CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVES

Curated by Khaled Ramadan and Anni Venalainen

Artists: Raed Yassin, Mahmoud Hojeji, Ayman Ramadan, Dalia A – Kury, Mounira Mounira, Najib Mrad and Khaled Ramadan

Exhibition Dates: January 7^th – February 18^th 2010

Opening Reception: January 7^th 2010, 6:30–8:30 pm

Venue:     The Guild, NY

45 West 21st Street, 2nd Floor

New York, NY 10010

www.theguildny.com 

NEW YORK—The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present Categorical Imperatives curated by Khaled Ramadan and Anni Venalainen, opening on January 7^th 2010. The first show of its kind, Categorical Imperatives will present video works by young contemporary Middle-Eastern artists including Raed Yassin, Mahmoud Hojeji, Ayman Ramadan, Dalia Al – Kury, Mounira Mounira, Najib Mrad and Khaled Ramadan. The themes explored are encounters between people, situations of life and points of view. All of these also relate to the theme of otherness. The spectator on the other hand is in dialogue with the artworks looking for his/her position with the perspectives represented in them.

Khaled Ramadan, born in Beirut in 1965, is a curator, video documentary maker and a lecturer in new media aesthetics. His fields of specialties are visual culture aesthetics, multi-media studies and the history of cross culture visual art and culture. He is a lecturer at the department of Art History, University of Copenhagen. He was also an associated guest Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught critical theory and experimental documentary making in 2006. He is the curator of the Coding-Decoding documentary festival, Copenhagen 2006, “Not on satellite - video and experimental documentary - at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía”, Madrid 2007. He is also part of the official jury of the AMAL Arab film festival, Spain 2007. He is the founder of Chamber of Public Secrets and the independent institute, Chamber for Interventional Media – institute for electronic, didactic and analytical art  

Raed Yassin was born in Beirut 1979. He graduated from the Theater Department of the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003. He works in video, performance, music and audio/ visual arts. He has done performances, videos and recordings.

Mahmoud Hojeij received his PhD in Media and Communication from European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2006, MA in Media Studies from New School University, New York in 2001 and BA in Communication Arts from The Lebanese American University, Beirut in 1997. He is a writer, director and executive producer of a number of films including: ‘Wish You Were Here’, 2006; ‘Masks’, 2004/06; ‘We Will Win’, 2006; ‘Tell Me Something’, 2006; ‘Sa Carapace’ 2006; ‘America’, 2004; ‘An Ocean Apart’, 2003. His work has received many awards.

About his own work Ayman Ramadan says: "Coming from a background of no formal art training and with strong ties to the street life I have managed to relay my thoughts and feelings into a visual language using mediums of installation and video art. This allowed for an immediate response from the ordinary person. In all my installations and video pieces I have concentrated on the status of the urban working class in a city with a rigid class structure reinforced by both government and cultural attitudes.

Dalia Al Kury is a 27 year old palestinian/jordanian director living between Jordan and Europe. She has directed many short fiction and documentary films since she first started in 2003. She holds an MA in screen Documentary from Goldsmiths College, UK, and has directed over seven documentary films, all of which were screened in international film festivals or on the Arabic MBC Sattelite TV network. She has been granted support from the TV channel Al Arabya twice including for her last film, “Smile you’re in South Lebanon”. Her approach to images is romantic yet sharp in the way it chooses to depict each and every side of a given issue. Dalia has a sense for portraits and films people as if she painted them, touch by touch with a warm and innocent approach to human nature.

Mounira Al Solh was born in Beirut in 1978. She studied painting at the Lebanese University in Beirut (LB), and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (NL). Between 2006 and 2008, she was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.   Her work is multidisciplinary, osciliating between video, installation, writing, photography and painting. 

For further information or questions, please contact the gallery at info@theguildny.com or call at (212) 229–2110.

www.theguildny.com