Initiated by Ashkal Alwan in 2006 and supported by Robert A. Matta Foundation, Video Works is a grant and screening platform aimed at supporting the development, production and diffusion of new projects by artists and filmmakers residing in Lebanon.
ArteEast, in partnership with Residency Unlimited and Sculpture Space, is pleased to announce Dalia Baasiri and Özgür Demirci as Summer 2016 Artists-in-Residence. Dalia Baasiri is a Lebanese visual artist and graphic designer and Özgür Demirci is a Turkish multidisciplinary visual artist.
From April 22 to June 12, 2016, the Badischer Kunstverein will be mounting an extensive exhibition and events programme on the subject of migration and flight. Hannah Arendt’s essay We Refugees provides the exhibition and events with their title and conceptual approach.
But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa, the third exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, illuminates contemporary artistic practices in the Middle East and North Africa and the region’s diaspora.
This series of workshops and lectures in Beirut will discuss the role of power structures as part of daily life and their links with geopolitics, zooming out of our local urban experiences. It will explore the relationship between artistic practice and political action through public art, sabotage, hacking and shamanism.
Three digital media works from Tammam Azzam’s Syrian Museum series will be included in Contemporary Ruins: Resistance to the Spectacular Image; a group show curated by Leah Hartman. Taking place at Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in New York, the exhibition will focus on the aestheticization of cultural heritage destruction and its reception by the global media in which mediated images of violence and destruction often fall within the intersection of art, propaganda, and documentary.
Gypsum is thrilled to present Berlin-based Setareh Shahbazi’s second solo show at Gypsum Gallery. Her new works deconstruct photographs by cutting, peeling, bending and un-layering them in Photoshop until she hits the core of the medium, the background layer, thus setting free an invisible pattern. Through a formal reflection on the medium, the photographic subject breaks off from presentation towards more abstracted twins and duplicates, dot.tiff dot.jpg dot.pdf., without losing the ghostly trace of its origin.
This exhibition presents, in its entirety, Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), a series of videos that details the stories of eight individuals who have been forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally and whose covert journeys have taken them throughout the Mediterranean basin.
Aiming at radically stimulating one’s creative side through mental games and tactics, overcoming the difficulties of working as a collective, challenging the egocentric mind, and unveiling the adventurous side of the creative approach, this workshop is fully experiential and we are not expecting any definitive forms or results (just like life).The workshop is an attempt at redefining/breaking and reshuffling the classic/academic norms and definitions of art, beauty, aesthetics, and approach, and discovering what’s beyond through intensive exercises, readings and reversed psychology based schemes.
"Its strengths are verbal and vocal. Even through the distortion of heavy reverb, the four women (Mona Gamil, Alaa Abdellateef, Salma Abdel Salam and Charlene Ibrahim) do pitch-perfect imitations of politicians and diplomats. In its parody of political speech, the script can be clever, with multi-sided ironies. The globe-spanning imperial titles of the new world order (“Her Majesty the Queen of Liberia and the American West Coast”) sound as absurd, and dangerous, as those of the old. The names of participants in a “cabaret for the colonies” scroll in an amusing list: Scarlett O’Sahara, Guantánamo Babe."
