Bidoun Magazine » Dubai

Bidoun Projects at Art Dubai, March 16-19, 2011

admin — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 23:54:35 +0000

Bidoun Projects returns for its fourth year as a project partner of Art Dubai. Our 2011 programming is built around the theme of Sports: competition, stardom, the parody of sports as labor or labor as sports, the art of losing, and sports per se. Our projects include the Art Park, an underground project space for film, video and talks, that features retrospectives of two pivotal Egyptian artists, Sherif El Azma and Wael Shawky, curated by Bidoun’s Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and Sarah Rifky of the Townhouse Gallery, respectively, as well as a sports-themed video programme featuring a variety of artists including Ziad Antar, Mahmoud Hojeij, Van Leo, and Marwa and Mirene Arsenios.

The Bidoun Library returns, too, featuring ‘The Natural Order,’ a new section specially curated for the fair that focuses on printed material on the Gulf from the past five decades. ‘The Natural Order’ will include corporate and state publications, as well as magazines and lay-ethnography on the Gulf published in the mid 20th century, when the region was mostly unfamiliar in the West and was becoming a source of great interest with the discovery of oil. The collective Slavs and Tatars will also make a special appearance with a new project and publication dedicated to Molla Nasreddin.

Join us at the fair on March 15th at 5 pm for a special Bidoun Show & Tell in the Art Park and on March 16th as we co-host, with The Third Line, the Sharjah Biennial After Party!

Bidoun Projects thanks the Emirates Foundation for its support in making these initiatives possible.

Bidoun at Art Dubai 2011

admin — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:31:58 +0000

Art Dubai
March 16-19, 2011

One again Bidoun Projects has been invited to partner with Art Dubai in bringing you a series of non-profit artist projects, screenings, and miscellaneous more with the theme of “SPORTS” — also the theme of our spring issue, to be launched at the fair.

2011 Bidoun Projects include the Art Park, an underground project space for film, video and talks, that features retrospectives of the work of two pivotal Egyptian artists, Sherif El Azma and Wael Shawky, curated by Bidoun’s Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and Sarah Rifky of the Townhouse Gallery, respectively, as well as a sports-themed video programme featuring a variety of artists including Ziad Antar, Mahmoud Hojeij, Van Leo, and Marwa and Mirene Arsenios.

Limited edition Bidoun trading cards will be distributed, too, and autograph sessions will be held throughout the fair featuring leading lights of the contemporary art world. Bidoun also presents a “live mural” painted and repainted each day throughout the fair by a group of distinguished artists — Dubai-based artist Rokni Haerizadeh and Tehran-based Ali Chitsaz among them — tasked with depicting the theme of “labor.”

The peripatetic Bidoun Library is back, too, featuring “The Natural Order,” a new section specially curated for the fair that focuses on printed material on the Gulf from the past five decades.

Also look out for a special appearance by the collective Slavs and Tatars in the Bidoun Library.

Finally, Bidoun Projects will present a special “Show & Tell” evening dedicated to highlighting Bidoun’s diverse activities past and present.

The Winter School Middle East Announced

admin — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:59:05 +0000

The Winter School Middle East (WSME) has announced it is to take place in Kuwait in 2011 and for the next three years. The program was previously hosted in Dubai where numerous Bidoun contributors (Antonia Carver, Sunny Rabhar, November Paynter, George Katodrytis) acted as faculty. For more information visit http://www.winterschoolmiddleeast.org. Application Deadline is January 5, 2011.

Bidoun Library at the New Museum

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:02:23 +0000

New Museum (5th Floor)
August 4 — September 26, 2010
235 Bowery
New York, NY

The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Arrayed along these shelves are pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, on subjects ranging from the oil boom to the Dubai bust, the Cold War to the hot pant, Pan-Arabs to Black Muslims, revolutionaries to royals, and Orientalism to its opposites.

Most of the 700-odd titles on display were acquired specifically for this exhibition. The shape of the collection was dictated primarily by search terms on the World Wide Web rather than any intrinsic notion of aptness or excellence. Searching for “Arab,” “paperback,” “1970s,” and “<$3,” we acquired dozens of books about the Oil Crisis, the cruel love of the Sheikh, and the lifestyles of the nouveau riche. A similar search for “Iran” produced its own set of types and stereotypes. We did not set out to find the best books about, say, the Iranian revolution; in a sense, we looked for the worst. Or, rather, we tried to look at what was there.

The result is less a coherent group of titles or texts than an assortment of books as things, sorted roughly into four themes or units. Catalogues hang from the ceiling in front of each shelf cluster. Inside is a documentation of a selection of books from that shelf, in dialogue with excerpted texts and images from the library as a whole.

The Bidoun Library includes a program of Iranian film, video, and television culled from low-fidelity DVDs and VHS tapes that circulate among Iranians in the Diaspora. The selection includes post-revolutionary variety shows, music videos, and other totems of middlebrow—unibrow?—culture. This is an Iranian cinema unlikely to be shown at Lincoln Center.

Bidoun Library at the New Museum, New York

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:18:48 +0000

New Museum (5th Floor)
August 4 — September 26, 2010
235 Bowery
New York, NY

Bidoun’s Antonia Carver Appointed Director of Art Dubai

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:03:37 +0000

Bidoun congratulates Antonia Carver, Director of Bidoun Projects and Editor-at-Large, who has just been appointed director of Art Dubai. Antonia has been with Bidoun since its inception in 2004. She led our Projects wing, from initiating workshops to launching the Bidoun Library and Project Space to managing managing bidoun’s roster of performances, commissions, and video programs. We already miss Antonia, but are thrilled that she will join the board of Bidoun Projects and continue to be part of our family.

Abbas Akhavan at The Third Line, Dubai

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 21:17:14 +0000

For his first solo show at The Third Line, Abbas Akhavan presents his selective aerial and experiential mappings of Dubai in faux-gold leaf.

The Third Line; Islands; Abbas Akhavan; 5 May — 17 June, 2010; http://www.thethirdline.com

Art Dubai 2010 Photo Recap!

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:54:46 +0000

Star intern Hind Demaithan at the Bidoun Booth

The Bidoun Library at Art Dubai

Daniel Bozhkov geared up for the the world’s fastest artist guided tour

The Forms of Compensation booth, teetering on the Edge of Arabia

Strategic detail, Forms of Compensation, 2010>

Hind Demaithan and Hassan Sharif in front of his Forms of Compensation forgery

Setting up Vartan Avakians installation

Stoop installation by Nikolas Gambaroff and Matt Sheridan Smith

Alice Aycock’s Sand Fans, Kenneth Goldsmith and some fans

Russian crooner at Art Dubai VIP party, Vartan Avakian at Art Dubai VIP party

Aziz Alqatami touching Farhad Moshiri’s ice sculptures

Farhad Moshiri ice sculptures: the morning after

Kenneth Goldsmith, Tiffany Malakooti and Lucy Raven at the BubuWeb screening in the Art Park

Peggy Ahwesh speaks in the Bidoun Art Park

Hamlet Hovsepian speaks in the Bidoun Art Park

Banu Cennetoglu, Negar Azimi speak in the Bidoun Art Park

Shumon Basar, Kenneth Goldsmith

Bidoun at Art Dubai 2010 Update

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:26:51 +0000

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.

Bidoun and Art Dubai 2010

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:31:52 +0000

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!