Arab Contemporary - Architecture, Culture and Identity
Louisiana Museum of modern art
31.1.2014 - 4.5.2014
ARAB CONTEMPORARY 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 ARAB CONTEMPORARY 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.
The exhibition trace 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.
The exhibition takes us to new cities like Dubai, old Yemenite civilizations and new architectural projects that relate to the desert as place. And it shows how architectural offices such as Atelier Jean Nouvel, Paris, X-Architects, Dubai, and Henning Larsen Architects, Copenhagen, intervene in the region with new interpretations. A current focus is the relationship between private and public space, which is presently changing socially, politically and architecturally.
ARAB CONTEMPORARY is a cross-over exhibition mixing architecture, art, photography, documentary and film.
Humblaek, January 2014
