Global Art Forum: The Future Was

The tenth edition of the Global Art Forum explores the ways in which artists, writers, technologists, historians, musicians and thinkers have imagined, and are shaping, the future. Titled The Future Was, the 2016 Global Art Forum is commissioned by writer Shumon Basar, with artist/curator Amal Khalaf and anthropologist Uzma Z. Rizvi, who co-chair this special evening of conversations, performances and music by artists Sophia Al-Maria and John Gerrard; curator Nada Raza; writer Anna Della Subin; saxophonist and composer André Vida. The Forum then continues at its home at Art Dubai, March 16-19, 2016, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Programme

Welcome & Introduction

The Future Was
Amal Khalaf (Artist, researcher, curator and Global Art Forum 10 Co-Director), Uzma Z. Rizvi (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies, Pratt Institute of Art and Design and Global Art Forum 10 Co-Director) and Shumon Basar (Writer and Global Art Forum 10 Commissioner)

Conversation

The Future Was Global/Art/Forum
 What did the future look like in the mid-2000s? In the Mid-East? Why did a talks program at a new regional art fair decide to be “global” and a “forum”? Art Dubai’s Director, Antonia Carver, and the Global Art Forum’s Commissioner, Shumon Basar, introduce the evening by traveling ten years in ten minutes.
 
Antonia Carver (Director, Art Dubai) and Shumon Basar (Writer and Global Art Forum 10 Commissioner)

Conversation

The Future Was Uncertain  
 How are technologies of simulation transforming the nature of violence, politics, power and the image in the contemporary world? Artist John Gerrard asks these questions through the complex virtual worlds he creates through a combination of photography, 3D modeling and gaming software. His painterly images make you feel as if you are standing inside an image and viewing it as a slow pan. Mesmerising and disorienting, Gerrard presents his realtime portraits of physical locations, harnessing advanced simulation and motion capture technologies to create a temporal collage shifting our understanding of the real and the record and the representation of our present and future.
 
John Gerrard (Artist) and Amal Khalaf (Artist, researcher, curator and Global Art Forum 10 Co-Director)

Conversation

The Future Was Rational
 Can science fiction only exist once the rationalism of science is fully understood and integrated into a way of imagining life? Why does modernity rely so heavily on rationality? In order to excavate these issues, we must look to the relationship between tonic bottles and cyclones, feminist utopias, and travels to Venus. All, perhaps, in an effort to reaffirm the necessity of the irrational to instigate change, which is at the heart of science and its many fictions.
 
Nada Raza (Assisstant Curator, Tate Modern) and Uzma Z. Rizvi (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies, Pratt Institute of Art and Design and Global Art Forum 10 Co-Director)

Conversation

The Future Was Desert
Sophia al Maria's time-travelling alter ego SFW makes pilgrimages to desert petroglyphs and other sites of deep human history in Namibia, Oman and Australia. Points of interest include the desert as time machine, as future dream and as Tatooine.
 
Sophia Al Maria (Artist and writer) and Shumon Basar (Writer and Global Art Forum 10 Commissioner)

Presentation

The Future Was ZZZZZZZZ
A short talk on a long repose. Theologians, activists and poets have told of people who sleep for 300 years and then awaken into a transformed world, as a way to critique the present and imagine the future. From 6th century Syriac eschatology to medieval Islamic futurisms, socialist sci-fi to the 1930s Egyptian theatre, it seems the quickest way to get to the future is to sleep. But will you like it when you get there?
 
Anna Della Subin (Essayist and Contributing Editor, Bidoun)

Performative Presentation

The Future Was Space is the Place
Musician and composer André Vida channels Afrofuturist space-traveler Sun Ra via the vibrations, thoughts and music of the 22nd century as made humanly audible today: what Sun Ra Arkestra leader Marshall Allen refers to as, "doing skillfully wrong... the key to all spiritual things." 
 
André Vida (Composer, lyricist and saxophonist)

Project

The Future Was A Computer Generated Image
If you drove down Dubai’s arterial highway, Sheikh Zayed Road, in 2006, you’d see the largest number of continuously running adjacent billboards in the world. Each one promised a brilliant, bright future under brilliant, bright skies. Hoards of hijabi and hipster inhabitants in jaw-locked joy. Photoshop Utopias of the better beyond. WTD collate the most iconic and most telling of these real estate image manifestoes.
 
WTD (UAE-based Magazine)

Presented by Art Dubai in partnership with the ICA.

Art Dubai's Global Art Forum is presented by the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and supported by Dubai Design District (d3).