By
Tajudeen Sowole
When Global
Art Forum 2015 opens during the 10th edition of Art Dubai holding
from March 18 at Fort Island, Madinat Jumeirah, U.A.E, writers, technologists
and other professionals in creative and digital world will be probing what the
organisers tagged The Future.
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| A Whale Is A Whale by Sophia Al-Maria: PIC BY: The Third Line Gallery. |
Among resource professionals listed for the
event are Art Dubai’s Director, Antonia Carver, Global Art Forum’s
Commissioner, Shumon Basar and Co-Directors Amal Khalaf as well as Uzma Z.
Rizvis. The resource persons, according to the organisers, will introduce the
session by retrieving one decade of trajectory.
In one of the topics, The Future Was The Past,
issues about
museums' role as programmed to protect the past will take the
spotlight with the question - Do they also guard the future? Among the
highlights are Vezzoli talking to Hans Ulrich Obrist and Basar about intrepid
interpretations of art history, the anti-nostalgia imperative and ways of
protesting against forgetting.
Among
other topics is ‘The Future Was Overcast.’
Excerpt
from the press statement: 'The past we know is simply what someone imagined and
manifested into being, the stories that the humans of that time decided to
tell. The future is unwritten, a mass of unwritten stories. Yes there are
reasons to feel afraid; there is experiential trauma from a history thick with
imperialism, colonialism, capitalism. But rather than letting that silence us,
how do we cultivate the capacity to create as our move against destruction? How
do we learn to use collaborative ideation to carve out space for futures that
are collective, resilient, interdependent, compelling, and beautiful? How do we
use science fiction, emergent strategies and pleasure activism to develop a
future we long for?"
Still on projection into the future, the
programme of the event adds that Christine Sun Kim is expected to present works
developed in relation to the different shades of the sound and meaning of the
future. Her work breaks down rigid definitions by piecing together a tangle of
overlapping languages and systems, including American Sign Language (ASL),
which is similar to sound in its intrinsic spatiality.
Questions
to be distilled include: Do futures have personalities? Can futures get further
away, altered or moved by the space that we give them?
Included
in the programme is The Future Was Cloud. "Since the second half of
the 20th century, we have lived under the shadow of two clouds: the mushroom
cloud of the atomic bomb, and the ‘cloud’ of distributed information networks.
João Ribas, curator of the Museu Serralves’ exhibition Under the Clouds,
explores how the central metaphor of cold war paranoia becomes the utopian
metaphor of today. What are the effect of the Cloud on life and work, leisure
and love, and on images, bodies, and minds?
João Ribas (Senior Curator and
Deputy Director, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art)"
On the list of speakers are Lauren Beukes and
Sophia Al Maria who are scheduled to talk to Basar about why the deep past of
the desert is also the perennial projection of literary and cinematic futures. It’s
a time-travel trip through Oman and Australia, Namibia and South Africa, via
Tatooine, Abu Dhabi and Arrakis.
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