Wednesday, April 11, 2012

MARCH MADNESS - March Meeting, Sharjah Art Foundation

March is both wonderful and exhausting. All art events in the UAE were squished into the same month, which flooded the cities with creativity and inspiration.
Ever have those nights where your body is completely drained of energy, but your mind is firing up? And all you can do is lay there, incapacitated with the exhaustion while you have this burning desire to create something. I find it an incredibly wonderful and also an excruciatingly painful experience.

Naima and I were really productive during March.
First blog post of the month is going to focus on the March Meeting, made by the Sharjah Art Foundation. It was held in the Calligraphy Square in the Heritage Area of Sharjah in the UAE. That's a whole lot of capital letters.



So Naima and I both volunteered/interned there. We had loads of different responsibilities, like: keeping time during panel discussions and presentations, handing out microphones, ushering people inside the talks when they were about to start, monitoring the books in the library, getting water for the presenters, putting together packages, registering guests and speakers, tweeting live about the event and it really goes on.



We also got to shoot photos and some footage of the event. Together with Samar, a new addition to our group, Naima and I made a documentary about 'Revisiting Tarab', which is a series of performances put together by a Lebanese sound artist, Tarek Atoui. It was the merge of Classical Arabic music and contemporary twists from 22 different world renowned sound artists.



It was an amazing night and it brought people from all over to come and join the show.

I'll have to remember to add the documentary later. I have to do some final touches.


Samar's in the middle :D


Overall, it was an entirely great experience. We got to meet awesome people, eat free food, and listen to great music. As one of our professors always says, "You have to steal time" in order to attend any of these art and design events. And we practically robbed any concept of time we had. We all fell considerably behind on our courses, but we are catching up, and it's completely worth it.

Steal time,
-Deena


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