Since it was founded in 2002, Homeworks has taken place every two or three years in Beirut. Organized by Christine Tohme, the powerhouse director behind the non-profit Ashkal Alwan, the event describes itself as ‘a forum on cultural practices’. This is not a biennial with an infinite number of collectors and curators rushing around with different coloured VIP badges, nor is it parcelled into different chunks – separate tours for press, cultural tourists, museum directors, and so on. In fact, for this first-time visitor, it seemed like there were no tickets at all: Homeworks 6 was free and open to anyone; the most reliable means of access was one’s enthusiasm to push through the crowds. Programmes were divided into different sections: projects, performance, performance-lectures (of which Lebanon is surely the spiritual home), plain old lectures, film and video screenings, dance, theatre, literature and, of course, an exhibition.

Keep Reading @Frieze.

Writing the Canon: Notes on Art Education by Omar Kholeif

There is a particular aloofness among artists working in the Middle East and North Africa toward the North American and Western European cultural brokers who seek to engage them. A natural assumption is that this is due to a postcolonial paranoia. This is no surprise, especially as the reactive politics of the post-9/11 cultural spheres (not to mention the Arab uprisings that sparked after January 2011) have undeniably sought to turn many contemporary artists’ works into instruments of a neoliberal agenda. Artists have seen their output culled into exhibitions and projects that seek to address prescriptive sociopolitical agendas, often prioritizing ethnic or political categorization over formal, conceptual, or aesthetic art historical concerns.

Keep Reading at New Museum

]]> http://www.everythingok.co.uk/2013/04/coming-soon-new-white-building-website/feed/ 0 http://www.everythingok.co.uk/2013/02/the-white-building/ http://www.everythingok.co.uk/2013/02/the-white-building/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:24:01 +0000 admin http://www.everythingok.co.uk/?p=694

I have just started running the programme at The White Building, London’s new cultural centre, working at the intersection of art, technology and sustainability.

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Lots more coming soon.

Image credit: Camaraderie (2009) by Mahmoud Khaled

International Film Festival Rotterdam announces short film programmes

Close Encounters: Peripheral Images and Histories of the Present
Spectrum Shorts also includes two short films programmes with recent Middle Eastern works brought together by Omar Kholeif and IFFR programmer Peter van Hoof. The two Close Encounters’ programmes seek to articulate the present with one eye on the future and another inextricably linked to the past. Can an image narrate a history? How do we deal with a history that brims so close to the present that it is impossible to distance one’s self from it?

www.ibraaz.org

This forum celebrates the Random Acts series of commissions – including new commissions from FACT for the strand – and opens up a dialogue about the future of television as a shared space that has the potential to bridge new relationships between socially engaged audiences, curators, creative producers, and broadcasters.

Speakers include Chip Lord, artist and one of the co-founders of Ant Farm; New York-based artist Marisa Olson; Tabitha Jackson (Commissioning Editor for Arts, Channel 4); performances by Ronald Fraser-Munroe and Jeremy Bailey, as well as conversations with artists Zineb Sedira and Sarah Wood, producer Jacqui Davies, as well as FACT’s Director Mike Stubbs and Curator, Omar Kholeif.

Download the full schedule and list of speakers from the Downloads section of this page.

Produced by FACT Liverpool and presented across the UK by the Cross Arts Venue (CAV) Network in partnership with Channel 4, Arts Council England and the Liverpool Biennial.

Tickets are £10/£8 (FACT Members & concessions). Lunch not included. Capacity is limited so advance booking is recommended. BOOK HERE.

See information about the 25 films we have commissioned for Channel 4 at the Random Acts project page.

Omar Kholeif is an Egyptian-born, UK-based writer, curator and producer. His current project, “Safar: A Journey Through Popular Arab Cinema” is running from 21 – 27 September at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London.

How did the idea for Safar come about and how did you get involved in it?

I was approached by the Arab British Centre a year and a half ago. We sat down and talked about what it was that we wanted to bring to London and British audiences in order to make a real statement about contemporary Arab cinema. Through lots of discussion and research it transpired that a lot of the Arab cinema that we were receiving in the UK was anchored around very particular social and political concerns and wasn’t necessarily representative of Arab cultural production or the films that were popular locally. What you get with Safar is an experience that we believe is much more representative, but also much more enjoyable. It actually contradicts the confines of what you expect world cinema to be. Traditionally, it’s something that aspires to a high arts concern, but these films are much more dialogue-based, comedic and melodramatic. They’re also epic and enthralling in different ways and actually reveal quite political and dissident things about local culture, by doing it through a form that’s accessible to a broader audience.

Do you think that even though historically Arab cinema hasn’t been shown much in the UK, that is something that’s set to change? Is Arab film coming more to the forefront of cinema in the UK today?

I think so. We’re building audiences slowly, but I think that it can be a red herring and we have to be cautious. What you find is that a lot of events are one-offs, when what you really need is someone to develop an infrastructure in their regular programme so audiences know that this isn’t just some fleeting fad, but actually a cultural form that’s important.

Keep Reading at New Statesman

In the inaugural issue of Portal 9, the first Arabic-English journal about the city, a novelist interviews an architect practicing in Iraq since the 1950s. A researcher in South Sudan analyzes the nation’s search for unity by means of a new capital city. Fiction from Esfahan, reportage from Port-au-Prince, essays from Beirut – urbanists, critics, taxi drivers, historians, and photographers consider “The Imagined.”

Visit: www.portal9journal.org

Rhizome has collaborated with FACT, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, and the Liverpool Biennial, to develop a new series: Five Videos. Responding to theme of the Biennial — The Unexpected Guest — Rhizome is “hosting” the online programming. Further relating to the theme, Omar Kholeif (FACT) and Joanne McNeil (Rhizome) invited internationally renowned artists to submit five videos considering issues relating to hospitality, which will run each week throughout the duration of Liverpool Biennial 2012. The artists include: Jemima Wyman, Judith Barry, Kristin Lucas, Lucky PDF, Jennifer Chan, Anahita Razmi. Ming Wong, Queer Technologies, Angelo Plessas, and Adham Faramawy.