LECTURE

Gulf Futurism

Joan Grandjean

Library Conference Room (106i), Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts, Doha, Qatar

19 January 2023, 12:30 (UTC+3)

 

By innovating the way of approaching representation in contemporary Arab art, Gulf Futurism becomes a symbolic space in the globalized contemporary art as well as that of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. This aesthetic is characterized by the adaptation of science-fictional elements in order to adapt representations of this region in the framework of anticipation, speculation, or to make it move in a futuristic iconographic field. 
The ambition of this lecture is to present the different components of this artistic phenomenon and to contextualize the major stages of its appearance (through artworks, texts, events and circulations of ideas that define it) in the globalized contemporary art worlds as well as those of the Persian Gulf.
If “Arab Futurisms” are an aesthetic current and a curatorial construction, calling for semantic caution, Gulf Futurism differs from it. Given the context of its creation and dissemination by a specific group of artists and cultural agents, its study needs to be isolated. It also raises the question of its condition: can it be considered as a current – an aesthetic tendency – or an artistic movement – a group claiming to have a theoretical corpus defined by a manifesto? I will try to answer this question in three characteristic steps of Gulf Futurism: its appearance, how it came about and where it has been heading to.

 

In-person event only.