Quarterly

Summer 2012 | ArteZine

Biographies

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Haig Aivazian is an artist, curator and writer born in Lebanon and currently based in New York City. He has a BFA from Concordia University in Montréal Canada and an MFA from Northwestern University in Chicago, USA. He also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. He has been involved in a number of curatorial initiatives including Roads Were Open/Roads Were Closed at The Third Line gallery in Dubai (2008) and was the Associate Curator of the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 entitled Plot for a Biennial. His work has been shown in France, Canada, the UAE and the United States, and the first installment of his ongoing project entitled FUGERE (A Series of Olympiadic Events) was commissioned and exhibited in the 9th edition of the Sharjah Biennial (2009). Aivazian has written for a number of websites and publications including Bidoun, FUSE, AdBusters, Ibraaz.org, AMCA, The Arab Studies Journal as well as several exhibition catalogues. He is currently represented by Lombard Freid Projects in New York.

Barrak Alzaid (b. 1985 Kuwait, MA Performance Studies, NYU) is a writer, curator, and artist, and is the Artistic Director of ArteEast. In this role he has developed and launched a residency initiative, curates a monthly artist talk series, and is the chief editor of the ArteEast online Quarterly Magazine. Recent installation and performance work include Seera Kartooniya (Bushwick Open Studios, 2010) and Diwaniya with Fatima Al Qadiri and Aziz Alqatami (Gwangju Design Biennial 2011). Curatorial work includes antinormanybody (Kleio Projects, 2011) and Anti-Artist Talks (Performa 11, New York). He was co-editor with Khalid Hadeed of the ArteEast Shahadat Publication ‘For Lives Undone: Gaza Summons its Writers to Speak (Min Hutam al-Hayah: Ghazzah Tastantiq Kuttabaha).’His article, ‘Fatwas and Fags: Violence and the Discursive Production of Abject Bodies’ is available in The Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. He is a contributor to Jadaliyya and Ibraaz.

Ava Ansari is a co-director of The Back Room, a pedagogical and curatorial project, developed in collaboration with artists, curators, and writers in Iran and the United States. She has previously worked at Basement Gallery, Dubai, and Silk Road Gallery, Tehran. As an artist, she has presented work at Dixon Place, La Mama, Eyebeam, the AC Institute, among others.

Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born artist and an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is known internationally for his on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international politics and internal dynamics. For his recent For his current project, the 3rdi, Bilal had a camera surgically implanted on the back of his head to spontaneously transmit images to the web 24 hours a day, a statement on surveillance, the mundane and the things we leave behind. Bilal’s 2010 work …And Counting similarly used his own body as a medium. His back was tattooed with a map of Iraq and dots representing Iraqi and US casualties – the Iraqis in invisible ink seen only under a black light. Bilal’s 2007 installation, Domestic Tension, also addressed the Iraq war. Bilal spent a month in a Chicago gallery with a paintball gun that people could shoot at him over the internet. The Chicago Tribune called it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him 2008 Artist of the Year.

Stéphanie Dadour received a scholarship from the Centre Pompidou where she works in the Mondialisation et Études Culturelles department. She is a doctorate student at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais. Her thesis dissertation entitled When architects speak the Other: towards a definition of Otherness in North-American housing projects deals with the construction and the representations of identity politics in architecture. Stéphanie has been teaching in many universities in between Montreal, Paris and Beirut as much as covering a Visiting Scholar position at Columbia University in New York.

Harun Farocki was born in the Czech Republic in 1944. He attended Deutsche Film and Fernsehakademie in Berlin from 1966 to 1968 and was both editor and writer for the magazine Filmkritik in Munich from 1974 to 1984. Since 2004, he has held the position of visiting professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Vienna, Austria. Farocki has made close to 90 films, including feature films and documentaries, which have been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including documenta 12 in Kassel (2007), MUMOK in Vienna (2007), Museum Ludwig in Köln (2009), Raven Row in London (2010), Kunsthaus Bregenz in Bregenz (2010), and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City (2012).

Dina Ibrahim is a curator and writer currently based in Dubai. She is the curator of ArteEast virtual gallery and previously held various positions in a number of international art museums including the Guggenheim in New York and Queensland Art Gallery in Australia. She also currently holds the title of exhibitions coordinator at The Third Line in Dubai orchestrating all aspect of exhibition development in the space. She contributes to numerous art publications such as e-flux ArtAgenda, ArtAsiaPacific, Whitewall, ArtLink, and Frieze. She obtained an Art History degree from the University of Queensland in Australia where she graduated with honors and is currently pursuing her thesis in cross-cultural curating with a focus on contemporary Middle Eastern Art.

Mirak Jamal is an artist born in Iran, and who since after the revolution has come to grow up in the former Soviet Union, Germany, the U.S., and finally Canada. Not bound to any one medium, his work echoes a process of redeployment of autobiographical anecdotes with that of historiographies and collectivities. He currently resides in Berlin from where he engages internationally.

Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq 1981. She lives and works in Oakland, Ca and is a graduate of the Academy of Art and Design in Florence, Italy. Recent solo exhibitions include Pins and Needles, The third line gallery, Dubai; Waraq, Frey Norris, San Francisco; Seven gates, Green Cardamom, London. Recent group exhibitions include: The Jameel tour, The Victoria and Albert museum, London ; Institute de Monde Arabe, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston; Casa Arabe, Madrid; Disquieting muses, Contemporary Art Center of Thessaloniki, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece (2011); Of Women’s Modesty and Anger, Villa Empain Center for the Arts, Brussels (2011); Taswir, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin Germany (2010); Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East, Saatchi Gallery, London (2009). Hayv Kahraman is represented by The Third Line Gallery, Dubai, UAE
. www.hayvkahraman.com

Bouchra Khalili is French-Moroccan artist born in 1975, in Casablanca, Morocco. Raised between Paris and Casablanca, she later studied Cinema at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Visual Arts at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts, Paris-Cergy. Khalili’s work in video, mixed media installations, photography and prints, combines a conceptual approach with a documentary practice to explore issues of clandestine existences, and the émigré experience.

In her work, she articulates language, subjectivity, minority discourse and speech, transitional territories and transit zones, investigating the interrelation between contemporary migrations and colonial history, physical and imaginary geography. Bouchra Khalili’s work has been shown around the world, including recently at Intense Proximity – La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2012) ; The 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012); The MoMA as part of the film exhibition Mapping Subjectivity (New York, 2011); The 10th Sharjah Biennial (2011); The Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, 2011);The Studio Museum, New York (2010); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2010) ; INIVA, London (2010); among others. In 2012, she’s the recipient of the DAAD-Artist in Berlin Award, and The Vera List Center for Arts and Politic Fellowship, The New School, New York.

Molly Kleiman is a co-director of The Back Room. She is a deputy editor of Triple Canopy, an online magazine and editorial collective, and the coordinator of the Writing Program at New York University’s Gallatin School.

Randa Mizra: I am an image-maker; I speak with images. Images are texts. The eye can read between the lines. Using visual language, I intend to reveal the intangible multiple layers that emanates from the physical presence through a mystification of reality. I’ve mainly worked on themes related to my perception of war, bringing to view questions about memory, violence and voyeurism. I have also been exploring issues concerning the Lebanese postwar condition, particularly the reconstruction policy. On another hand, I’ve worked on gender roles in ritualized performances and gender differences assigned to body shapes. I aim to understand and to translate the complexity of my personal, social, geographical, historical and political reality.

Nazila Noebashari is a curator and the director of Aaran Gallery.

Ernesto Pujol is a site-specific performer, social choreographer and cultural writer. Pujol’s interdisciplinary work follows the footsteps of nineteenth-century itinerant artists traveling across the globe creating psychic portraits of people and places through public durational performance art. His critical practice is informed by eastern notions of walking meditation, seeking a mindful presence that reveals the unseen. His new text, Sited Body, Public Visions: silence, stillness & walking as Performance Practice is available through McNally Jackson Books.

Joseph Shahadi is an interdisciplinary artist. He makes experimental theatre and performance, installation and visual art. He has been exhibited in New York, regionally in the United States and internationally, in Europe. He teaches Solo Performance at New York University and he is the Executive Director of The Art of Brooklyn, a nonprofit dedicated to the art and culture of the borough. See his work at www.josephshahadi.com.

Sadia Shirazi is a curator, architect, and educator based in New York City. She is engaged in a transdisciplinary practice investigating the relationship of art and architecture to socio-political issues, cultural and historical memory, and exhibition practices. Her recent curatorial projects include 136 MB / Exhibition Without Objects at The Drawing Room in Lahore (2012) and Foreclosed. Between Crisis and Possibility in New York City (2011). Shirazi’s writing and design work have been published online and in various magazines and journals, including Thresholds, Bidoun, and AU Arquitetura e Urbanismo. She has worked in architectural practices in Cambridge, Cairo, and Chicago and as a researcher and designer for the artists Kyrzstof Wodizcko and Andrea Geyer. Shirazi is currently a visiting professor at National College of Arts (NCA) and has also taught or lectured at Wentworth Institute of Technology, Parson’s The New School, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and Beaconhouse National University. Her research has been supported by grants from the Architecture League of New York, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, and the MIT Council of the Arts. Shirazi holds a MArch degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a BA from the University of Chicago and is a former fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Rayyane Tabet is an artist working in Beirut. He received a Bachelors in Architecture from The Cooper Union in New York and a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of California in San Diego.

Mary Tuma is a fiber artist. She has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in Asia and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in Art in America, Dar Al-Hayat, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Counterpunch, NYArts, Mother Jones, The San Francisco Chronicle, Worker’s World, The Jordan Star, and many others. She is an Associate Professor and Head of the Fibers program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. See her work at www.marytuma.com.

 

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