Lebanon-born, New York-based artist, writer and lecturer Walid Raad’s practice is instinctively nourished by the tension between two acts of human nature: preserving and destroying. Dealing with the codes, forms and languages derived from the Western models of museology with a skeptical attitude and context-sensitive approach, Raad questions their location, geographical reality and historical validity […]
The progression of a day is charted through the passing of time, visually marked by the changing presence of light that feeds cyclical processes of growth and renewal. Sunlight bookends its beginning and end, while moonlight can appear unannounced. Much like the sequential passing of a day, George Awde shoots in serial rhythms, sectioning together moments across days, weeks, and years to write an expanded image-based narrative of existence in times of extreme political and social unrest.
Whoever comes into the world, builds a new house his own; He passes, leaves it to a second, Who fits it as the builder never reckoned, And no one lays the topmost stone. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Early 2014 while visiting ARCO Madrid for the first time, dealer Sabrina Amrani invited me to visit the […]
In the following fragments, transcribed from actual recordings in Spanish, adding aural and oral elements to a delicate thread of ideas about the nature and future of cities and the urban experience in general, Madrid-based Brazilian artist Marlon de Azambuja – rather experienced with the architectural forms of new cities – sets out in this […]
What does it mean to listen to a city? In order to re-evaluate one’s city for a distant listener’s ears one must remove oneself from any comfortable, lasting perception of a home one feels one knows intimately and set out instead to perceive it anew. A city, more than the spatial sum of its streets […]
In the following fragments, complementary to a selection from serialized photographic essays by the artist, Christian Carle-Catafago will not simply introduce any work, but rather lay out the conditions under which these works were produced, along a thread of memories, historical circumstances and political events, connecting the largely diverging latitudes of the Middle East, Europe […]
Arie Amaya-Akkermans: Tell us how you arrived in Dubai. Maria José Arjona: I was extended an invitation by Luiza Texeiras de Freitas to take part in Marker, the non-profit section of Art Dubai, this year with a focus in Latin America. She invited me to come up with something related to performance, and my final […]
Today positioning the new art and cultural institutions outside the West – in places where local artistic and cultural productions have not historically found an institutional ground – stands as one of the most critical questions around cultural practice. Museums have traditionally been integrated into the narration of history, more particularly art history, as their […]
A deep bay, an arm of an ocean or sea 1497, Cadiz In May 1497, the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci set sail on his first voyage to the New World. He embarked from Cadiz, travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, and reached the mainland of Central America, having entered through the Gulf of Mexico, becoming the […]
In a preface to an earlier edition of a volume on pirates and emperors, Noam Chomsky begins by relating a story of St. Augustine, who recounts the tale of “a pirate captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him ‘how he dares molest the sea.’ ‘How dare you molest the whole world?’ the pirate replied: […]