Contemporary Identities, Issue 8

 The latest issue of the online contemporary art magazine, Contemporary Identities features my profiles on two hugely talented artists, 

Rachael Kantaris and Paul Wadsworth,

both of whom live and work in Cornwall, UK. 

Have a look at Contemporary Practices #8 

- Rachael Kantaris - Paul Wadsworth -

Contemporary Identities, Issue 7

 The latest issue of the online contemporary art magazine, Contemporary Identities features my profiles on two amazing artists: Afra Al Dhaheri and Sax Impey, both of whom have worked in the Porthmeor Studios in St Ives! Have a look 

New Art, New Markets

 September/October issue of Canvas Magazine

After Darkness: Social Impact and Art Institutions

Review of the exhibition by photographer Abbie Trayler Smith 

Museum Worlds Journal
Volume 6 (July 2018) Issue 1 - p.132-138

The photographer Abbie Trayler Smith traveled to Iraq in the autumn of 2016, after the Islamic-State-controlled areas of Northern Iraq, as far as the city of Mosul, had been liberated by allied forces. She traveled with Oxfam Iraq to cover the humanitarian situation and the problems that refugees and “ISIS widows” faced, as they were living in makeshift camps before they attempted to return to their homes. Many of her digital C-type photographs in the After Darkness series portray frozen moments in time: a bedraggled mother, arms around her fair-haired children as a black cloud from burning oil fills the sky behind her; waves of dirt and sand on the window of one of the rickety buses that transported people from one horrific situation to the next; a disfigured child standing with her mother and father; and countless other pictures of women and children surrounded by annihilation and devastation. Beside each picture, Trayler Smith has added a short description or story to give the viewer an idea of the context of each photograph. And this is what she has to say about her motivation.

"Museums of the Future - Editorial Interview" in Museological Review 22

Summer 2018

The theme of this year's Museological Review is Museums of the Future.
As a member of the editorial team for this peer-reviewed journal, edited by post-graduate students of the School of Museum Studies, Leicester University, I am grateful to have featured my friend, Valerie Hillings, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs for the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation Abu Dhabi Project and Maisa Al Qassimi, Programmes Manager at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in the Editorial Interview on Museums of the Future (page 5-8).

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Chief of Chiefs - The Father of A Nation

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of HH Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the United Arab Emirates, I was honoured to have this article published in The Camden Magazine, an independent magazine linked to Westminster School, of which I am an alumnus.

Meditations on the Temporariness of Refugee Life

Permanent Temporariness is the exhibition which opened at NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery on 24 February 2018. It is an exploration of the enduring permanence of the refugees environment and the concept of ‘temporary people’, by award-winning, research architecture duo Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti.

Until 2014, Hilal worked within the United Nationals Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and she continues to work around the refugee problem for the Swedish Public Art Agency, in northern Sweden, and leads the ‘spaces for hospitality’ initiative in Stockholm, with the support of the Arab Foundation for Arts and Culture (AFAC) and the Modern Museet.

Petti is a Professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University in the United States. Together, they founded the Decolonizing Architecture Institute (DAi) with Eyal Wizman in 2007, a project that explores the political use of land as a tool for colonization. They also created the Campus in Camps educational project, aimed at democratizing knowledge and educational structures within the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. 

 

The Dheisheh Camp, the world’s oldest refugee camp, was the inspiration for one of the works in the exhibition: ‘Refugee Heritage’. ‘Refugee Heritage’ is an installation of a series of lightbox-mounted photographs taken by an official UNESCO photographer in the historic Dheisheh camp, in Bethlehem. The photographic installation explores the politics of space and time, as well as the paradoxical permanence of temporary spaces. Though quickly assembled as a temporary living solutions for displaced families, camps such as Dheisheh became permanent homes for generations of families.

‘Common Assembly’ is a video installation and concrete steps which comments on the ironically permanent nature of the crude structural assemblage that occurs in the refugee environment. Built out of necessity and hastily assembled, the moveable concrete steps that seem to lead nowhere, like other temporary camp structures and the refugees’ life in general, lack the careful planning and painstaking assemblage that would be given to a house or lifestyle that was not caught in this transitory political and economic situation.

Permanent Temporariness is a moving collection of works that strike at the very core of human existence. The exhibition includes several installation, performance and sound works in the gallery and other installation works spread out over the NYUAD campus. The breadth of the exhibition emphasises the boundlessness of the refugee problem, as well as Hilal and Petti’s artistic expression and creativity.

Outside the university’s dining area, ‘The Concrete Tent’ is a monumental structure, which plays on the paradox of permanent temporariness - a concrete house in the form of a tent, with billowing, curved walls belying the unwelcoming temporariness and limited confines of a refugee family’s home. There is a sad irony to ‘The Concrete House’ and it can, of course, be understood on so many different levels.

Salwa Mikdadi, Co-curator of the exhibition and NYU Associate Professor of Art History, has presented Hilal and Petti’s work at the Venice Biennial in 2009 as part of the Palestine Pavilion. Mikdadi suggests that the Permanent Temporariness works offer ‘the audience new ways of engaging with this critical and timely topic’.

Her co-curator, Bana Kattan, curator of the NYU Abu Dhabi Gallery sees the exhibition as a ‘large-scale, meditative retrospective’. Adding that Hilal and Petti’s work is, ”both locally relevant and internationally significant, and this subject matter is particularly resonant now.”

Permanent Temporariness is a beautifully contemplative exhibition of works that belie not only the stark reality of human transience, but also the resourcefulness and hopefulness of the human spirit.

 The exhibition will be accompanied by a full programme of talks and events – see: http://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/