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Symposium
How Culture Builds Cities: Berlin and Abu Dhabi
10 December 2016 @ 3 – 4:30pm
At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien
The Symposium is part of the Exhibition
Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates
At Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien
9 – 22 December 2016
Presented In Partnership with the Etihad Modern Art Gallery
and Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize
MORE INFORMATION ON ART NOMADS HERE >>
SPEAKERS:
Janet Bellotto, Zayed University, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises
David Elliott, Art Historian, Curator, Writer, Museum Director, Judge of Sovereign Art Prize
Jeni Fulton, Editor-in-Chief of Sleek Magazine
Vanina Saracino, Curator
WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE SYMPOSIUM HERE:
Abu Dhabi and Berlin: two capitol cities redefining themselves through art; cultural capital at work in two radically different cultures; two places which voraciously ingest influences from abroad, yet produce cultural outputs inextricably linked to the identity of each city. Abu Dhabi builds the Louvre and the Guggenheim with the world’s top architects, while Berlin rebuilds its Stadtschloss, re-homes its museums, and brings famous museum directors from London to run its theaters. Is Abu Dhabi going for the “Berlin Effect” of cultural capital? Is this a parallel trajectory, or is there something else at play here? We invite art professionals working in and with the UAE to discuss this and other questions linking the two cities.
Berlin. Home to countless galleries and museums. Adoptive home to countless artists. Berlin has come to be known internationally as the Art Capitol of Europe, attracting artists from around the world. And not only artists. At the geographical center of Europe, Berlin acts as a vortex, sucking in the cool young things of art, fashion, media, music, professionals and tourists, migrant laborers and refugees.
Berlin is a city of nomads where everyone is always from elsewhere, somewhere anywhere but here. It is a city of mobile people and moving images. In willful defiance of its painful history, Berlin, the perpetually evolving city, welcomes everyone. In this age of displacement, Berlin is a city constantly rebuilding itself. On a mission to outgrow its legacy of war, Berlin redefines and rebuilds itself through art and culture.
Abu Dhabi. An oasis in the desert reinventing itself as the art capitol of the Middle East. A culture of pearl divers whose palaces until only fifty years ago were tents, today builds skyscrapers and museums. Adoptive home to the Louvre and the Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi is a city of nomads who build monuments to permanence designed by the world’s greatest architects. Living in a culture of incredibly rapid modernization, Emeraties are balanced on the precarious edge of maintaining their heritage while actively redefining itself through influences from abroad. A city of nomads no longer, Abu Dhabi instead opens itself to the phenomenon of art nomads, aiming to attract cultural tourism, and the ever mobile cultural producers which make it happen.
SPEAKERS:
JANET BELLOTTO
Janet Bellotto is an artist, educator and curator from Toronto, who splits her time teaching in Dubai as an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University. She was the Artistic Director for the 20th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Dubai and engages in projects of cultural exchange. Water, documented events and personal narratives are elements that have shaped Bellotto’s sculpture/installation practice, including mediums of photography, video and performance, while exhibiting internationally in a variety of collective, group and solo exhibitions.
DAVID ELLIOTT
David Elliott sits on the Advisory Boards of both MOMENTUM and The Sovereign Art Foundation, and he served as one of the judges for the inaugural The Sovereign Art Foundation MENA Art Prize in 2016, selecting the three finalists shown in Art Nomads – Made In The Emirates. David Elliott is an English born curator and writer. He was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England (1976-1996); Director of Moderna Museet [The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art] in Stockholm, Sweden (1996-2001); Founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2001-2006); the first Director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art [Istanbul Modern] (2007); Artistic Director of The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival for a Precarious Age, the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2008–2010); in 2012 he was Artistic Director of The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art, the 1st International Kyiv Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011-12); he was Artistic Director of A Time for Dreams, the IV International Moscow Biennale of Young Art (2014). David Elliott was the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2008) and Visiting Professor in Museum Studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong (2008/11/13). From 1998 until 2004 he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums of Modern Art).
JENI FULTON
Jeni Fulton is Art and Editor-in-Chief of Sleek Magazine, a Berlin-based print publication covering all aspects of contemporary visual culture. She obtained an M.A. (Hons) in philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and is currently completing her PhD Thesis on “Value and Evaluation in Contemporary Art” at the Faculty for Cultural Theory at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung Berlin. Her PhD thesis examines how different systems of art evaluation (economic, symbolic and institutional) interact in the field of contemporary art to create a concept of contemporary artistic value. She has written catalogue texts for artists including Christian Jankowski. She is bilingual in German and English and is fluent in French.
VANINA SARACINO
Vanina Saracino is a Berlin-based independent curator. Since 2013 she is in charge the contemporary art program on the experimental, non-narrative TV channel ikonoTV and is responsible of external projects with museums and institutions; in 2014, she co-founded the curatorial project OLHO in Brasil, exploring the relationship between contemporary art and Cinema. Other projects include Un lugar habitable es un evento (former museum MAMM, Medellín, Colombia, 2012), Vertical World – approaching gravity (General Public, Berlin, 2012), and the environmental project Art Speaks Out, for ikonoTV (shown at Istanbul Modern, 2015, and COP22, Marrakesh, 2016). Graduated in Communication with a thesis in semiotics of the arts, she holds a masters degree in Arts Management (GIOCA, Università di Bologna) and in Philosophy and Art Theory (UAB, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona). She is a member of the IKT, international association of curators.
