Fortune-teller: Reflections on the Future of Arts, Education and Economy in the Middle East
April 7, 2010, 6:30 PM

What does the future hold? Speculations on the political, economic and social future of the Middle East are common in many spheres. Political economists Kiren Aziz Chaudhry and Saskia Sassen join Mishaal Al Gergawi, curator and critic, for an informed discussion, building on each other’s perspectives to propose potential directions for regional developments with implications for arts and education internationally.

Location: 19 Washington Square North

Mishaal Al Gergawi Critic
Kiren Aziz Chaudhry Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
Saskia Sassen Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

Thought this might be perfect for avantcaire. Empty Quarter sent out this email invite, then sent a retraction an hour later…

via flavorwire and the daily beast.

alex ross has me excited to learn more about iannis xenakis. in his waveforms article, we learn of the proposed settings for xenakis’ “polytopes”: multimedia experiences that blended electronic sound, live performance, light shows, and temporary structures. these included persepolis in iran.

xenakis- architect + musician- generally a winning combo- was at one point an assistant to le corbusier before committing to music and there is an exhibition of his compositional, mathematical and architectural sketches currently on at the drawing center on wooster st which i’m hoping to check out this weekend.

alex says ‘to understand fully how his pieces are put together, you need a good working knowledge of probability theory and combinatorial mathematics, among other disciplines‘ and end his piece with xenakis quoted as wanting ‘a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciosuness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect.‘

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• Persepolis + Remixes Edition 1 (netnewmusic.net)
• Xenakis at the Mall (netnewmusic.net)
• (avant-garde composer) Iannis Xenakis exhibit at Drawing Center + related shows (JACK Quartet, So Percussion, more) (brooklynvegan.com)

only to wander in to the anish kapoor exhibit which i had forgotten was showing.

kapoor’s piece, called memory, made for a lovely calm contemplative epilogue to sehgal’s participatory ‘this progress’ exhibit which was the most fun i have had at a museum since the blue whale at the museum of natural history turned me back into a little boy over the summer.

after being asked to think about progress (what is progress? is it always good? are we progressing? will tomorrow be better than today?), memory (fluid, fragmented, compressed) and lovesex (intimacy, male-female, female-male power structures / struggles, performance, sanctity), von hantelmann’s questioning of what makes art politically and socially relevant was almost too much to take in. she had some interesting ideas and theories about the evolutions of the exhibition, museums and art in the ages of industrialism, consumerism and post-modernism (i only really understood bits and pieces of her talk). though her thesis that the contemporary format of the museums and the exhibition was a representation of individualism that was not relevant in a non-western context seemed a stretch. the question of course if highly pertinent in the context of the guggenheim’s upcoming abu dhabi expansion.
there was some concern in her talk and in the audience’s questions about how museums would translate to the ‘east’ with china’s ambitions to build a thousand museums mentioned condescendingly and almost menacingly a few times.
von hantelmann did illuminate sehgal’s work placing it in the context of our consumerist, post-physical information-age: ‘if it can be bought and sold, it is a product and can therefore be defined as art’.

i don’t think the guggenheim has ever looked better completely stripped of art.

oh and you really should buy historicity.

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• A day of art (gothamgal.com)
• Tino Sehgal: Thunder Under the Rotunda (artsjournal.com)
• Animal Collective & Danny Perez Bring Transverse Temporal Gyrus To The Guggenheim Museum (stereogum.com)
• Art Review | ‘Contemplating the Void’: Take This Museum and Shape It (nytimes.com)

he showed a beautiful shot of burj dubai khalifa at pecha kucha over the weekend. go seek.

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• PechaKucha for Haiti, biggest distributed conference with smallest ecological footprint, raises money for Architecture for Humanity (treehugger.com)
• Designers and architects brainstorm Haiti’s future (theworld.org)
• A striking image of downtown Dubai (robertg69.wordpress.com)

ht mona eltahawy.