Slavs and Tatars

Language Arts

March 17 - April 17, 2014

The Third Line is pleased to present Language Arts, Slavs and Tatars’ first solo show in the Middle East. Following a run of internationally acclaimed museum shows and publications, this new body of work is based on the performative use of language, which is at the heart of the collective’s practice. The Third Line show will open parallel to MARKER, the collective's curatorial début at Art Dubai.

Hassan Hajjaj

My Rock Stars Experimental, Volume 1| Crawford Art Gallery, Cork City, Ireland | January 17 - March 1, 2014

Hassan Hajjaj's installation My Rock Stars Experimental, Volume I is simultaneously a haut-couture street experiment and a revival of African photography from the 1960s and 70s, while celebrating present-day musicians, unsung artists and personal inspirations in the artist's life. The film is part of a series of works which is an on-going examination of belonging in an increasingly globalized society where boundaries of cultural identity – most notably African, Arabic and Western – are constantly changing. Hassan, designs the costumes of the musicians and singers using traditional fabrics and found objects which he sources from local markets in his town of birth, Marrakech, and in doing so, bridges the gap between past and present cultures, creating pieces that seamlessly merge folkloric elements into Western contemporary art.

Ala Ebtekar

The Vastness is Bearable | Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara | January 25 - December 7, 2014

In his book, Contact (1985), noted astronomer and science writer, Carl Sagan wrote, “She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” Inspired by this quote and the themes of the book—contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced, extraterrestrial life form—the third annual exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara’s satellite location at Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara features artists who contemplate the vastness of the cosmos. Whereas last year’s exhibition looked to the mysteries of the sea, this year’s presentation gazes up, featuring artists whose works reflect human fascination, curiosity, and awe with the universe.

Hayv Kahraman

ARAB CONTEMPORARY - Architecture, Culture and Identity | Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Gl. Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Danemark | January 31 - May 4, 2014

CONTEMPORARY ARAB is the second chapter in the series “Architecture, Culture and Identity” – and is a successor to the exhibition NEW NORDIC, which Louisiana showed in 2012. The series is about how architecture is both a bearer of identity and promotes the shaping of the cultural distinctiveness of a country or a region. Just as there are ongo­ing discussions of whether anything specifically Nordic exists, the exhibition CONTEMPORARY ARAB attempts to home in on features shared by the Arab countries – from the Arabian Peninsula through Lebanon to Morocco. The Arab world is first and foremost connected by language, but there are other common features that point both to a shared understanding of space and a visual culture where one can draw lines from calligraphy over certain construction elements to architecture on the very grand scale. CONTEMPORARY ARAB traces some of these common lines for consideration, and a picture of the notion of ‘the Arabian’ will arise through various stories from places where significant developments are happening right now. CONTEMPORARY ARAB is a cross-over exhibition that mixes architecture, art, photography, documentary and film.

Rana Begum

Dhaka Art Summit | Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh | February 7 - 9, 2014

The Samdani Art Foundation announces the second edition of the Dhaka Art Summit from February 7 to 9, 2014, a pioneering initiative for South Asian art that brings together artists, curators, museums, galleries and visitors from across Bangladesh and the world to discover institutional quality works in a non-commercial environment. This art festival will present over 250 artists from South Asian countries and presentations by 32 local and international galleries.

Rana Begum will be creating works for the Solo Projects section. Returning to her childhood fascination with basket weaving, she will be creating a monumental sculptural dome that references light in the Koran and immerses the viewer in an innovative play between light and shadow.

Zineb Sedira

Ship to Shore: Art and the Lure of the Sea | SeaCity Museum, Southampton, UK | February 8 - May 4, 2014

Ship to Shore: Art and the Lure of the Sea explores how contemporary artists have engaged with seas and oceans. The exhibition is an intriguing visual feast of paintings, films, photography and prints alongside archival objects, evoking vast ocean expanses, the romance of sea travel and ship-to-shore communications.

Ship to Shore features major international artists including Chris Burden, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Dorothy Cross, Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Susan Hiller, Isaac Julien, Clare Kerr, Steffi Klenz, Langlands and Bell, Richard Long, Humphrey Ocean, Simon Patterson, Mark Power, Zineb Sedira, Yinka Shonibare and Catherine Yass, alongside historic paintings such as La Vague by Gustav Courbet and artefacts including Donald Crowhurst’s ‘Navicator’ from the National Maritime Museum.

Youssef Nabil

Ri-conoscere Michelangelo | Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy | February 18 - May 18, 2014

Coordinated by the Academy of Arts and Design, and in collaboration with Fratelli Alinari IDEA AG, the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence presents an exhibition celebrating four hundred and fifty years after the death of Michelangelo Buonarroti. It addresses the interest and admiration for the artist from the nineteenth century to contemporary times, through the work of sculptors, painters and photographers who have looked to the figure of Michelangelo and his works as iconographic reference for their accomplishments.

Starting from the production of photographs by some of the most famous ateliers and professionals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the exhibit tries to highlight the role photography has played in consolidating critical acclaim and iconography of Michelangelo and, through it, the celebration of his myth.

Ebtisam AbdulAziz

The 32nd Annual Exhibition of Emirates Fine Arts Society | Sharjah Art Museum, East Wing | February 19 - April 30, 2014

In continuing her investigation of alternative methods of autobiography, Emirati artist Ebtisam AbdulAziz will present her series My Phone Diary at this year’s 32nd Annual Exhibition of the Emirates Fine Arts Society exhibit. Curated by Nasir Nasrallah, Stories yet to be Told centers on the semantics of story telling and the various mechanisms comprising narrative potential. The show will feature different explorations of the forms of communication, prompted by the question, “Where do stories come from?"

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Adelaide Internationale 2014: Worlds in collision | Contemporary Art Center of South Australia | February 26 - March 30, 2014

Adelaide International 2014 features artists who suggest new ways of modelling and imagining the world, who map the edges of what is known, and who investigate the potentials of what might lie beyond. Worlds in Collision looks at technological, political, psychological and psychedelic exploration, and the ways artists imagine alternatives to arrive at new understandings of potential and transformation.

The Lebanese Rocket Society by Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas is a homage to the 1960s space exploration program in Lebanon. The project operates as an archive of the activities of the Lebanese Rocket Society to construct and reveal a kind of secret history, where one proposes a different sort of past that might shape our understanding of the present.

Tarek Al-Ghoussein - In Absentia

Born in Kuwait, of Palestinian origin and based in the UAE, much of Tarek Al-Ghoussein's work deals with how his identity is shaped in a context of inaccessibility and loss. In many of his photographs the artist is dwarfed by a vast desert landscape, reconstructing allegories for the obstacles, barricades and walls erected in the Occupied Territories.

The book includes a foreword by Jack Persekian (director & curator, The Palestinian Museum) as well as several commissioned essays by several key writers: Hamid Dabashi (writer and chair at Columbia University), Emily Jacir (fellow artist), Suzanne Cotter (Senior Curator at Modern Art Oxford), Antonia Carver (critic, writer and coeditor of Bidoun) and Kevin Mitchell (architect).

Published by PageOne on behalf of Works on Paper by The Third Line, this hard-cover book has 150 pages and over 60 full cover plates. In Absentia was launched during Tarek's exhibition at The Third Line in February 2009. In Absentia in Arabic is published with the support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture.

In English and Arabic, ISBN: 978-981-245-805-6.