Daftar Asfar participates in Art Dubai’s UAE NOW

Co-founders Lena, Sarah and Nahla at Art Dubai, photo courtesy Darah Ghanem, (2019).

Daftar Asfar participated in UAE NOW, an exhibition curated by Munira Al Sayegh.

UAE NOW was a new segment of Art Dubai exploring the country’s independent local artist-run platforms. These collectives and community groups offered a crucial counterpoint to the public and commercial sectors and added an essential layer to the local contemporary art ecosystem. UAE NOW highlighted the depth in these organisations and their place in the evolving landscape, and brought to the fore the important contribution of grassroots platforms and the underground in creating new ways of thinking, theory and artistic movements.

The participating platforms included, Bait 15, Banat Collective, Jaffat el Aqlam, PAC (Public Art Collective) and Daftar Asfar. These platforms have been invited to showcase their respective institutions in their way of choice and their introduction to the fair acted as a counter narrative, created a symbiotic push and pull between institutional and non-institutional thinking and action.’

Daftar Asfar’s booth was designed in such a way to present it’s story and journey through humorous facts, a 7m scroll displaying a section of the pages, a video which stitched together all the current pages and a table packed with material for audiences to drop by, take a seat, and absorb the content- slowly.

We also spoke on a panel along with Darah Ghanem/ follow the halo, curator of the Digital Daftar on the process of starting an artist run collective through social media. You can listen to The power of technology and transport| how to launch mobile, travelling sketchbooks in New Mexico, the Middle East and Cyberspace simultaneously here.