Latest news with #Biennial
Time of India
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
CM opens international exhibitions at museum
Patna: CM Nitish Kumar on Thursday inaugurated a series of temporary exhibitions by various Asian, African and South American countries at the Bihar Museum in Patna, marking the commencement of the Bihar Museum Biennial 2025. The exhibitions were part of an international cultural celebration hosted on the museum campus, attended by ambassadors of the participating nations. After formally opening the Biennial, the CM, accompanied by ministers Samrat Chaudhary, Vijay Kumar Sinha, Vijay Kumar Chaudhary, Shrawan Kumar and Moti Lal Prasad, toured the exhibitions. They were joined by Bihar Museum director General Anjani Kumar Singh, arts, culture and youth affairs department secretary Pranav Kumar and senior officials from the Patna division and district administration. Countries participating in the exhibition included Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Zambia, Ethiopia, Mexico, Argentina and Peru. The displays showcased a range of social, cultural, artistic and environmental themes representative of their respective nations. Director general of the Bihar Museum briefed the CM on the exhibits and accompanied him during the visit. The delegation also visited the exhibition at the Multi-purpose Auditorium, which was part of the Biennial programme. A cultural programme featuring performances was scheduled for the evening. Later, the CM interacted with the ambassadors of the participating countries and took part in a group photo session with them. Stay updated with the latest local news from your city on Times of India (TOI). Check upcoming bank holidays , public holidays , and current gold rates and s ilver prices in your area.
Euronews
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Bukhara Biennial: A ten-week exploration of food, art, craft and music
From 5 September to 20 November 2025, this UNESCO Creative City will host the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, a ten-week journey of contemporary art, communal rituals, and culinary storytelling. Titled 'Recipes for Broken Hearts', the Biennial transforms a city of legends into a living stage where grief, memory and joy are reimagined through food, music, poetry and craft. Curated by international art figure Diana Campbell and commissioned by Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), the Biennial features over 70 commissions created in Uzbekistan, activating centuries-old madrasas and caravanserais in ways Bukhara has never seen. 'Bukhara has shaped the world before: through knowledge, craft, and exchange,' says Umerova. 'This Biennial is a way of giving it the tools to do so again, through creativity and dialogue'. Not just an exhibition. A sensory ritual. Rather than opening with a red carpet or gallery wall, the Biennial begins with the aroma of fermentation. At Cafe Oshqozon, Buddhist monk and chef Jeong Kwan will prepare kimchi on the first day — only to unearth it again ten weeks later for a final meal, ripened by time and silence. It is a metaphor for the event itself. 'Recipes for Broken Hearts' explores how time, tradition, and care can heal. Every element – from food to sculpture, textiles to sound is part of a broader experiment in emotional repair. Diana Campbell, known for her work at the Dhaka Art Summit, calls it a 'multi-sensory feast rooted in Bukhara's spirit of hospitality and intellectual depth'. She adds, 'You don't just look at the art. You smell it, taste it, feel it in your hands and bones'. From salt and sugar to clay and code The artworks span disciplines and geographies. Egyptian-born food artist Laila Gohar conjures memories through Navat, a traditional sugar crystal made from saffron and grape juice. Colombian artist Delcy Morelos constructs a dome from earth, sand, and spices. Uzbek artist Oyjon Khayrullaeva, working with ceramicist Abdurauf Taxirov, builds mosaic organs - a stomach over the cafe entrance, lungs and hearts tucked across the city connecting venues as parts of one collective body. And then there's Subodh Gupta, who repurposes enamel dishes from traditional kitchens into a towering dome, inside which guests dine on dishes connecting India and Uzbekistan. 'It's about collapsing distance — between countries, between disciplines, between people,' he says. All works are made in Uzbekistan, many in collaboration with local artisans. 'This was non-negotiable,' says Umerova. 'We didn't want an art fair. We wanted something that speaks from here, even when it reaches the world'. At the centre of the Biennial is the House of Softness, a transformation of the 16th century Gavkushon Madrasa into a space for public programmes, children's workshops, and storytelling. Artist and architect Suchi Reddy has designed a protective canopy inspired by Uzbek ikat casting patterns of healing across the courtyard. Here, a three-day symposium titled 'The Craft of Mending' will bring together thinkers, historians and artists to explore repair as both a physical and political act. 'Erasure is a form of heartbreak,' says Aziza Izamova, an Uzbek scholar at Harvard leading the event. 'And so, to repair to remember - is an act of resistance'. Young curators from across Asia will also gather in Bukhara for a workshop on how to commission work that does not yet exist. It is a fitting lesson for a city reshaping its own future. Music, too, flows through the Biennial's veins. Each full moon will be marked by a ceremonial karnay ritual – the long Uzbek horn used in weddings to symbolically summon water to the desert. These performances, led by Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, fuse local tradition with global environmental consciousness. Elsewhere, the Bukhara Philharmonic will collaborate with artists like Tarek Atoui, bringing together Arab and Central Asian musical traditions. Weekly street processions and spontaneous performances will animate the city with rhythm and memory. Food is not a side programme, it is the soul of the Biennial. From fermented rituals to nomadic grains, the meals are designed to explore loss, resilience and belonging. Uzbek chefs like Bahriddin Chustiy and Pavel Georganov will share dishes infused with memory, while guest chefs like Fatmata Binta from Sierra Leone and Zuri Camille de Souza from India will link Uzbek traditions to West African and Goan culinary heritage. The final week hosts the Rice Cultures Festival, featuring plov, paella, pulao and jollof rice cooked in the open air, surrounded by stories and songs. 'It's not about haute cuisine,' says Umerova. 'It's about how we gather, how we heal, how we remember - through food'. Why Bukhara? 'Bukhara is not a backdrop,' says Umerova. 'It is the protagonist'. For over two millennia, the city has been a center of spiritual, scientific and artistic exchange. Yet in the modern art world, it has remained peripheral, until now. The Biennial is part of a broader national strategy to reintegrate Uzbekistan into global cultural networks. With support from President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the ACDF has launched restoration projects, museums, and creative platforms across the country and internationally including the Venice Biennale pavilion and the Expo 2025 in Osaka. 'This is not soft power,' Umerova insists. 'It's structural power. Culture creates jobs. It shapes futures. It builds identity that isn't reactive or nostalgic — but alive, generous, and forward-looking'. Bukhara is accessible by high-speed rail from Tashkent and Samarkand, with boutique hotels and guesthouses nestled among its UNESCO-listed architecture. The Biennial is entirely free and open to the public. Foreign visitors can expect immersive programming in Uzbek, Russian, and English, and a culinary scene where history is served with every dish. More information is available at and on Instagram at @
Gulf Today
01-07-2025
- General
- Gulf Today
Angela Harutyunyan, Paula Nascimentoare Sharjah Biennial 17 curators: SAF
Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) has announced that Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento have been appointed as the curators of Sharjah Biennial 17, opening January 2027. Harutyunyan is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, Berlin University of the Arts and Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda, Angola. 'Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact," said Hoor Al Qasimi, SAF President and Director. "Rooted in our local context, we have fostered a place of significant regional and international exchange, bridging cultures and shared histories. Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities.' Working in close collaboration, the mandate for the curators is to shape the Biennial as a space for critical reflection and experimental exhibition-making, exploring alternative contemporary realities and the imaginative potential of art, through a wide range of artistic projects presented in sites across Sharjah emirate. 'The possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity are of particular interest to me,' said Harutyunyan. 'I would like to examine the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.' American University in Cairo campus. For Nascimento, biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with structures and models of exhibition-making, as well as places for gathering communities and fostering social and physical transformation. 'I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between art making and infrastructure in an expanded way, as well as exploring art's capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations,' she said. Based in Berlin, Angela Harutyunyan (b. 1982, Gyumri, Armenia) is a founding member of The Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities, Yeravan, and the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research. She has curated several exhibitions, including This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time (with Nat Muller) at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2014) and the American University of Beirut Art Galleries (2015). She obtained her PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Manchester in 2009 and previously taught at the American University in Cairo (2009-2010) and also at the American University of Beirut (2011–2023). One of the founding editors of ARTMargins, she has extensively researched and written on post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality and curatorial theory. She is the author of The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the 'painterly real' 1987–1994 (Manchester University Press, 2017). She has published internationally on the autonomy of art, art and the public sphere, cultural politics and curatorial practices in the post-Socialist condition and in the Middle East. Paula Nascimento's (b. 1981, Luanda, Angola) practice is rooted at the intersection of visual arts, urbanism, geopolitics and arts education. She engages with interdisciplinary methodologies with a focus on contemporary readings of historical themes in and around Africa and the Global South. An associate curator of the sixth and seventh editions of the Lubumbashi Biennial (2019, 2022), she has also developed projects and curated exhibitions internationally, including Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography, Experimenta Design, Triennale di Milano and the Angola Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, which received the Golden Lion for best national participation in 2013. She is a curatorial advisor to Hangar Centre of Artistic Research, Lisbon, and a member of the acquisitions committee of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian. In 2023, Nascimento was a member of the visual arts jury for the annual DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, a platform for artistic and cultural exchange in and beyond Europe. Angela Harutyunyan (left) and Paula Nascimento. SAF is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. It provides an experimental and wide-ranging programme model, supporting the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the culture of the region and encourages an understanding of the transformational role of art. The Foundation's core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of travelling exhibitions and scholarly publications. Established in 2009 to expand programmes beyond the Sharjah Biennial, which launched in 1993, SAF is a significant resource for artists and cultural organisations in the Gulf and a monitor of local, regional and international developments in contemporary art. The Foundation is committed to developing and sustaining the cultural life and heritage of Sharjah; it is reflected through year-round exhibitions, performances, screenings and educational programmes, mainly hosted in historic buildings that have been repurposed as cultural and community centres. A growing collection reflects the Foundation's support of contemporary artists in the realisation of new work and its recognition of the contributions made by pioneering modern artists from the region and around the world. SAF is a legally independent public body established by Emiri Decree and supported by government funding, grants from national and international non-profits, cultural organisations, corporate sponsors and individual patrons. All its exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Hindustan Times
27-06-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
The Stoic Capitalist: An exclusive excerpt from the book by Wall Street titan Robert Rosenkranz
Every two years, the Whitney Museum in New York showcases works by America's most promising up-and-coming artists in a highly publicized exhibition. Being selected for the Whitney Biennial can transform an artist's life. It brings newcomers to the attention of prominent gallerists looking to add fresh faces to their rosters and to collectors eager to stay abreast of the competition for emerging talent. . However, if you look up the Biennial's catalogs from a decade ago, you will find that most of the artists they heralded now languish in obscurity. Few have important dealers; fewer still have a strong and consistent auction market for their work. Page through Sotheby's and Christie's auction catalogs of contemporary art from a decade ago, and the story is much the same. The art world is in large part a fashion culture, constantly in flux. So, it should be no surprise that investing in art is trickier than, say, buying stocks, and almost always less lucrative. Most contemporary work auctioned a decade ago would not be salable today at a price that could cover the original hammer price, plus the twenty-five percent commission auction houses typically charge, plus the nine percent sales tax a New York resident would have had to pay…not to mention what all this money might have earned over the period in a typical stock market portfolio. There would be notable exceptions, of course, and those are the ones that make headlines. The best that can be said is that if you can afford to buy the finest works by the most prominent artists, and you have first-rate professional advice, you have a reasonable chance to make a decent return. Otherwise, investor beware. Owning art is one of the great attractions of wealth, but you should never mistake it for a great investment. Then why is buying art a great idea? Simply because to own a work of art is its own reward. You can experience art in museums, but it will not enhance your life nearly as much as living with it every day. Nor will it require of you the focus that should be part of the decision to exchange your hard-earned money for an artist's work. As a collector, you will be part of a community that includes artists, curators, gallerists, and other collectors with shared interests. Equally important, each object you buy can be a catalyst for learning. That too is life-enhancing. As soon as I could afford to buy art, I started to collect modern Chinese ink paintings. My mentor in the field was a British scholar/collector/dealer named Hugh Moss, who I met through my Shanghainese friend, Jimmy King. Hugh divided his time between Old Surrey Hall, a vast pile in Surrey with Elizabethan antecedents, and a scholarly retreat on a sparsely populated hillside in Hong Kong. He styled himself a modern Western reincarnation of a Chinese literatus. Historically, the literati were a class of scholar/officials who played prominent roles in Chinese culture and often served in high government posts. They collected meticulously crafted furniture of simple design, brush pots, ancient jade artifacts, snuff boxes and 'scholar's rocks'—unusually shaped stones thought to embody nature's mysterious forces. The literati tradition of landscape painting persisted even after the Communist revolution and Mao's Great Leap Forward. It was the modern expression of that tradition I focused on. There was much that drew me to the genre. I was fascinated that the artists had classical training and technical skill, while their growing exposure to Western influences was encouraging them to experiment with scale, with color, and with abstraction. … I liked the hanging-scroll format of these works, because it let me readily change the paintings I had on display and experience them with fresh eyes. (The Chinese would no more show the same painting all the time than we would play the same music again and again.) Conveniently for me at that early stage in my career, the prices were modest, yet at the same time the genre was so rarified that I could be one of a handful of serious collectors and have access to the best material from the leading dealers. I was not expecting these ink paintings to be good investments, nor did they prove to be. But I stayed with them, accumulating more than fifty over the course of a decade. When I was finally ready to move on, I donated the bulk of the collection to the Harvard University Art Museum, whose senior curator, Robert Mowry, was building perhaps the finest institutional collection in the US. By the 1990s, my interest in art shifted to China's ancient traditions—what my then muse, now wife Alexandra Munroe called a step 'forward into the past.' Hugh Moss again played a pivotal role. He alerted me to the availability of a magnificent Tang dynasty horse which he regarded as one of the finest objects to appear on the market in years. Hugh introduced me to Giuseppe Eskanazi, a preeminent London dealer who was showing the work in New York. Eskanazi was surprised that a beginning collector he had never heard of would buy such an object. The price was hardly modest, but this time I did feel it would be a good investment, because China was fast becoming prosperous, and I expected that collectors there would ultimately spend heavily for outstanding examples of their cultural heritage. … Since I bought it in 1995, the Tang horse has held pride of place at my Manhattan apartment: it stands in solitary splendor on an art deco console in the living room and is the first thing to catch your eye as you enter. Starting with such a great object set the bar for the rest of the collection, which evolved with a focus on Buddhist sculpture. Wen Fong, then head of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was generous with his advice, and I made the Met my standard. When a dealer or an auction house had an object that I found intriguing, I would go to the Met and see if they had a better example. If they did, I would pass. As a result, I bought only a handful of objects each year. This pace suited me well. While I enjoyed living with these works, which often combined physical beauty and spiritual power, they were also a challenge. Fakes were not uncommon, and even top dealers could occasionally be fooled. I felt a need to know why and how they were made and what they signified, lessons that often took time to absorb. … Part of the reason I responded to Buddhist art was the connection between Buddhist and Stoic philosophical systems. Both encourage the cultivation of virtue, though one approach focuses on spirituality, the other on rationality. Both emphasize mindfulness, which Buddhism seeks through meditation; Stoicism through concentration, focus, and elimination of distractions. The Stoic concept of impermanence and change echoes the Buddhist idea of detachment. Neither philosophy is incompatible with worldly splendor, provided it occupies a moderate share of one's psychic space. Seneca was among the wealthiest men in Rome and the most influential of Stoic philosophers. The Buddha was a prince who renounced worldly goods for an ascetic life and is always depicted in simple robes. In his pantheon are bodhisattvas, who are typically portrayed in elegant, princely garb with elaborate jewelry. My favorite bodhisattva is Vimalakirti.. (He) lived lavishly and had a passion for debate. When Buddha's other followers criticized Vimalakirti's style of life, he argued that they were seeing only the surface of things and echoing a conventional understanding of wealth and poverty. In contrast, he believed in 'non duality'—the idea that one could be fully engaged in the world, could enjoy material possessions without becoming attached to them, and find true wealth in spiritual insight, compassion, and wisdom. … My expectation about China's economic growth, and the demand it would stoke for the nation's cultural icons, proved correct. The value of my collection has probably increased fivefold. Five times sounds like a fine return, but it is far less than the stock market returned over the same period. Since I have no intention of selling, that doesn't matter very much to me anyway; what did matter was that great objects were no longer 'coming out' of China, and the window of opportunity to add to my collection closed. I adapted quite radically, stimulated by seeing some extraordinary private collections of time-based media, video art, and the intersection of art and technology. My focus shifted from the past to the here and now, from objects to experiences, and from a category with reasonable investment prospects to one with little financial upside. It struck me that video was the natural language of young people, of a whole generation that gets most of its information from screens, and does most of its communicating on devices. Some artists were doing very innovative work, enabled in part by rapidly changing technology ranging from cameras that make a thousand images a second, to facial recognition software, to artificial intelligence, to virtual reality. Other artists were basing their work on video games, often with an ironic critique of the aggressiveness and gender stereotypes they embody. While I had enjoyed learning the history, now I enjoyed getting to know artists. I found that I had a good rapport with many of those I met and quite a few have become real friends. Doug Aitken has been aptly described as the best dinner company the art world has produced. He has surfer dude good looks, boyish curiosity about virtually any topic you introduce, and the charm and skill of an accomplished raconteur. He resists the confines of the museum and is eager to project his art into unexpected places. This penchant for the unexpected is central to a work in my collection, Migration, set in a series of cheap motel rooms reminiscent of B-movies. The motels are mostly in desolate industrial settings in a landscape devoid of people. Into each motel room, he introduces a different species of wild animal. A horse stares in bewilderment at a TV set, a beaver frolics in a bathtub, a mountain lion attacks a pillow as if it is his prey, a buffalo overturns a lamp and crashes a telephone to the floor. The result is sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious—and a metaphor for the struggles of human migrants to find their footing while adapting to unfamiliar environs. … Because there were relatively few collectors, I had the opportunity to be among the leaders in the field. The small universe of potential buyers kept prices reasonable, which in turn meant that the artists were making their work with the purest of motives. … Video art is a challenging area for museums too. Some museums have large collections, excellent curators, and strong technical staff. However, visitors to museums typically expect to enter a gallery with a dozen or more paintings or sculptures and spend less than a minute with each. They do not expect to engage with a single work of art for ten minutes or more. It's not that visitors have short attention spans; they go to operas, ballets, concerts, movies, and theater. But those activities are done sitting down in the evenings, not standing up in the daytime. I have long felt that if video art is to offer the kind of immersive experiences the artists intended, a new kind of cultural institution is needed—a hybrid between a museum and a performing arts venue. As a venture philanthropist, I am excited to help create such an institution. I have taken a giant step by acquiring a 40,000-square-foot venue in Manhattan's Lower East Side, which we are calling Canyon. It will incorporate the latest technology, and it will showcase both established masters and exciting new talent. I hope it will become a 'must see' destination for lovers of contemporary art. It will be open in the evening to attract new, younger, and more diverse audiences, drawn by the dramatic, experiential nature of its exhibitions. (Excerpted with permission from The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious by Robert Rosenkranz, published by Bloomsbury; 2025)
Scoop
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Wellington Artist Selected To Exhibit At SACO Biennial In Chile In July
Press Release – GoldFish Creative Wellington artist Debbie Fish will be traveling to Chile in July to exhibit a new artwork 'Glass Sponge' on the historic pier in Antofagasta in the north of Chile, as part of the SACO Biennial. Debbie was selected alongside 5 other artists from Brazil, Chile, Iceland, Mongolia and Russia to exhibit in Chile's leading contemporary art biennial on the theme of Dark Ecosystems. The new artwork celebrates the new species of sea sponge found off the coast of Chile in 2024, and highlights the oldest living creatures, created larger than life. The artwork is made out of found and recycled shade cloth, contemplating land impacts on ocean life. The fabric is textured with circular holes, cut by hand, as if creating an industrial lace, giving the appearance of fragility, but maintaining strength in their adaptability. After the exhibition has opened, the 6 artists will participate in an immersion trip in the Atacama Desert, to visit different natural and cultural sites, as part of the Biennial. While SACO is covering the costs of her flights and accommodation, Debbie is running an art fundraiser to support the creation and exhibition of this new art installation. Included for sale is a selection of limited edition prints, a few mixed media artworks and one large bamboo eagle ray. Debbie has previously exhibited in festivals including Sculpture on the Gulf (Waiheke Island), Sculpture in the Gardens (Auckland) and her work Whai Repo was exhibited in the Whairepo Lagoon in Wellington in 2023. SACO Biennial was started as an independent initiative under the direction of Dagmara Wyskiel and produced by Christian Núñez with the goal of emphasising the connection between art and science, and bringing artistic creation and reflection to the world's driest desert.
