CAP March 2014 Schedule

Opening reception: 9/4/2014 (7:00 – 9:00pm)

Exhibition dates: 10/4/2014 – 19/4/2014

Contemporary Art  Platform / The Art Room

My First Solo show / 30 Days 3 artists, is a project presenting young emerging Kuwaiti artists for their first solo exhibition at The Art Room gallery, one of Contemporary Art Platform’s exhibition spaces. This project gives an opportunity for 3 young artists every year to show their work for 10 days within a reflective artistic community supported by CAP Kuwait. The first artist in this project is Mohammed Al Kouh who uses an original approach towards taking his audience back to the time when stories were passed on between generations through hand colored black and white photographs. The exhibition titled "Tomorrow's Past" serves as a catalyst to experiencing a specific Kuwaiti nostalgia to a past where this place was known as the pearl of the Gulf.

In the photography of Al Kouh, the work focuses on landmarks reflecting an almost forgotten Kuwaiti landscape as well as whispers of stories told between generations as though they are dreams from a parallel reality. The photographs commemorate past buildings in a futuristic composition of a glorious past of the architecture of Kuwait.  Al Kouh’s photographs embark on a powerful journey into a time that refuses to be limited to just a memory of the past, but however still insist on existing as a deeper present reality. Al Kouh’s work takes viewers back to a time where buildings in Kuwait were the landmark of this “Pearl of the Gulf” city and where stories were told as if each word is a pearl of an infinite necklace. click here to read more.

50 YEARS OF PRINTMAKING 

MOHAMMED OMAR KHALIL 

Opening reception: 23/4/2014 (7:00 - 9:00 pm)

Exhibition dates: 24/4/2014  - 15/6/2014  

Contemporary Art Platform / Exhibition Space

Project conceived by : Hayfa Aljishi - Founder of Al Bareh Gallery 

Book Published by Al Bareh Art Gallery - Bahrain 

Curated in Kuwait by : Abed Al Kadiri 

These works, many of which had never been exhibited before, presents an alternate view of the artist’s entire career, not only as a traveler between cultures and epochs, but as re-interpreter of the meaning of visual culture in general: He attempts to re-locate sensorial experience elsewhere than with the pure colors that characterize the postmodern, hereby searching in the black, for a warmer place where his book of art and life meets the viewer.   

Applying a traditional technique acquired from European print-makers from earlier centuries, Khalil’s etchings on black represent with vividness all his pictorial periods, from the early student days investigating modern art through his numerous travels, the experiments with abstract figures, and ultimately renditions of tributes to modern music and classical painting. Withdrawing from the visual field, the artist is opening the possibility of entering the world with an altogether different morphology, causing apparently unrelated elements to collide into each other and emerge as distinct syntactic compositions. A precise amalgamation between folkloric elements and handicraft, and the timeless quality of art history, give birth to composite worlds with life of their own.

Mohammed Omar Khalil has been both a pioneer and role model in print-making throughout the region, and one of the most important living artists working on the format that he has as well taught in prestigious American universities, such as Columbia and the Parsons School of Design at the New School. Staying away from the minimal and abstract that shaped his generation, the artist has developed a grammar of his own, excavating surfaces of consciousness and presenting them as narrative sequences in snapshots that might be arranged differently each time we observe them. The fifty years encompassed in this exhibition are by no means a composite whole more than they are the traces and coded signals of a fertile career, nowhere finished and still on the search for new groundbreaking paths.

The artist is one of the distinguished artistic practitioners of the Middle East, having pioneered not only printmaking but conceptual drawing and different styles in painting interweaving contemporary ideas with classical techniques and the use of ready-mades and crass-objects. Born in Burri, Sudan, in 1936, studied at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum, Sudan, and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. Since 1967, he has lived and worked in New York. His work has been showcased in important venues all over the world, including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Kunsthalle Darmstadt in Germany, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, both in New York City.

   UPCOMING EVENT    APRIL

BOOK LAUNCH 

THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF OBJECTS / Mai Al-Nakib

Book Launch: 2/4/2014 (7:00 - 9:00 pm)
Talk & Presentation by Mai Al Nakib: (7:30 - 8:10 pm)

Contemporary Art Platform / The Art Room

Signed copies will be available

Contemporary Art Platform and Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation invite you to celebrate the launch of The Hidden Light of Objects,  Mai Al-Nakib’s first collection of short stories. 

The headlines tell of war, unrest, and religious clashes.  But if you look beyond them you may see another side of life in the Middle East—adolescent love, yearnings for independence, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib’s short stories carefully trace overlooked moments in the lives of those who reside in this fraught region of the world— and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.  Mai Al-Nakib is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Kuwait University.  

     OPEN CALL      

Per | Form 

40 Days Intensive Workshop

Program Dates : 10/4/2014 - 20/5/2014 

Project led by: Mo Reda 

Selected artists will share a studio space at CAP with the curator and each other for the duration of the program. Through meetings and seminars, artists will work towards researching the performance and Dramatic arts in the classical /historical sense as well as the modern and contemporary expressions of performance related arts and the cross over between fine art, contemporary dance and theater. For this project artists are encouraged to research Kuwait’s rich history in Performance and theater arts and to write their own concept in order to implement it into a performance / public intervention or a HAPPENING.

Participants will work individually and in a group to create solo and group performances, acts and an exhibition and learn about the curatorial, organizational and theatrical aspects of shows and exhibition, and receive intensive mentoring/coaching from the curator and guest mentors through a dynamic process.

Project Program: Curator talk and presentation of project, seminars on dramatic arts and contemporary performance arts, Workshops in writing a performance and dramaturgy techniques, Workshops in how to researching and conceptualize before producing art works, Workshops in the public intervention acts and how to present your self as a sculpture / art work in the public space, Collective and individual mentoring and coaching from Curator /Director, Collective meeting for reflection and support, Gallery visits and film screenings. 

Guest mentors and speakers: Hasan Hujairi  - Musicologist and performance artist, Neil Van der Linden – Co founder Gulf Art Guide, Freddy Dewe Mathews – conceptual / performance  artist

Application deadline  05 / 04 / 2014

For more information about the workshop and Mo Reda click here 

For registrations contact : info@capkuwait .com or deena@capkuwait.com 

      FILM SCREENING        

We are happy to continue our CAP free film screenings this month with Lowave art film collection titled 'Human Frames' which presents works of video art and experimental cinema from 99 European and Asian contemporary artists who put in perspective 10 moods such as happiness, desire, madness, fanaticism, fear, anger, isolation, melancholy and the Asian concepts of mono no aware and impermanence. In addition each screening will be followed by an optional open discussion! 

APRIL 13th 2014 /  IMPERMANENCE

“Seeya in elektrik dreamz” By Nelson Yeo, Singapore. 2011

About the film:  This volume presents five contemporary works from Asia and Europe that reflect on the permanent becoming and changing of all beings and the concomitant ephemerality of human existence. The films invite us to look back in order to move forward. Featuring: Gerard Cairaschi, Nelson Yeo, Nose Chan, Christopher Lau, Bin Chuen Choi, and Ashish Avikunthak. Time: 7:00 pm / Duration: 80 min     

APRIL 27th 2014 / MELANCHOLY 

“Oh Torment (Wa waila)” By Monira Al Qadiri, Kuwait. 2008

About the film: This volume presents nine contemporary works from Asia and Europe that arouse our curiosity of other cultural interpretations of melancholy. The films invite us to revisit the things we once considered familiar, to look at them from a different perspective, and ultimately, to subject our own cultural system of scrutiny. Featuring: Marylene Negro, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, Tony Wu, George Hsin, Yuki Kawamura, Monira Al Qadiri, Matthias Groebel, Kazumi Kanemaki, Vaughan Pilikian, and Fabio Scacchioli. Time: 7:00 pm / Duration: 64 min

    WORKSHOPS     
ABANDONDANCE I ART I YOGA 

ABANDON: A complete surrender to natural impulses, freedom from inhibitions, restraint, concern or worry. 

ABANDON is an experimental workshop that utilizes Dance, Art and Yoga as pathways to inspire freedom, discovery, and connection to the body. Building strength and flexibility opens a door to our body’s natural expressions. The workshop will focus on breath, gravity, yoga asana, improvisation, and both stillness and movement using creative choreography and gesture drawing. Bring a lightheart, curiosity and a willingness to explore. 

Deena Qabazard is a Kuwaiti visual artist who was born and raised in the States. She threads art, dance and yoga to experiment with the physical/mental capabilities of the human body; a main topic explored in her artwork. Qabazard holds a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts from The Evergreen State College in Washington State, additionally a certified Hatha Yoga teacher trained by The Yoga One Studios in California, where she also taught yoga and dance.  

For more information and registration contact: info@capkuwait.com or deena@capkuwait.com 

      CURRENT EXHIBITION     

KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE WALL