Basma Al-Sharif

I spent the month of June at Makan developing a new project I decided should be titled 'milk & honey'. I arrived with loads of fantastical convoluted ideas about how to begin research/development on a still image and text project that would illustrate a love story set in an apolitical Middle East. I spent the beginning of the month researching fascist Italian cinema and pre-Islamic Middle Eastern history, redrawing maps, photographing kites & trees, taking day trips to Ajloun, Jerash, and Mount Nebo. Then, once I got super overwhelmed and could no longer identify the origins of the project I wanted to make, I decided to discover downtown Amman. Soon enough, the images I had taken and hung in my studio at Makan began to translate into the beginnings of the love story I had been imagining and narrating in my sleep for months. Soon after that, I realized the missing piece to my puzzle was old Arabic love songs. So, I headed to a music shop that had tons of old music but which myself and the shop owners had to sing together in order to identify. By the end of the month, I packed up my images and the beginnings of what I consider to be a promising text and now the project is just a bit less convoluted (although just as fantastical) and I am confident of it becoming a short experimental film

Student's Summer Residency

 

 The Summer residency program brought together young people active in the arts, they were offered work spaces in Makan for the duration of July. The residency is process oriented and focuses on collaboration and exchange between the participants around the theme of the city Amman and its popular culture symbols and associations. The projects approached subjects such as the lives of cats, concrete structures, the personal interpretations of the city, childhood toys and foreign cultural elements. The participants are Liyan Al-Jabi, Abdullah Khasawnih, Dina Khoury, Rafique Nasereddin and Dana Qabbani.

 

 

OPEN STUDIO

To mark the end of the program, there was a one day open studio in order for the people meet the summer residency program participants and to view their ideas and works in progress.

 

 

 

PROJECTS

 

-Dina Khouri and Abdullah Khasawneh :

 

Cement crib – Making of by worker, video – Plastic-water-bottle mobile

 

Three piece multimedia installation

 
Growing up in cement homes constructed by workers’ hands, we know water is special. It has always been different_ not from anything else, though…

 

 

 

Film editing by Ghifar al-Alem

-Abdullah Khasawneh:

In its present, Amman’s past … it’s music, food and tobacco

Chat with ostaz Ali Eid on the balcony of Makan

Audio recording of conversation – Fresh heesheh (Arabic tobacco) – Qudhamah (Roasted chickpea)

 

- Dina Khoury:

Inside Out

Paintings

 

- Dana Qabbani :

This project started as an experiment to prove Dana’s personal theory regarding Amman's cats, their attitude, styles and behavior patterns according to their geographical spots, but it later became something more personal between her and every cat she had met, more of an interpretation of this cat, her attitude, life, or even her history, its only a theory and this research is still in process.

Dana used digital photography to prove her theory

 

- Rafique Nasereddin :

 

How would it be like ?! (2009)

Work in progress

 

Between psychology , genetics and the culture of taboos and shame we stumble upon plenty of Maybe-like-answers, probabilities, theories,  and unfinished researches.

And so far , my question were not answered !

 

On display is an abstract,symbolic installation to visualize the stages of the brain storming which is the first step in this research of self discovery. An attempt to explain and understand the terms ( sexual identity, sexual orientation and sexual education )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- Dina Khouri and Abdullah Khasawneh

Editing by Ghifar al-Alem

In the present, the past. Through light-hearted conversation and trips around Amman we tried to envisage what it would have been like to live in Amman before.

This sitting is one of these conversations through which we aimed to learn more about past music scenes_ namely, past bands and trends.

It is part of the research for a larger project to document artists of older Jordan and their music.

Location: Sandy for music - near Second Circl ,With ostaz Ali Eid and ostaz Tawfiq Sa’eed

 

 

 

Cecilia Mandrile

BETWEENING

(40 Displaced Shadows + 40 Desert Stones = 40 Unsent Postcards)         

 

Unveiling intersections between nomadic practices within different cultures,

Betweening proposes a dialogue conceptually based in the improvised poetic encounters among both Gauchos and Bedouins. Shaped by the social mistrust towards wanderers, solitary nomad subjects embark on their own ‘poetic battle’: when moving may become the deepest form of entrapment.

 

 

Project Background

(Moving Ground: The Desert Inside)

 

In the language of animation, to tween means to have a change made between two objects. In this way, moving, morphing, transforming, One becomes OneOther. Following this concept, Betweening, a traveling and practice based research, focuses in the sense of incomplete-ness experienced along that transition process.

 

Betweening, emerges as a response to my recent experience living and working in Middle East as a traveling South American woman artist, and through this, a continuation on my rehearsing of visual translations of displacement. Living and working in Jordan, I had the opportunity of dialoguing with local artists and writers, as well as being adopted by a Bedouin family.

 

Throughout this experience, I intended to provide some understanding to my effortless adaptation and adoption of this place of the world as another ‘home’: a place where the concept of displacement is felt from inside every day, where doors do not close, they simply lean against their frame; a context in which the refuge is made, unmade and remade every day. The desert here is found as a ‘space’ where, even without an apparent common language, communication could be profound.

 

This research intends to unveil and articulate the discovering of ‘intersections’ between Latin American and Arab culture; with particular reference to the poetic battle established in the encounters between Bedouins as well as among Gauchos (the vanishing nomadic cattle herder of the Pampas).

 

Based in the ‘word war’ practiced between nomadic oral poets, both in South America and in the Arab World, I intend to articulate the motivations and intentions of a form of communication that is established between two other-nesses in a space of blurred frontiers, where the nomads are forced to settle, and settled ones, to become nomads. 

 

 

 

 

 
7iber
August 2010 - January 2011


7iber is an independent media outlet that is youth-orientated and Jordan-based. Established in May 2007, 7iber looks to provide an online platform that allows young Jordanians to become more actively engaged. Essentially, it is a place for citizen-generated content to flourish, fostering a critical and informed civil society through an independent and participatory new media. It attempts to offer an alternative to mainstream and state-run media, focusing on storytelling and conversations.

 

www.7iber.com

eric gottesman
September, 2010

Eric Gottesman began his career working for the Chief Justice of the United States of America.  He is now a collaborative artist and teacher working in photography, video, installation and performance, mainly in Ethiopia. He is the creator of the book, May the Finest in the World Always Accompany You! He is a recipient of the 2009 Artadia Award, and a 2009-2010 Fulbright Fellow in Art in Jordan.    

www.ericgottesman.net

Savage
May, 2010

Savage is a conceptual artist, writer and senior lecturer in interdisciplinary art & design working and living in Bristol and Berlin. Through his artwork, he plays with notions of ownership, the rites of exchange and social value systems, all the while invariably borrowing from fiction, cinema and advertising in a bid to create new urban mythologies.

Saba Innab
February, 2010

Saba Innab is an artist and architect whose work is concerned with Urbanism and space production processes. Saba's artistic practice is very much informed by her architectural work.

Her architectural practice has recently landed her in a post war reconstruction of Nahr El Bared in Lebanon. She spent a month at the Town House Gallery in Cairo, Egypt as part of the Arab Residency and Exchange program run by Makan in December 2008.

 

 

Adam Davis
June, 2010

Adam Davis is a multidisciplinary artist whos practice involves sculpture, installation, video, animation, photography and more. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions and has been an artist in residence in several spaces nationally and internationally. Over the course of his career, Adam has found himself working and teaching in as varied environments such as a correctional facility, a wayward home for pregnant teens and a private women’s liberal arts college. Adam currently resides in Los Angeles, California, where in addition to his professional studio practice he is an Assistant Professor of Art at Scripps College.

 www.adamdavisart.com

Ana Pecar
April, 2010

Ana Pecar is a visual artist living in Maribor, Slovenia. Ana uses a variety of media in her work and is active in several groups and collectives.

 

http://www.anapecar.com/

 

Tom Bogaert
Belgium

Tom Bogaert is mainly an installation artist, who focuses on creating contextual pieces that are politically inspired. Though Bogaert often deals with difficult themes and subjects, he maintains a degree of lightness and humor in his work. The seriousness of the work and subject matter are often masked by this humor and by an intentional lack of high-production values.

 

   http://www.tombogaert.org/home

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