The Forum Forum was a new multi-media repository, located in the Ballroom Foyer of Madinat Jumeirah during Art Dubai 2012, that assembled an alphabet of chairs and tables with an array of content. These included commissioned publications, curated projects, and new research, as well as art-works shown in Dubai for the first time. Each element painted its own idiosyncratic portrait of ‘The Medium of Media.’

Arabic Art Glossary Project

Curator Lara Khaldi leads a new collaboration between Art Dubai and Mathaf: an interactive Arabic Art Glossary platform. Over the course of a year, a database of art terms and definitions in Arabic will be built up, providing arts practitioners, institutions, students and translators with an unparalleled resource.

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PowerPointingTM Your Creative Medium Potential (CMP)

PowerPoint is omnipresent — from bored boardrooms and continuing education seminars to military briefings at the Pentagon and in Kabul, with art fairs in between. Editor/art historian Victoria Camblin has curated a special series of PowerPoints, created collaboratively by contemporary artists, writers, creative entities and duos, which celebrate, critique and creatively exploit the medium’s strange, story-telling familiarity. Featuring Douglas Coupland, Ayshay + Kari Altmann, Goldin & Senneby, LuckyPDF and Alexander Provan (Triple Canopy).

Arshafa E3lamiya: Middle East Archive

In this archive of the present, writer and researcher Mariam Wissam Al Dabbagh collects, compares and critiques the different way in which current events in the Arab world are narrated by Arabic and English speaking news media. A project commissioned by Global Art Forum_6.

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Mass Medium: Emirati TV on Home Video

Blogger Hind Mezaina presents highlights from Aqeel al Showab’s 10,000-hour VHS/Betamax archive of Emirati TV from the 1970s to the 1990s. A private individual’s passion becomes de facto national archive.

Dubai Art World Cartography

Brusselssprouts have produced a dynamic, cartographic visual exploration of the Dubai art world, distilling more than 2500 entries spanning from galleries, exhibitions, fairs, artists, curators, patrons and any art event produced in U.A.E. since 2005. They explain to Shumon Basar how the map came about and what it reveals.

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EXHIBITED PROJECTS

THE BATTLE FOR PETRA

Isak Berbic presents The Battle for Petra, a video piece that investigates cinematic aesthetics through montage of appropriated material, form the streaming news footage of the Cairo march, 2011 protests. The color bars open into an epic battle between the north and south. As the crowds roar, our gladiators take on even more daring risks in quest for victory.

02.11.2011

Banu Cennetoglu’s 02.11.2011 is a collection of hard copies of arabic newspapers, printed on the day of 02.11.2011, in twenty arabic speaking countries.

549 OUT OF 250,000 CABLES

Hala Ali presents US Diplomatic Cables organized into piles according to correspondence about each Arab/Muslim state. They are stacked in order of the largest to smallest, sculpturally signifying the weight of political discourse per country.

INTO THIN AIR IN TO THE GROUND

A part of The Unimaginable Things We Build project Haig Aivazian uses found material to retrace the evolution of the rhetoric surrounding the tallest building in the world. Burj Khalifa’s own incessant utterances, suggest that it existed well before its inauguration and that this inauguration was in fact its public suicide. Through artistic and literary references this work seeks to reconcile notions of globalisation and site-specificity or the idea of architectural landmarks as nodes in an abstract global economy.

IN CONVERSATION SERIES 2011

In October 2011, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art launched a new series of talks aimed to amplify the voice of Qatari artists featured in the exhibition ‘Swalif: Qatari Art Between Memory and Modernity’ by placing them in dialogue with local leaders on topics ranging from art education to urban planning.

Shumon Basar

HG Masters