Artipedia - Arts News

BIDOUN

Bidoun’s spring issue is devoted to GLORY.

Glory is:
To be talked about.
To be overwhelmed.
To be touched by the hand of God,
or possessed by infernal ambitions.
To aspire to greatness.
To go too far.
To live forever,
or to go out with a bang.

http://www.bidoun.com

In this issue, Issandr El Amrani charts the life and death and afterlife of Souffles, an avant-garde journal of 1960s Morocco, in which a generation of North African intellectuals found and then lost a place they could call home. Z Pamela Karimi and Michael C Vazquez consider the contested glories of Persian Empire and Islamic Republic in the history of a single building in downtown Tehran. Sophia Al-Maria describes the phantasmagoric spectacle of the women’s tent at a Qatari wedding feast, while Gary Dauphin ponders the occult chemistry of listening to hip hop and house music as a teenager on the outskirts of New York in the 1980s.

In the music section, Sukhdev Sandhu revisits the legacy of Mingering Mike–simply the most important soul superstar you’ve never ever heard–while Elias Muhanna writes of Julia Boutros, sometime-muse of Hassan Nasrallah. In the film section, Bruce Hainley converses with cult film auteur William E Jones about his hypnotic filmmaking, the documentary impulse, and the lessons of the 1970s pornography.

In the arts, Tom Morton profiles Saâdane Afif, Dominic Eichler sits down with Shahryar Nashat’s latest project, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie casts an eye to Ziad Antar’s current video in progress. And we have the usual installment of columns on travel, museums, and curatorial practice. Exhibition reviews include: Istanbul Biennial/Jean-Luc Moulène/Stalking with Stories at Apex Art/How Nancy Wished It Was All An April Fool’s Joke/Shirana Shahbazi/Contour/VideoBrasil/Port City at Arnolfini/summer show at the Dubai Community Theater and Arts Center/London is the Place for Me at Rivington Place/The FM Ferry Experiment/Riwaq Bienniale.

And finally, this issue boasts two new departments. Ephemera captures all manner of pettifoggery, whether ridiculous or sublime, while the Glossary provides a wealth of tall tales and minutiae–the stuff of legend.

Subscribe now at http://www.bidoun.com

Etant donnés

Kader Attia, Sleeping from Memory, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Christian Nagel Gallery, Cologne. Photo: John Kennard. Image from the exhibition at the ICA Boston supported by Etant donnés.

OPEN CALL: Curatorial Research and Project Grants

Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art

Application deadline: March 31st, 2008

Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art offers financial support in the form of grants to American nonprofit institutions organizing exhibitions, installations, artist residencies, publications, or other projects by living French artists or to French nonprofit institutions presenting the same types of projects involving American artists. Qualifying projects may be in the fields of visual arts, architecture and design. The Fund, established in 1994 with the French Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange), with support from the Florence Gould Foundation, has distributed nearly 2 million dollars to support more than 200 projects at major French and American institutions.

Since 2005, Etant Donnés also offers Curatorial Research Grants supporting the professional development of American curators by offering them extended stays of up to three months in France for research projects in the field of contemporary art. The grants are intended to facilitate the discovery of new talents, reinforce interest in established contemporary artists, and encourage the exploration of France’s cultural resources. Eligible projects may include research for an exhibition or publication, travel to visit specific sites and collections, an intensive period of reading or writing or other projects that support professional development. The grants are reserved for curators and scholars, who must be U.S. citizens or legal residents of the United States for at least five years who have a minimum of three years of research or professional experience in the field and are currently employed by or have a specific project in collaboration with a nonprofit art space.

Grants are awarded through an open competition administered by the Etant donnés Fund. Applications are reviewed by the Etant donnés Artistic Committee, composed of prominent curators, art critics and arts administrators.
Completed applications must be received on or before March 31st of each year, for projects beginning after June 1st. We regret that incomplete or late applications cannot be accepted for consideration.

Complete guidelines and application forms are available at:
http://www.facecouncil.org/etantdonnes/contemporaryart.html

Additional information is available from the Fund at:
Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art
972 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10075
Tel 212 439-1448
Fax 212 439-1460
contemporaryart@facecouncil.org

CIC (CONTEMPORARY
IMAGE COLLECTIVE)

Malak Helmy
KOSHK: How to make your body double overnight, 2007
Installation shot
Courtesy Tarek Hefny

TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT: THE PUBLICATION
17 February 2008 at 7pm

CIC (CONTEMPORARY
IMAGE COLLECTIVE)
20 Safeya Zaghloul St., Mounira,
Cairo, Egypt
T +2 012 110 8700
F +2 02 2794 1686
http://www.ciccairo.com

The book launch of TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT: THE PUBLICATION is the third installment in a multi-staged contemporary arts project curated by Aleya Hamza and Edit Molnar.

Initiated in Cairo in 2007 during Meeting Points 5 Festival, Tales around the Pavement explores the complex relationships and shifting dynamics between people and public space in the context of a mega city like Cairo, in which the notion of public space and its various functions, official and informal, is constantly negotiated and redefined.

The FIRST CHAPTER OF TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT was staged in the streets of Downtown Cairo. Seven local artists, designers and architects produced new low-budget site and context-specific projects that take an investigative research-based approach to the daily habits of people. Two of the seven works have taken the form of public furniture. The rest of the projects include a portable sound installation, a TV-based public situation, a street graphics project, a series of pictograms, and an interactive installation in an abandoned kiosk. Some of these lasted over the span of a week or more, but most have been ephemeral disruptions of the urban landscape through which this group of artists effectively reinvented some of the guerrilla-style tactics and survival strategies employed by city dwellers on a daily basis in the public arena.

In TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT: CHAPTER TWO, a similar set of questions and issues pertaining to public spaces in mega cities today from Istanbul to Mumbai were examined by an international group of artists, photographers, writers, curators and filmmakers. This chapter was presented within the framework of a visual arts show at CIC as well as a parallel public program of presentations, lectures and films screenings. Making use of a diverse range media and approaches, from single channel low-tech videos, sound installations to black and white documentary photographs, these cultural producers collectively spin a web of stories that is as multi-layered as the city itself.

In both chapters various concepts of property, privacy, ownership, class, marginalized sub-cultures and gated communities were explored within the narratives presented in the projects and program.

The focal point of TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT: THE PUBLICATION is the seven projects commissioned for the first chapter of the project. With photographs, illustrations, texts, notes and conversations, this publication seeks to track some of the experiences of producing a series of transient interventions in public spaces in Downtown Cairo. The book launch will be accompanied by a round table discussion with participating artists.

Chapter One: 5 – 15 November 2007
Chapter Two: 20 January – 29 February 2008

ARTISTS

Marwan Fayed, Kareem Lotfy, Malak Helmy, George Azmy, Mahmoud Hamdy, Eklego Design, Mohamed Allam, Hany Rashed, Jean-Luc Marchina, Katarina Sevic, Mahmoud Khaled, Osman Bozkurt, Randa Shaath, Tarek Hefny

PROGRAM: CHAPTER TWO

20 January 2008
Opening reception of visual arts exhibition

22 January 2008
OPEN CITY: ISTANBUL
Presentation by Istanbul-based artist Osman Bozkurt

6 February 2008
MUMBAI RISING
Presentation by British photographer Jason Larkin

10 February 2008
Film screening of THE TEQUILA GANG, directed by László Hudák-Lénárt Imre, a project by Miklós Erhardt, 1998, 58 min (Hungarian with English subtitles)

17 February 2008
Book Launch of TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT: THE PUBLICATION

24 February 2008
FORM, FUNCTION AND COMMODITY. INVENTING THE MODERN CITY THROUGH NON-FICTIONAL FILM
Lecture by Berlin-based artist and film curator Florian Wüst

26 February 2008
Film screening of CHAIN directed by Jem Cohen, USA, 2004, 100 min (English language)

TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT has been made possible with the generous support of the Young Arab Theatre Fund, Meeting Points 5, Pro Helvetia: The Swiss Arts Council, Goethe-Institut Kairo and ACAX Budapest