Higher Atlas (Exhibition)

29^th February - 3rd June 2012

Curated by Nadim Samman and Carson Chan

Venue: Theatre Royale

higheratlas.aimbiennale.org

Higher Atlas

Higher Atlas, a major exhibition curated by Carson Chan and Nadim Samman, will take place at the Theatre Royal in Marrakech (29^th February-3^rd June 2012). High connotes reverie and transcendence. Higher Atlas suggests a cartography of the beyond. All works will be new site-specific commissions, conceived and created on location with local craftspeople and manufacturers. Over thirty international artists, architects, writers, musicians and composers will be showing their work, including Karthik Pandian, Aleksandra Domanovic, CocoRosie, Jon Nash, Juergen Mayer H and Turner Prize nominated Roger Hiorns. The exhibition seeks to engage in an expansive dialogue with the city.

Co-curator Carson Chan notes: "While trying to curate an exhibition that could become part of a contemporary Moroccan cultural identity, we can also challenge the received methods of biennale making that is routinely practiced elsewhere. Do we have to show art? Why not commission a novel, a symphony, an album or a prayer?"

Curators

Nadim Samman is an independent curator and art historian based in London. He read Philosophy at University College London before undertaking a doctorate at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has written for publications including Third Text, The Art Newspaper, Art Review (Online), Contemporary, Asian Affairs, Art India, Erotic Review, Naked Punch and WestEast. He has also been an invited speaker at MoMA Warsaw, the 2009 Beijing Biennale, Christies and SoAs. His curatorial projects in London, Moscow, Berlin and Zurich have included presentations of leading Russian modern and contemporary artists, emerging international talent and, recently, a large-scale photography exhibition at Somerset House (London) under the patronage of HRH Prince William. In June 2011 Nadim co-curates One of A Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy, an Official Collateral Project of the 54^thVenice Biennale, held at the Arsenale Novissimo.

Carson Chan (1980) is an architecture writer and curator. Chan studied design, history and theory of architecture at both Cornell and Harvard University, where he received a Master's in the History and Theory of Architecture. After working at Barkow Leibinger Architects and the Neue Nationalgalerie's architecture exhibitions department in Berlin, with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, he founded PROGRAM in 2006, a non-commercial initiative for art and architecture collaborations. He has variously curated and overseen more than 30 international exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture. His writing on art, architecture and contemporary culture appears in books and periodicals worldwide, including Kaleidoscope and 032c (Berlin), where he is also a contributing editor. Chan has interviewed a broad range of contemporary practitioners, including Thomas Demand, Udo Kittelmann, Adam Caruso, Olafur Eliasson, William T. Vollmann, MVRDV, Greg Lynn, Kevin Kelly, Rick Owens, and David Simon. He has recently lectured at the Schaulager (Basel), GAMeC (Bergamo), 12th Venice Architecture Biennial/Nordic Pavilion, Bund Deutsche Architekten (Berlin), 0047 (Oslo) and he will be speaking at the Fondazione Ratti (Como) this spring. Chan is an active advisor to several cultural institutions including DLD (Munich), Europan, and the Premio Furla - a biennial prize given to the most promising emerging artists in Italy. In 2008 he organized an evening of panel discussions at the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin) with leading artists, architects and curators to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Mies van der Rohe building. He is currently working on a series of essays on exhibition making in both art and architecture.

Dar al-Ma'mûn Conversations, part of the Marrakech Biennale 2012

As part of the Marrakech Biennale, Dar al-Ma'mûn (International residency centre for artists and literary translators) will hold three conversations about art and its relationship with the city, to be held in the Riad Denise Masson in partnership with the Institut français de Marrakech on Wednesday, 29 February and Thursday 1st March 2012.

Wednesday, February 29, 2.30pm to 4.30pm
Artistic identities in Africa and the Middle East

with Aziz Daki (art historian, director of the Atelier 21 in Casablanca), Khadija El Bennaoui (coordinator of Young Arab Theater Fund and Art Moves Africa and Board member of Arterial Network), Catherine David (independent curator , Director of Contemporary Arab Representations), Simon Njami (curator and art critic, co-founder of Revue Noire), Hamza Serafi (founder of Athr Gallery, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia).

Wednesday, February 29, 5pm to 6.30pm
A Spring of images?

WJT Mitchell (theorist of art, media and literature, University of Chicago, and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry), in conversation with Rasha Salti (independent art critic, curator and film programmer) and Omar Berrada(director of the Dar al-Ma'mûn library).

Thursday March 1st, 10am to 12pm
Art and public space

with Negar Azimi (editor of Bidoun magazine, member of the Arab Image Foundation), Hassan Darsi (artist, co-founder of La Source du lion), Abderrahim Kassou (architect, President of Casamémoire & General Coordinator of Les Abattoirs de Casablanca), Driss Ksikès (director of the CESEM research center, and its magazine Economia, and co-founder of DABATEATR in Rabat).

Art Participants

Higher Atlas

جماعة
Younes Baba-Ali
Barkow Liebinger (Frank Barkow, Regine Leibinger)
Joe Clark
CocoRosie (Bianca Cassidy, Sierra Cassidy)
Matthew Stone & Phoebe Collings-James
Hassan Darsi
Alexandra Domanovic
Sophie Erlund
Tue Greenfort
Eva Grubinger
Jürgen Mayer H.
Hadley & Maxwell
Elín Hansdóttir
Ethan Hayes-Chute
Roger Hiorns
Katia Kameli
Felix Kiessling
Faouzi Laatiris
Juliana Leite
Chi Wo Leung
Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Megumi Matsubara
Christopher Mayo
John Nash
Karthik Pandian
Finnbogi Pétursson
Alexander Ponomarev
Luca Pozzi
Katarzyna Pszewańska
Florian & Michael Quistrebert
Andrew Ranville
Anri Sala
Alex Schweder La & Khadija Carroll La
Pascal Martine Tayou
Sinta Werner