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4/6/2009

Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas

Different venues, New York

A ten-day, multi-venue arts festival and conference celebrating the extraordinary range of artistic expression throughout the Muslim world Singer Youssou N’Dour, visual artist Shirin Neshat, actor Naseeruddin Shah and choreographer/dancer Sardono Kusumo highlight the festival.

In celebration of the extraordinary range of artistic expression in the Muslim world, Asia Society, BAM, and New York University Center for Dialogues announce the full lineup of events for Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas, an unprecedented ten-day festival and conference taking place June 5–14, 2009 throughout New York City. More than 100 artists and speakers from as far away as Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and as near as Brooklyn, will gather for performances, films, exhibitions, talks, and other events, ranging from the traditional (calligraphy, storytelling, and Sufi devotional voices) to the contemporary (video installations and Arabic hip-hop). Festival presentations and programs aim to present multiple perspectives from the Muslim world.

World renowned singer Youssou N’Dour will open the festival at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House (30 Lafayette Avenue) on Friday, June 5 at 8pm. Additional festival highlights will feature artists from India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Morocco, Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others. Tickets for Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas events at BAM are currently on sale at BAM.org or 718.636.4100. Tickets for Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas events at Asia Society are currently on sale at AsiaSociety.org or (212) 517-ASIA. Further information may be found at http://www.MuslimVoicesFestival.org.

In addition to the mainstage offerings and complementary education and humanities events from Asia Society, BAM, and NYU Center for Dialogues, programs associated with the Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas festival will take place at locations including: American Museum of Natural History, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Brooklyn Museum, MoCADA (Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The New York Public Library. In celebration of Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas, the Empire State Building and Brooklyn Borough Hall will be lit green from June 5—7. The color green has many significant associations in Islam and is considered auspicious.

“No more pressing issue faces the world today than the profound lack of understanding between Western and Islamic societies,” said Asia Society President Vishakha N. Desai. “Most non-Muslim Americans have very limited exposure to and even misconceptions about Islam, the world’s second-largest religion.” Mustapha Tlili, NYU Center for Dialogues Founder and Director, added, “The divide between the United States and the Muslim world is rooted in hard political issues such as the question of Palestine, the war in Iraq, relations with Iran, and other points of contention. Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas aims to help change perceptions, foster mutual understanding and respect between the two sides, and pave the way for the solution of the hard issues.” “Asia Society, BAM and NYU Center for Dialogues would like to thank the many donors who have supported this complex and worthwhile project,” said BAM’s President Karen Brooks Hopkins. “We were brought together by a need to create common ground, and a shared feeling that the arts can play a unique and singular role in bringing people together.”

Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas originated in conversations between Mustapha Tlili and Karen Brooks Hopkins at an international conference in Kuala Lumpur organized by the NYU Center for Dialogues. Asia Society was brought in as a partner for its long history of using arts and culture to promote understanding and deeper engagement between Asia—home to two thirds of the world’s Muslim population—and the United States. !

Visual Arts

Sight Unseen: Video from Afghanistan and Iran
June 9–Sept. 13
Tues-Sun, 11am to 6pm; with extended hours Fri until 9p
Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Ave at 70th Street, New York, NY $ 5, 7, 10
Asia Society presents Sight Unseen: Video from Afghanistan and Iran showcases two video works by Afghan artist Rahraw Omarzad and Iranian artist Seifollah Samadian. The exhibition will represent the first time either work has been presented in a U.S. museum. Both artists are ardent supporters of artistic independence in their home countries. Although the two works are stylistically different, Sight Unseen reveals each of the artists’ intense exploration of the human condition.

Rahraw Omarzad (b. 1964, Kabul) is one of Afghanistan’s first avant-garde video artists. A teacher and mentor to a younger generation of Afghan artists, he played an important role in establishing the Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan (CCAA), the only not-for- profit arts organization in the country. His work The Third One (formerly titled Opening, single channel video, color, and sound, 11 minutes, 31 seconds) is the result of a collaboration between Omarzad and his students and members of CCAA. This compelling video depicts an unidentified individual using scissors to cut a hole in a woman’s head-covering or chadri (also referred to as chador in Iran or burqa by Muslims in other regions). Rather than passively accepting this apparent “liberation,” the woman under the chadri begins to stitch colorful embroidery around the hole.

Seifollah Samadian (b. 1954, Tehran) is highly regarded internationally as an art director, and has worked with celebrated film directors such as Abbas Kiarostami and Martin Scorsese. His simple filmic works often document mundane everyday scenes, extracting drama and leading to an awareness of wider social issues. He emerged on the forefront of the Iranian art scene for his photographic work following the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. The White Station (1999, 35mm film transferred to single channel video, color, and sound, 9 minutes) depicts a woman wearing a black chador as she waits for a bus during a harsh blizzard in Tehran in 1999. The mesmerizing film was shot in one take from the artist’s apartment window. Samadian’s work has been exhibited extensively in Europe and at major international exhibitions, including Documenta in Kassel and the Istanbul Biennial. He is the publisher and editor of the influential Iranian cultural magazine Tassvir.
The exhibition is curated by Miwako Tezuka, Associate Curator, Asia Society.
Please contact Elaine Merguerian at 212.327.9313 or elainem@asiasoc.org for more information.

New York Masjid: The Mosques of New York City
June 5–14
12Noon–11p
BAM Natman Room, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY Free
BAM presents a selection of work from New York Masjid: The Mosques of New York City. The documentary project by Edward Grazda explores the Islamic presence in New York by looking at various places Muslims assemble to worship throughout the boroughs. The project took root on February 26, 1993 amidst an urban crisis: the first World Trade Center bombing. But ultimately more destructive to the city at that time were the tidal waves of toxic and reductive one-line headlines that followed in the written and televised media: “Muslim Terrorist,” establishing a simple familiar code name for terror.

Grazda and scholar Jerrilynn R. Dodds not only documented the mosques and analyzed their architectural forms, but also conducted interviews with community members—in the process, revealing an alternative image of American Islam. Grazda’s photography displays a unique perspective on an emerging cultural identity that is American and Muslim. Grazda’s “penetrating black-and-white photographs” (The New York Times) were published as a book of the same title in 2002, New York Masjid: The Mosques of New York City.

Born in New York City in 1947, Edward Grazda studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Starting in 1972, he began photographing in Latin America. Later he concentrated on Asia, traveling to Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Burma, Pakistan, and India. During the past 20 years his primary focus has been on the people of Afghanistan. Grazda teaches photography at the Harvard University Summer School and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography in New York. He has worked on the archives of Walker Evans and Hans Namuth.

The subject of three monographs, Grazda's work has also been published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Doubletake, The Christian Science Monitor, and Avenda-E-Afghan, an independent Afghan newspaper. His photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The New York Public Library; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and others.

Among his awards are grants by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980 and 1986, and by the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1986. He has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 1994, 1996, 1999, 2001, and 2003. Please contact Fatima Kafele, at 718.636.4129 x4 or fkafele@bam.org for more information.

Partner events

The Seen and the Hidden (Dis)covering the Veil
Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, New York, N
May 21–Aug 29
The Muslim woman’s veil is one of the most visible icons of contemporary Islam. It represents an important cultural tradition yet remains a very personal practice for Muslim women as well as a symbol communicated to others within the public sphere. By presenting contemporary artists from the Greater Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan), Europe (Austria, France, Germany) and North America (New York City, Canada), this exhibition intends to be a trans-cultural exploration of ideas that surround both the literal and, as importantly, metaphorical meaning of the veil. Works included represent a variety of media such as video, installation, photography, and painting. Curated by David Harper and Martha Kirszenbaum (New York) and Karin Meisel (Vienna).

Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY
June 5–Sept 6
This installation features approximately 25 objects from the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private collections related to a mystical form of Islam known as Sufism. The theme of light and enlightenment is emphasized throughout, both literally and in its figurative or spiritual sense. Highlights include an extraordinary Egyptian gilded and enameled glass lamp inscribed with the famous “Light Verse” (Ayat al-Nūr) from the Qur’an; two brass candlesticks made in the Jazira region and Iran in the early thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively; illustrated manuscripts, manuscript pages, and single folios of Sufi literature and subjects from Iran and India; an early thirteenth-century Iranian dish inscribed with mystical poetry; and a contemporary work on paper produced with rubbings of prayer stones. Organized by Ladan Akbarnia, Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Masterpieces of Islamic Calligraphy from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd St, New York, NY
June 2–Sept 1
Masterpieces of calligraphy from the Islamic Art Department’s collections will be on display for, showcasing the calligraphic art of the Islamic world, from Spain to south Asia and beyond. The works, ranging in date from the 8th to the 19th century, will include several richly illuminated Qur’anic manuscripts, as well as sumptuous album pages in a variety of scripts, examples of inlaid metalwork, fine ceramics, and rare textiles with calligraphic elements. Many calligraphic scripts from early kufic to the later refined nasta‘liq, will be shown in a range of media, demonstrating the impact and importance of this most quintessential of art forms.

Perspectives: Women, Art and Islam
MoCADA (Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts) & Museum for African Art
80 Hanson Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY
June 4–Sept 13
Spanning three continents and the mediums of video, photography and installation, Perspectives features work by five female artists: Fariba Alam (Bangladesh), Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Algeria), Mahwish Chishty (Pakistan), Safaa Erruas (Morocco), and Nsenga Knight (Brooklyn), whose works challenge preconceptions, defy categorization and raise timely questions about gender and the Islamic faith. Alam infuses ceramic tiles with personal archival photography of family in Bangladesh; Bouabdellah carves out space for gold high-heels in a series of prayer rugs, and takes self-portraits with couscous pots; Knight interviews Muslim women from her Brooklyn community for a video installation; Chishty projects Kufic script into a pool of water; and Erruas uses multiple sections of soft white textiles to set out the gallery’s walls as spaces of perceived femininity. Curated by Kimberli Gant and Lisa Binder.

For press inquiries please contact:
Asia Society: Elaine Merguerian, at 212.327.9313 or elainem@asiasoc.org
BAM: Fatima Kafele, at 718.636.4129 x4 or fkafele@bam.or
NYU Center for Dialogues: Andrea Stanton, at 212.998.7137 or stanton@centerfordialogues.org
Programming details follow. For updates and additional background, please visit http://www.MuslimVoicesFestival.org

June 5–14, 2009
Different venues, New York

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