ART DUBAI INVITES BIDOUN PROJECTS TO DEVISE CURATORIAL PROGRAMME Curating a series of non-commercial exhibitions, commissions, screenings and educational events, Bidoun Projects give artists a voice

Bidoun Projects, the not-for-profit curatorial wing of arts organisation and publisher Bidoun, will continue its partnership with Art Dubai with an extensive line-up of art events and exhibitions at the 2010 fair to support the region’s artists.

“Bidoun Projects have established a critically acclaimed, independent platform within Art Dubai for upcoming artists and curators to profile the most significant new work coming out of the region,” said John Martin, Director and Co-Founder of Art Dubai. The four days of Art Dubai, 17-20 March 2010, will present a range of activities offering something to suit all age groups. A key feature will be the Bidoun Projects exhibition: A New Formalism, which takes as its starting point the subtle articulation of four works that share a space.

“The exhibition will complement the rest of the programme, which looks at the spectacular and temporal nature of art fairs. A New Formalism brings together a precise selection of works by Hazem El Mestikawy, Iman Issa, Mahmoud Khaled and the collective U5 that together pose an expanded understanding of formalism,” said Antonia Carver, Director, Bidoun Projects. Art Park, the converted car park underneath the galleries at Madinat Jumeirah, returns for the third year at Art Dubai and will foster discussion during the fair, with a range of talks and performances. Film programmes curated by Bidoun Projects and guest curators Masoud Amralla Al Ali, Aram Moshayedi, and duo Özge Ersoy and Sohrab Mohebbi will be screened. Art Park is also home to the Bidoun Lounge, which will host to a set of innovative talks and performances looking at the relationship between archives, film, music and art, presented with UbuWeb, the avant-garde archiving site.

UAE artist Ebtisam Abdul-Aziz will display a new work, specially commissioned by Bidoun Projects for the fair, outdoors at Art Dubai in which she will re-imagine a map of the Arab world according to a set of numerical codes. Abdul-Aziz is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Sharjah, UAE, working in installation, performance, photography and on paper. Her recent exhibitions include the UAE and ADACH Pavilions at 53rd Venice Biennale; Sharjah Biennial 7; and Languages of the Desert, at the Kunst Museum, Bonn, Germany.

To demystify the art fair experience, Bidoun Projects has commissioned artists to act as Art Dubai tour guides. Taking the fair-as-stage-set as inspiration, artists including Daniel Bokhkov, Sophia Al Maria, and Khalil Rabah will conduct daily tours, devising their own narratives through the galleries and the grounds, in an exploration of the pure subjectivity of interpretation. These tours will be offered to all visitors of the fair.

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Consultant: Maha Obeid