AGENDA
INTERNATIONAL Exhibitions from Beirut to cyberspace echo not only themes of uneasiness and despair when communication and solidarity break down, but also the way in which great art thrives through intercultural inspiration and exchange
Until 22 January 2012 Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Uncanny Encounters Uncanny Encounters features contemporary works by six women artists of Turkey’s younger generation who explore the possibilities of photography to communicate an unsettling feeling evoked by something familiar yet foreign. Pictured is a work from Zeynep Kayan’s Torn series. Kayan (b. 1986) reworks her photographs and videos to create new visual pieces from old ones and achieves this through a repetitive creative process based on the destruction/reconstruction of the image. /2
Until 6 February 2012 Louvre Museum, Paris
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The Museum World
Until 24 December 2011
The museum’s curator of honour this season is Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Described as an “explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation,” Clézio, for whom there is no hierarchy when it comes to art, interprets the theme “museums are worlds” by including mats from Vanuatu, paintings from Haiti, Ife heads from Nigeria, paintings on the French Revolution, and Mexican ex-votos. Pictured: Head of Ife woman, Nigeria. Courtesy of the Louvre Museum./3
Agial Art Gallery, Beirut
Canticle of Death “Green Parrot”, “Blue Bunny”, “Red Rose”, “Green Flax”, “Yellow Sun” are just some of the strangely cheerful and innocent names given to British nuclear weapon project disguised under the code name “Rainbow!”. In his Canticle of Death exhibition Tagreed Darghouth (b. Lebanon, 1979) wonders: Why personify a weapon that destroys entire cities? Pictured: “Brighter than a thousand suns…”, 2011 /1
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Until 12 January 2012 The Third Line, Dubai
Disconnected Through this haunting yet moving photography exhibition inspired by the city of Karachi, Pakistani photographer Izdeyar Setna explores the imprint of the city’s descent into anarchy on the collective psyche of its inhabitants. Taking a different approach to traditional portraiture, Setna strips each of his subjects by painting his or her face in monochrome and reducing the surroundings to a neutral background. Pictured: In the Moment, 2011. Courtesy of The Third Line. /4
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8 QULTURA