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

"Weasels ripped my flesh!"

"On the graphic arts front, TASCHEN has released the wonderfully over-the-top Men's Adventure Magazines, the definitive look at the male equivalent of the graphic romance novel. Sure to be a guilty pleasure, this exhaustively colorful tome depicts an idealized vision of the 1950s manhood, when fearless macho guys could dispatch Nazis, communists, gang members, pedophiles, nymphomaniacs and man-eating caterpillars with equal measure."
-Daily Variety, Los Angeles, United States

Art? Design? Science?

Museum Kills Live Exhibit
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
New York Times, May 13, 2008

"Art is deathless, the poets say. Unless it isn’t.

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

Though she has said “I felt cruel when I turned it off,” Ms. Antonelli said in the more recent interview that it was, essentially, a simple decision tinged with a bit of regret. “It was the only piece in the show that was alive,” she said. “It really was an amazing piece.”

Oron Catts, director of SymbioticA, said in an e-mail interview that he “particularly liked what happened at the MoMA,” with its slightly Frankensteinian sensibility of “life growing out of control.” The need to shut the exhibit fit in with the group’s overarching goal “to present the end of our projects in ways that remind people that these works are/were alive and that we have a responsibility towards the living systems that we engage in manipulating,” he wrote. Besides, he added, “the piece was able to regain some of its irony that was lost” when it was put in the context of what he characterized as an “optimistic design show.”"

(G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL

DIDIER FIUZA FAUSTINO/BUREAU DES MÉSARCHITECTURES
May 14 - June 28, 2008

"This May, Storefront will inaugurate a solo exhibition of French artist and architect Didier Fiuza Faustino and his Paris-based practice Bureau des Mésarchitectures (Mathieu Herbelin, Cláudia Martinho, Tony Matias, Guillaume Viaud). Faustino's largescale onsite installation (G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL, designed specifically for Storefront for Art and Architecture, will occupy the entire body of the gallery and engage its iconic façade by temporarily interrupting its role as movable, morphable barrier. Using chain-link fence as a medium to entirely encase and isolate the facade's panels, (G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL will explore the complex role that barriers and thresholds play in defining and creating public and private space, ideas central to Faustino/Mésarchitectures' work."