Art Dubai Projects to feature new work by more than 75 artists
16-19 March 2011
Madinat Jumeirah
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Art Dubai has invited Abbas Akhavan, Oraib Toukan, and Hrair Sarkissian to create site-specific installations that examine the nature of the art fair. Abbas Akhavan will undertake an eight-week residency as part of the Delfina Foundation’s international residency programme in Dubai in the lead-up to Art Dubai 2011, through a new collaboration between the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) and Tashkeel with the support of the British Council. Akhavan will be working in a studio in Bastakiya, alongside UAE-based artist Shaikha Al Mazrou; both artists will produce work for the fair and will display in Bastakiya as part of Dubai Culture’s Open Studios programme.
New in 2011 is a series of dispatches from Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (MENASA) artist studios that are designed as a living archive of artistic practice across the region and interrogate the contemporary notion of the ‘studio.’ Co-curated by The Island, MENASA Studio Dispatches will include more than 60 five-minute audio projects ranging from spoken word and music to abstract sound collage. Participating artists include Ramin Haerizadeh, Hassan Khan, Radhika Khimji, Faisal Samra, Naeem Mohaiemen and many more. The project will be presented on Dubai radio station 103.8 FM, on listening posts at the fair and will be serialised for Art International Radio (www.artonair.org).
2011 is the inaugural year for the new MARKER section of Art Dubai. Art Dubai has commissioned curator Nav Haq to invite experimental commercial and non-commercial art spaces from across Asia and the Middle East, most of whom are new to exhibiting within an art fair. MARKER will feature Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), Alexandria; Grey Noise, Lahore; Liu Ding’s Store, Beijing; Makan, Amman; and Ruangrupa, Jakarta.
Building on the success of last year’s interactive performative artist tours by Daniel Bozhkov, Khalil Rabah and Sophia Al Maria, this year’s tours of Art Dubai will be developed by artists Abhishek Hazra and Malak Helmy.
Art Dubai 2011 will also launch DXB store, a not-for-profit space featuring limited edition products and artists’ multiples that are designed and made in the UAE. Highlighting the innovative work of contemporary UAE-based artists and designers, the collection will include newly commissioned objects as well as sought-after recent works.
The leading Middle Eastern arts organisation Bidoun Projects returns for its fourth year as a project partner, kindly supported by the Emirates Foundation.
Art Dubai welcomes back the peripatetic Bidoun Library, 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. Bidoun Projects will also present a “live mural,” painted and repainted each day throughout the fair by a group of distinguished artists—Dubai-based Rokni Haerizadeh among them—tasked with depicting the theme of ‘labour.’
2011 also sees the return of The Big Idea, a forum for 10 young designers and artists based in the UAE who will present upcoming projects and their ideas for the future of the cultural scene in the Gulf.
The 2011 Bidoun Projects programme includes Art Park, an underground project space for film, video and talks, that features retrospectives of the work of two pivotal Egyptian artists, Wael Shawky and Sherif El Azma, 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 Art Park will also host a series of workshops that focus on the practicalities of working in the arts in the region, with in-depth workshops on art law as well as writing and curating for local practitioners.
For more information and the latest updates, please register at www.artdubai.ae/register-form.php
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Media Queries:
Stephanie Sykes
press@artdubai.ae
