Shumon basar biography of william
Shack up
Nokolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller, Cybermohalla Hub. Photography by Johan Bettum
Cybermohalla Is a network of young researcher-practitioners in different urban neighbourhoods in Delhi, who work out of self-administered media labs and studios. It was set up by Sarai-CSDS and Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education, and since 2001, close to 450 young people have been a part of the Cybermohalla network, a word that updates the Hindi and Urdu mohalla (“neighbourhood”) for India’s accelerating E-generation. Books, broadsheets, installations and radio programmes have been produced and circulated locally and internationally. A peripatetic unit introduces animation, sound, photography, blogging and other tech-discourses and practices to the already savvy – and more importantly – the uninitiated. In 2006, Cybermohalla Lab in Nangla Manchi was destroyed when the whole settlement was evicted for new developments. Cybermohalla’s practitioners rallied to record – and provide important testimony – to the under-represented, displaced community now forced to disperse through the city, breaking up generation-deep links that have little purchase in new India. Cybermohalla members have said that they foreground “the knots formed in the intersections between individual biographies and the possibilities inherent in urban neighbourhoods.” This spring, Frankfurt-based architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller will build a new Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi’s Ghevra district. an aggregate of community centre, school, studio and gallery, the Ghevra Hub gives Cybermohalla’s informal initiatives an architectural form that echoes the dynamic nature of its host neighbourhood. Shelves and furniture accumulate and become the structure of this building: nothing is redundant or ancillary. Hirsch and Müller showed prototypical versions of their structure at last year’s Manifesta 7 biennial and Thyssen-Bornemisza art contemporary in Vienna, and refer to the potential of th
I feel so emotional, baby. Every time I think of you.
But. Who is this “you”?
You is Dubai, where I went for the first time a decade ago.
You is Bidoun.
The two yous became intimately entwined with my life in ways impossible to entirely explicate. But let me try.
In September 2005, just three months before I set virgin feet in Dubai, I chanced upon a magazine in a friend’s Brooklyn apartment. The cover showed the cropped back of a white Lexus; on the windscreen, two laminated Gulf Sheikhs beamed at each other. They were obviously wealthy. They had great teeth. They enjoyed the privileges of their Sheikh-ness. Was this pulp racism? In any other context, it would have been standard issue Orientalism-lite. And yet, somehow, not here.
The issue was titled Emirates Now. (I exclaimed internally, “Emirates whaaa?”)
The magazine was dedicated to making sense of Dubai ⎯ a word I’d never heard without the words Duty Free in close tow. Here was an émigré artist directing fake adverts about fake Chinese perfumes, purchased somewhere called Satwa; here were a flurry of utopian architectural projects, except they were real real estate properties; why, one writer asked, was a no-place a new kind of Xtreme Place?; honestly, one graphic designer demanded — did Dubai’s billboards need to be so huge?; and what’s with all the gold furniture in tropical baroque? [[O indeed.]]
All of this anticipated what future Bidoun Contributing Editor Sophia Al-Maria would come to characterize as “Gulf Futurism,” and her delineation of such phenomena would influence sci-fi legends such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Not bad going.
If I hadn’t found Bidoun, my first visit to Dubai would likely have followed the same lame narrative as most visitors from (The Region Still Known As) the West. I’d have sneered at the crazy Valhalla of big bad taste, then felt smug plus superior, thankful to have been bred in the birthplace of authenticity, Joy
The right to be left
Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier), Media Burn, performance at the Cow Palace, San Francisco, July 4, 1975
In 1975, the art-architecture group Ant Farm drove a camera-strapped, 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible through a bank of televisions. One of the protagonists, Doug Hail (who dressed as John F. Kennedy for the event), said, “Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?” This kind of symbolic ruckus was indicative of counter-cultural activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as embodied so vividly in Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point. Generational divide, the emergence of activist culture and critical disaffection for American political hegemony courtesy of Vietnam and Watergate coloured one of the most ideologically violent eras in postwar history. Felicity Scott, a New York-based architectural historian and co-editor of the journal Grey Room, has focused on this slice of time to explore how architectural discourse shifted from a modernist to postmodernist position. At stake for Scott is how new fabrication and mediation technologies forced new political stances – and often vice versa. She notes that any notion of America’s cultural formations before and after World War II must include the renegade voices of the Marxist left, a movement that today seems almost impossible to think of as an active force. Her discussion stretches from the groundbreaking MoMA show The International Style (1932) to a savaging of the World Trade Center site design competition, post 9/11. The ley lines of ideological rupture run back, she claims, to those years in which we saw earth from space for the first time and modern architecture was literally blown to pieces to make way for the next “new.” Dense, all-encompassing and nuanced to the vicissitudes of micro and macro politics, Scott’s book offers an uncompromising l While on leave from my program at the University of Toronto, I’m taking a course at the Node Center called the International Curator Program. Enjoying it very much. The first assignment in our first module (Key Moments in the History of Curating): Choose an exhibition from your country (either birth or residence) that you consider expresses the notion of curator-as-author in the spirit of Szeemann. Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head (1969) and Documenta 5 (1972) have come to exemplify curation as authorship. That’s when a curator treats their exhibition as a composite language of things and words and images in which to express a sensibility or chase an argument. To think about the curator as author, I chose three authors who’ve curated – specifically, a show at MOCA Toronto that moved and provoked me when I happened on it. Age of You Age of You, curated by Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Shumon Basar, was a didactic exhibition, developing an argument about the fate of the self in the age of social media. The self has been made “extreme,” they proposed, by the connectivity and instantaneity of our new media environment, and this deracinated self only feels real when packaging itself for consumption by a crowd. Whatever delight the curators might have felt at this astonishingly creative media moment was eclipsed by their sense that it’s controlled out of view by forces bent on quantifying our every experience and harvesting the data generated for profit. “Guess what this century’s most valuable resource is,” they ask. “It’s you – and all of your online behaviours, enriched data sets and millions of meta-data points.” In this process, a large part of you is extracted from you, and now exists everywhere and nowhere, independently of your five senses. Are you really built for so much change so q
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Toronto
September 5, 2019 – January 5, 20201. The concept