CAMPUS ART DUBAI 4.0: CORE

Campus Art Dubai (CAD) is a school for artists, curators, writers, architects, designers and cultural producers based in the UAE. Meetings occur over weekends and feature courses, talks, workshops, taught and led by a local and international cast of academics, critics, curators and artists. The course provides a space for critical thinking and the exchange of ideas and skills, with participants encouraged to collaborate, debate and challenge.

Campus Art Dubai Core (CAD Core) is the first and only programme of its kind in the UAE; the intensive six-month course gives artists, writers, curators and cultural producers the opportunity to develop their practices under the mentorship of world renowned curators. The course provides a space for critical thinking and the exchange of ideas and skills, with participants encouraged to collaborate, debate and challenge.

Participants selected by the tutorial committee for Campus Art Dubai 4.0’s Core programme 2015-16 were:

Rahel Aima

Noor Al-Dabbaggh

Anoushka Anand

Layan Attari

Vikram Divecha

Reem Falaknaz

Zahra Jewanjee

Sophiya Khwaja

Sara Masinaei

Nabila Nabi

Maisoon Al Saleh

Karim Sultan

Saba Qizibash

The course took place on Saturdays, and included group critiques, lectures and workshops with visiting tutors, as well as 84 hours of teaching, plus monthly, one-on-one mentoring sessions for each participant.

CAD 4.0 was led by the Sharjah-born, New York-based curator and writer Murtaza Vali, with anthropologist Uzma Rizvi, a professor at Pratt Institute of Art and Design, New York, and resident Tutor Lantian Xie. Guest tutors included Todd Reisz, Deepak Unnikrishnan and Shaina Anand

THEME

Turbulent Waters┃Shifting Sands

How do we inhabit fluidscapes?

Uzma Z. Rizvi and Murtaza Vali devised a particularly fluid and timely theme for CAD 4.0. The course dives head first into the material impermanence of what it means to be of here, in the UAE. CAD Core participants will examine and debate the geographies and topographies that are the uncertain bedrock and slippery subtext of increasingly fixed notions of borders and identity — and of architecture, infrastructure and urban development; maritime trade and security; and markets and free-zones.

Through a series of seminars and workshops, plus visits to artists’ studios and field trips, we will explore some of the histories, mythologies, folklore, diaries, songs, gestures, dreams and futures of the ocean and the desert. These pasts, presents, and futures are as unique and fluid as the geographic locations that inspire them; we will attempt to harness, for our contemporary moment, some of the ancient wisdom of simply “going with the flow”. From thinking about mineralogy to learning how to read the stars to sail, CAD 4.0 challenged its participants to integrate the ideas and materials presented into a proposed project which was refined in regular group and individual critiques through the run of the course.