

Opening Date:
27 November 2008, 7pm
(A special video and film program will be screened exclusively on the opening night, presenting several dance videos and films from Egyptian, French and Belgian artists working with different approaches to the body and movement)

Opening Venue:
Passage 35, Mr. & Mrs. Mahmoud Khalil Museum, 1 Kafour Street, Giza (Opposite the Cairo Sheraton Hotel)

Detailed Program to be announced soon: transdance.blogspot.com.

BoltArt

BoltArt is a new monthly magazine (in Turkish) that serves as an online platform to discuss visual arts, performing arts, design, architecture and art philosophy. You can access the first issue from the following link: http://boltart.net

BoltArt, görsel sanatlar, performans sanatları, tasarım, mimari ve sanat felsefesi üzerine yayın yapan online bir dergi. Aylık olarak güncellenen BoltArt, bünyesinde sergi yazıları, proje tanıtımları, denemeler, röportajlar ve fotoğraf projelerine yer vermeyi amaçlıyor. İlk sayıya buradan ulaşabilirsiniz: http://boltart.net

City Sense at GarajIstanbul

City Sense: Surveillance, Secrecy, Security, Control
curated by Nat Muller in collaboration with NOMAD

A playful evening pondering media, control, surveillance, secrecy and art in urban environments.
Date evening event: 20 September 2008, 8 pm
Place: GarajIstanbul, Tomtom Mah. Yeni Çarşı Cad. Kaymakam Reşat Bey Sk. No:11a 34433 Galatasaray-Beyoğlu / İstanbul

It is no big secret that urban centers have become sites of surveillance and control. Gone are the days that the urban city dweller could carelessly drift – as the 19th century flaneur, strolling from one area to the other, and then disappear anonymously into the crowds. As our urban experience might have become more anonymous in regard to social interaction, our behavior – how we move, what we see, hear, taste and smell - is becoming more regulated, watched and controlled. Anonymity, it seems, is no longer an option. Our urban sensibilities are often directed, mediated and pre-programmed, either by security measures or by other overt or hidden codes of conduct. It is no coincidence then that how we consciously sense our cities – our “City Sense” – ultimately defines how we position ourselves as citizens.

CitySense offers a playful interpretation on how to actively engage your urban senses and reveals the hidden, and questions the exposed in an evening choc-a-bloc with video screenings, live food and smell installations, live audio-visual performances, and a party to close off the night.

Performance Installations by: Maki Ueda, Wietske Maas. Live Performances: Sasker Scheerder & Radboud Mens, Edwin van der Heide, Koray Tahiroğlu, Not at Home. Video Screenings and installations: MediaShed, Nicolas Provost, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay & Pascal Lievre, Daniël Melse, Matteo Venet, Mattias Geurts, Dimitri van Loenen, Başak Kaptan, Efe Hızır, Dilara Kurtoğlu, Denizcan Yüzgül, and Burak Arıkan.

More info:
http://www.garajistanbul.org/
http://www.kosmopolis.nl/

CUP in La Biennale di Venezia 11th International Architecture Exhibition

Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonprofit organization based in Brooklyn, NY, that works with communities about places and how they change. The organization produces exhibitions, public programs and design educational tools through which art/design professionals, community-based advocates/researches and policy-makers get together.

"This fall, CUP projects will be exhibited in two pavilions at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. In the US Pavilion, organized by Bill Menking, CUP is one of 16 organizations and firms representing the country. Projects like the Subsidized Landscape and Dinely Taveras's short video "Representing Public Housing" question popular beliefs about housing and subsidy. For the Padiglione Italia, Damon Rich and Althea Wasow have installed a series of giant photocopies about abandoned buildings, the urban environment, and bad neighborhoods called "Sneakers --> Fashion --> Money --> Respect."

11th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia
September 14 – November 23, 2008
Venice, Italy

Related links:
"Out There: Architecture Beyond Building" at the Padiglione Italia
"In the Open: Positioning Practice" at the U.S. Pavilion

Los Surcos de la Ciudad

Los Surcos de la Ciudad (grooves of the city) is JR's new large-scale photography installation in Spain where he captures Carthagena's residents and transfers the portraits onto the city's walls. An impressive grand narrative project.

The Rabbit Master

A fairy tale for the family.
Cheers Mofa.

TransDance:2

If you happen to be in Cairo this Friday...

"TransDance, initiated by HaRaKa in 2008, is a series of mini-festivals of a transdisciplinary nature, focusing on dance and movement. It comes as a product of the long research project CONNECTIONS which aimed at raising critical questions around mobility, trans-cultural dramaturgies and transdisciplinarity in the production of contemporary dance.

HaRaKa and 100Copies would like to invite to TransDance:2--an evening of improvised dance and music, exploring relations between Sound and Movement, live and unpremeditated, with four musicians/composers and three choreographers/dancers invited to the stage: Adham, Hassan Khan, Reem Hegab, Shaimaa Shokry, Mahmoud Refaat and Nina, Karim Lotfy."

Venue: Rawabet Theatre, Hussein Mimar Street, Off Mahmoud Bassiouny St., Downtown, Cairo (Next to the Townhouse Gallery)
Date and Time: Friday, July 18th, 2008, 7pm