This special edition of Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum — which took place for the first time at the Royal Academy of Arts — focused on the past, present and future of art, culture and ideas in the UAE. For more than a decade, the Forum has brought together over 450 global minds, at the fair and beyond, to combine original thinking and contemporary themes. The Forum highlights the ways cultural influence resonates across the world. This evening’s event gathered some of the most notable protagonists from art, architecture, cinema and futurism, to share stories about one of the fastest changing places in the 21st century.
VIDEOS
TIMELESS: HE Zaki Nusseibeh and Hans Ulrich Obrist Conversation
Born in Jerusalem, educated in Cambridge, Zaki Nusseibeh arrived in Abu Dhabi in 1968, three years before the unification of the United Arab Emirates. Starting out as Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s personal interpreter, Zaki Nusseibeh’s life of culture, education and diplomacy has grown in parallel with the making of a new nation. This conversation explored origins and evolution between the Arab 20th and 21st centuries.
THE PAST: Ahmed and Rashid Bin Shabib Presentation
Cities are populated as much by unrealized architectural projects as realized ones. Abu Dhabi and Dubai are no exception. Seminal architects, such as Oscar Niemeyer and Walter Gropius, were responsible for ambitious plans which never materialized, but whose drawings outline fascinating alternative histories and futures.
THE PRESENT: Butheina H Kazim and Munira Al Sayegh Conversation
From Abu Dhabi’s Louvre to the Sharjah Art Foundation and a thriving scene of independent galleries in Dubai, the UAE art ecology has expanded and diversified over the last decade and more, situating itself in the confluence of regional forces that reach out to Asia, Africa and beyond. And through Cinema Akil’s fiercely independent ethos, a new space for independent and art-house cinema has been cultivated, highlighting historic and emerging cinephilia, at a time when film culture is reinventing itself across the world.
THE FUTURE: Dr. Noah Raford Lecture
The Dubai Future Foundation is pursuing a dynamic, design-led approach to systemic transformation in the UAE. From the Museum of the Future (opening end of 2019) to city-scale prototypes of 3D printed buildings, self driving cars, and urban farms, this talk explored a new approach to creating the future, together.
