DOHA: Global Art Forum 2014 will kick off in Doha in March, featuring 40 contributors from the worlds of art, architecture, film, literature, history, theatre and commentary.
The Forum, which is a leading regional platform for cultural debate, will be held on March 15 and 16 in Doha and from March 19 to 21 in Dubai.
This year the Forum creates an imagined timeline of turning points in history that shifted an understanding of the world.
Titled Meanwhile…History, the Forum also reflects on the philosophy and fiction of making history matter: each interview, discussion, presentation or commissioned project at Global Art Forum 8 is a point on this imagined timeline.
The Forum is presented by the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture), and is held in partnership with the Office of Strategic Cultural Relations at Qatar Museums Authority through their Years of Culture annual initiative. The Doha days will take place during the Qatar Brazil 2014 Year of Culture at Katara Art Center, while in Dubai, the Forum will be held next to Art Dubai Modern, at Mina A’Salam, Madinat Jumeirah.
“Meanwhile...History takes Eric Hobsbawm’s adage, ‘A protest against forgetting,’ as its starting point,” says Shumon Basar, commissioner of the Global Art Forum. “As our experience of time accelerates, so does the build-up of history. Amnesia is built into this process by default. This year’s Forum is an occasion to time-travel to some of history’s blind spots.”
Global Art Forum co-director Omar Berrada adds: “Within its context, the Global Art Forum is a unique event, for its idiosyncratic format, its eclectic approach to art and knowledge, and its enduring appeal. Through this year’s iteration, we hope to achieve world-class conversation and thought-provocation around topics that we think should be on everyone’s mind.”
“It’s one of the few established annual meetings with a Middle East focus,” says co-director Ala Younis. “The Global Art Forum is a unique event with an amazing constellation of topics and projects devised by artists, intellectuals and regional experts.”
Meanwhile...History tours through Ibn Khaldun’s medieval treatise, the Muqaddimah; Soviet Orientalism; American Cold War paranoia; a hundred years of the art exhibition Documenta; several millennia of the pearling industry of the Gulf; the “Short Seventies” in the UAE and across the world; as well as cultural experiments in Kuwait; Iranian art collections in Dubai; Africa in 1966; and creative lapses in storytelling and Facebook timelines.
Free, and open to all, this year’s Global Art Forum will be simultaneously translated into Arabic/English, and will be live-streamed globally and to sites within the fair.
The Global Art Forum’s fellowship programme Forum Fellows returns this year with a focus on curating, led by writer and curator Tirdad Zolghadr. This programme enables exceptional upcoming curators from the Middle East to exchange ideas and experience. Fellows selected for the 2014 programme are: Amanda Abi Khalil (Beirut); Azar Mahmoudian (Tehran); Yasmina Reggad (Algiers); Yara Saqfalhait (Ramallah), and Ania Szremski (Cairo).
The Global Art Forum 8 also features commissions, including new projects by the Gulf-based artists Sarah Abu Abdallah, Raja’a Khalid and Hind Mezaina.
The Peninsula
