Dubai’s Renowned Artspace Gallery Proudly Presents an Exclusive Group Show Dedicated to Middle Eastern Modern and Contemporary Art A diverse and moving exhibition of contemporary works by various artists Dubai May 2011 – Artspace Gallery is pleased to be showcasing a new selection of works by renowned Middle Eastern artists at an exhibition that is taking place from May 2- May 3o. To give you a sneak peak of what is to come, we will be including works by Kamel Yahiaoui, Hani Zurob, George Bahgory, Ayad Alkhadi, and photographer Harriet Logan.
Kamel Yahiaoui was born in 1966 in Algeria. Attending the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts from 1985-89, he moved to France thereafter to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes with a scholarship. He has worked and lived in Paris since 1992. Growing up in the Casbah of Algiers has greatly influenced his art as well as inspiration from his travels. Equally as an Algerian living in France, the artist is well acquainted with the experience of crossing borders, and issues such as colonization, extremism and injustice remain prevalent throughout his work. Expressing himself through multiple mediums, such as everyday objects presented as sculptures, and painting on canvas, rugs and other items, enables Yahiaoui to thus immediately shape his thoughts and feelings onto a piece. He is also an avid poet, having descended from a strong family tradition of oral poetry. His work has been exhibited in numerous personal and collective exhibitions in Paris, and notably in the Word Into Art exhibition by the British Museum at the DIFC in 2008.
Hani Zurob was born in Rafah (Gaza) in 1976. He achieved his Fine Arts degree in Nablus in 1999, before settling in Ramallah. In 2006 he received a grant allowing him to reside at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Zurob’s work deals with situations and events that the artists has experienced, expressing no boundaries between political and private matter, eventually leading towards displacement. He says, “What I try to do when I paint is to rewrite my life; I try to place myself as a witness of the situations and the events I experience… when painting displacement becomes a matter of exploring the state of Wait, Absence, Halt and Deferral, I wonder if I can still talk about the particularity of the bodies I paint by relating them to some local conditions or to any specific dates.” He has been able to participate in solo and group shows all over the world from Atlanta, Marrakech and Paris, to Seoul, Damascus, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (UK), the 11th Cairo Biennale, and the more recent Palestine: La création dans tous ses états held at the Arab World Institute in Paris (2009). He has also staged many solo exhibitions in Palestine and was awarded the Al-Qattan Foundation Young Artist Prize (Ramallah) in 2002. In 2009 Zurob was granted the Bourse et Prix Renoir. George Bahgory was born in Egypt in 1935. In 1955, he studied at the Fine Arts Institute of Egypt and moved to Paris in 1970 where he continued his studies at the Fine Arts Institute of Paris. He went on to receive his PH.D in “Egyptian Drawings in Picasso Artworks” from Sorpon University. George Bahgory is mainly seen as a cartoonist. He focuses on music as well Middle Eastern figures in his art works, which can also be seen as a narrative on daily happenings. Bahgory’s interest in cartoons dates back to his art-school days in Cairo following the Egyptian revolution. Fascinated by the power of caricature to highlight reality, Bahgory became the first cartoonist in Egypt to move into sophisticated commentary. He received many prestigious awards in Italy, Spain, France and Yugoslavia. Bahgory has also been credited as novelist with a distinguished journalistic style in drawing and editing. He has published six books, three of which were dedicated to art.
Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Ayad Alkadhi spent his childhood between England, the United Arab Emirates and Baghdad. He is an MFA graduate of New York University’s ITP Tisch School of The Arts. At the age of 23, Alkadhi decided to leave Iraq for a better future after the first Gulf War. His temporary residence was in Amman, Jordan, where he exhibited works at the Amman branch of the Orfally Gallery. Shortly thereafter he moved to Auckland, New Zealand where he had his first one-man art show at the Aeotea Galley in Auckland in 1999. His work centers on Arabic calligraphy in stylized forms. Calligraphy in the form of caligrams is used in his paintings as trenchant commentary on the intersection of Near Eastern and Western culture, politics and religion. These creations are deeply personal and sometimes incorporate his painted image – a reflection of an artist at the crux of East and West polarities. Alkadhi’s first group exhibit in the U.S. was at the Fire Island Pines Arts Project’s 9th Biennial art show, followed by a group showing at the National Arts Club in New York, where his work earned the Will Barnet Award. Other group showings were with the Nader Gallery and LT-MH Gallery in New York City and with the Iraqi Art Gallery in Chicago. He has exhibited in the Middle East, New Zealand, Europe and in the U.S. British born Harriet Logan (1967) studied Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design where she completed a photo-thesis documenting the life of a young man dying of AIDS. Since then she has worked on world-wide assignments for international newspapers and magazines as a photojournalist. Her stories have covered Somalia, Sudan, former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Mongolia, Iran, China, Iraq, Kenya, Kashmir, Angola, Mozambique, India, and America. Her highly acclaimed assignment “Women in Afghanistan” shot for the Sunday Times Magazine in 1997, was exhibited at Visa pour l’Image, the annual international festival of photojournalism in Perpignan, and has subsequently been shown in Los Angeles, Paris, Brussels and Warsaw. She has also published a book “Unveiled” by Regan Books in 2002 in which she revisits Afghanistan to meet with the women she worked in 1997. Harriet has received a number of awards including the Ian Parry award in 1992, Magazine Photographer at the 1999 Picture Editor’s Awards in 1999, and The Vic Odden Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2000.
Exhibition opening A cocktail reception will be held at Artspace, located in The Gate Village, DIFC, from 7:00 pm on the 2nd of May 2011. Media is welcomed from 6.00pm.
Artspace Sossy Dikijian +9714 3230820 sossy@artspace-dubai.com
About Artspace Gallery: Launched in May 2003 at the Fairmont Dubai, Artspace Gallery invited Dubai and the region to acquaint themselves with Contemporary Middle Eastern Art. Having dedicated the past five years to promoting and establishing Contemporary Middle Eastern artists in the region, Artspace Gallery now boasts a portfolio of over 20 artists, and is located in the art district at The Gate Village, DIFC. For more information and location: Visit www.artspace-dubai.com or call +9714 3230820
CAMO HEAD III, 122x183cm, mixed media on canvas:
I AM BAGHDAD XIV 2009 182x182cm, mixed media on canvas:
George Bahgory Untitled 18:
George Bahgory Untitled 19:
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