Taking place over five days in both Qatar and the UAE—March 15-16 in Doha and March 19-21 in Dubai—the Global Art Forum is part of Art Dubai’s regular program and is a regional platform for cultural debate.
Entitled ‘Meanwhile…History’, the 2014 edition of the Global Art Forum has been programmed by London-based writer Shumon Basar; Casablanca-born and Paris-based curator-translator Omar Berrada, who is also the co-director of the international residency center for artists Dar al-Ma’mûn in Marrakech; and the Kuwait-born and Jordan-based artist and curator Ala Younis.
‘’Meanwhile…History takes Eric Hobsbawm’s [and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s] A Protest Against Forgetting as its starting point,” says Shumon Basar, commissioner of the Global Art Forum. “As our experience of time accelerates, so does the build-up of history. Amnesia is built into this process by default. This year’s Forum is an occasion to time-travel to some of history’s blind spots.”
The Global Art Forum will take its audience through various cultural and social topics across the ages, including (but not limited to) the early view of universal history of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah; Soviet Orientalism; the Cold War; the 60 year anniversary of the documenta art exhibition; the so-called “Short Seventies” in the UAE and across the world; and various cultural experiments in Kuwait.
This year’s Global Art Forum will be simultaneously translated into Arabic and English and will be live-streamed with the support of the Ibraaz/Kamel Lazaar Foundation. The schedule of the Forum, which features the full list of contributors, is available on Art Dubai’s website.
