CΠΟΡΤ

The team is developing the new auditorium for the arab guggenheim museum, preliminary design for your eyes only.

At the Centre Pompidou

On the 26th of August,2008, the president of the Centre Pompidou, M. Alain Seban
inaugurated the exhibition of Nicos Charalambidis.

Kathimerini's article

«Προστατευμένη ζώνη» στο Μπομπούρ
Το νέο πρότζεκτ του Κύπριου Νίκου Χαραλαμπίδη στηρίζεται στη νεότερη ιστορία της πατρίδας του καλλιτέχνη

THE LINK TO THE INTERACTIVE SITE

Finally is online the interactive flash site, best viewed on
mozilla firefox, take a tour!

http://artsivistes.free.fr/ledrabarricade/interactive/main.swf

the Arab Guggenheim reaches Bejing

The Arab Guggenheim Museum

Introduction



The opening of the new Guggenheim Museum will take place next summer in Beirut. Rauche, a seaside district not far from the town’s centre, was considered as the perfect location not only because of its rare spot and its magnificent view over Mediterranean sea, but also because of being a space charged of the Lebanese historical past. During the French colonialism the whole area of Rauche had comprised the quarters of a French military camp, which in 1980 had been reduced to ashes by a fire caused by a group of Lebanese partisans.


The architect’s proposal focuses on a version of the Mies van der Rohe monument, which he had designed for the city of Berlin (1926) in memorial to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and had been dismantled from Hitler in 1933.

According to the scenario of the new version, the monument is transformed into a transportable building, to house the Arab Guggenheim Museum. After a period of two years activities the structure will be transported in Cyprus for other two years and accordingly to other towns in the Arab world. Due to the troubled political situation of the Middle East -and the nearby region - the founder and the shareholders of Guggenheim, had approved the architect’s idea of a portable, rambling museum.







The museum design



The particular Lego-type design of the legendary Mies monument gave to the architect the ideal solution in order to carry out the project. Inspired from the constructivist outline of the monument and following pattern, a radical building has been formed out of revolutionary ecological materials, which could provide an exceptionally light result to the whole structure. In case of war, the boxes of the
museum can be deconstructed and transported to another Arab country.






Following a premeditated rearrangement of the boxes the museum can easily be rebuilt at a significant location, preferably incorporating remnants of the past of each country, refurbishing or even rebuilding historic monuments, buildings, antiquities etc. In Beirut, for case in point, the main building of the museum has been surrounded by a group of assistant buildings which have been built, following the original plans of the demolished quarters of the French military camp; bringing back to life memories of an era that left its indelible traces on Lebanese people.

The row of the long central buildings of the camp that had served as administration and commander’s offices in the past, have been converted into a series of versatile workshops for local and invited foreign artists,while the soldiers’ chambers have been converted into a of studios for the artists. The architect has played upon the former French ruins by creating baths, a swimming pool, changing rooms and the Arabic hammam by carving the earth, with the guidance of the geologist for the composition of the minerals.





This series of constructions lye on the grounds of the local history and of course, on the quotidian of the Arab’s life. All the excavations and erections that have taken place within the site have been supervised by a special geologist; in straight collaboration with the architect they have confronted the complexity of creating dykes immersed in a sea of rocks and communing with one another through a path made of concrete.

The composition inevitably immerses itself in the sea. The galleries of the museum have been camouflaged behind a ramp and a mesh-rope glass façade.The latter dissuades from the penetration of the direct sunlight, whilst a ramp that bridges the course of the procedure from the capture of the concept and its creations within the workshops, to the final phase of its display in the museum,and a refreshment café both for the visitors and the artists has been molded following the site’s contour lines.




An Art School



The owners’ perception of the museum reflects the ancient Greek model of a Museion, a meeting place and an interdisciplinary laboratory for creative activities, a kind of constant workshops, rather than the Anglo-Saxon model of an exhibition space as it has been established since 1759 (the year when the British Museum was founded).

Arab Guggenheim highlights this original Ancient Greek idea of a cultural/educational temple, where poets, musicians, artists and scientists could work together - under the protection of the Muses, taking actually the form of an alternative Art School:a small group of international artists (5 or six) could be invited each time,for a period of three months to act as the teachers of the school.

In fact, the artists/teachers could be invited to carry out one of their own projects,working in collaboration with their 'students'. The students should work
following the instructions of the artists in order to accomplish their projects,while in parallel they could work on their own artworks, under the supervision of the artist.

Of course the final outcomes will belong to the guest artists but the documentary of the entire procedure (films, interviews, texts and the relics of the activities) will consist a new artwork, a parallel installation- acquisition of the museum. On occasion, replicas of the artists’ artworks (or smaller models) could be constructed for the museum's collection,by the permission of the artist.




Carnival Pause



At the end of the activities, the outcomes of the “art-school” could be put on display before the artists/teachers’ departure, following the form of a carnival parade into the town. Emphasizing the nomadic character of the museum the exhibits, could be set up on floats and “meet” people in public spaces, streets and plazas, instead of waiting them to visit the museum. Of course, Carnival is a ceremony that doesn't exist in Arabic civilization, even though it is so familiar to a variety of religions and cultures in the rest of the world.

Thus, trying to impose an overseas ritual to them, it sounds like a colonialist strategy. In fact, the Museum’s Carnival parade has nothing to do with the usual procession; actually the real reference here, is nothing else but the very oriental custom of displaying merchandises in the street; costermongers, hawkers and pedlars are very characteristic figures in the Arab world.





Hollow Airport Museum



The vacant building of the International Airport of Nicosia atthe Green Line is the ideal - emblematic location to host (after Beirut station) the activities of the Arab Guggenheim Museum. Although the airport is the only unoccupied from the Turkish army edifice, located at the Green Line, is still in a militarizedzone, under the control of the United Nations authorities. Stressing the necessity of an International school of Fine Arts and of a Contemporary Museum in the area, a group of international artists such as: Mounir Fatmi, Wafa Hourani, Gülsün Karamustafa and Eric Valette have been already invited to work as the first teachers of the school/museum. Atlas Group is also another collection of artists that have been included in Museum’s schedule for next spring in 2009, along with a retrospective of Joseph Beuys, programmed for the same period.

This policy gives local students and artists the opportunity to meet inspiring artists coming from all over the world and the chance to collaborate and exchange ideas with them; accordingly gives the “teachers” the opportunity to learn as much as possible about Arab people, the political situation in the Middle East, and (no matter how much ridiculous it sounds) learn how many problems, the contest for oil, caused to these countries and the nearby area.

One ironic and almost symbolic thing to mention here is that the dividing wall in Cyprus is constructed from empty oil containers. Petroleum, the real reason for the war, is at the same time the element that literally divides the island...That’s the reason why I put emphasis on this element, constructing the Carnival Floats
in Sao Paolo.As my six years old nephew told me, Cyprus suffered a lot and still suffers since is the western gate to Arab oil and wealth…

Rebuilding borders…

Rebuilding borders…

In the last biennial of Sao Paulo, Charalambidis’ dominant piece was a versatile, multiple-use platform, floating by the help of four helicopter’s propellers and of some helium filled barrels. The barrels originated from three barricades on the Green Line in Cyprus, the buffer zone that divides the island in two, Turkish and Greek as a coincidence of a violent war in 1974. The artist, following a painstaking, insistent and often painful process of struggling with United Nations’ bureaucracy and the local authorities, had finally the permission to dismantle three parts of the dividing wall, in order to transfer the barricade barrels to the Biennale, of which the title was “How to Live Together”. Moreover, he had convinced the military forces to provide him with a group of soldiers to participate in his antimilitaristic project. It was a real hard plan, which was getting even more complicated especially due to the fact that the whole operation had to be realised during the war in the neighboring Lebanon and in a period while Cyprus was in the process of accepting more and more evacuees; thousands of Lebanese people, who were arriving at the island seeking out for a refuge. In Sao Paolo Another group of Brazilian soldiers had received the barrels in order to set them inside the emblematic Niemeyer’s biennale building. Altering their militaristic role, the Cypriot soldiers had shifted their duty of protecting/guarding the wall in dismantling it. The floating platform had served as a stage for a series of happenings and performances playing the role of an alternative carnival float. In one of these performances the group of the Brazilian soldiers had accompanied a team of samba girls during their dancing, while Brazilian drummers had been playing Samba on the dismantling barricade barrels, converting them into musical instruments. Samba, which originated from traditional African dances, was the representative hymn to freedom for the African slaves in Brasil…The fancy costumes of the dancers had been made out of hieratic byzantine vestmens, like those that archbishop Makarios, the first elected president of the Cypriot Democracy, used to wear.

His participation in “How to Live Together” biennial gained the admire of his artist fellows, visitors and art critics from the first day of the event. The samba platform was so crowded during the opening, that I had to make gran efforts,struggling among the spectators, in order to take some photos, like the one below (pag.3) with Ambramovic, chattering with the artist while watching the performance…

Of course, that great success it’s not an easy incident for a “third world” originated artist, who was participating at the biennale completely on his own forces, without the support of a gallery, a commissioner or even a curator. However, his success doesn’t personally surprise me or those who know the radical character of his activities;

In fact, I’m one among those who strongly believe that he would surely be one of the most known pioneer figures of the nineties if he wouldn’t himself repeatedly refused to play the game of art system, believing that political art should find alternative ways to act. Even if, in a very young age, he had drawn near international establishment and recognition through his participations in significant exhibitions, he had never accepted to collaborate with powerful galleries. Thus, when the Dakis Ioannou collection, had presented his work (soon after his first participation in Venice biennale in 1997) in the glamorous “Global Vision” five artists show, with Chris Offili, Kcho, Kara Walker and Yinka Shonibare, Charalambidis was somewhere across the Ireland’s borders, sticking up anonymous posters of the Queen Elisabeth (photo below) propagandizing his project “The Arab Guggenheim Museum”. Actually another version of his Rumbling/Rambling Museum, “The Arab Guggenheim Museum” was also the conceptual framework of one of the other large-scale emblematic constructions that accompanied the Samba platform in Sao Paulo.

Charalambidis envisaged his “Arab Guggenheim Museum” as an itinerant group of carnival floats that could participate in carnival processions in Europe (or other crucial spots of the Western world) as a cultural intervention by artists coming from Arab countries. As a travelling archive, this carnival ark, could distribute also, information about everyday life and the culture of these countries, functioning as a political manifesto or an “autonomous protesting machine”. In Sao Paulo, the museum took the form of a large prison following the outline of Mies van der Rohe Monument to November Revolution, on which a team of architecture students were participating in a series of workshops, wearing orange uniforms, as a subtly reference to the Guantanamo prisoners (images on page 6).

Ambramovic whispering: you made the real thing to Charalambidis. She was certainly
only one of the many artists who were fascinated by Carnival Pause. Alfons Hug the German curatot of the ex Sao Paolo biennale was probably the first one who had distinguished publicly, even from the day before the opening Charalambidis’political intervention; while Rafal Niemojewski at his report in Art Forum (19-10-2006) had declaired : The biennial’s set piece was definitely Nikos Charalambidis’s Social Gym, 2006, a carnival float filled with soldiers and samba dancers, while the neighbouring installation by Thomas Hirschhorn looked blunt and generic (and was, for me, the show’s biggest disappointment)…

Recently, I met Charalambidis in China, during the opening of “Trans-experiences 2008” at 798 Space in Beijing, where he presented his “Hollow Airport Museum”. Is actually another activistic guise of the “Arab Guggenheim”, in a form of an International Art School, located at the vacant building of the International Airport of Nicosia at the Green Line in Cyprus. The artist told me about his new “Carnival Float”, a replica of the Ledra Street barricade (the first barricade that officially came down after 44 years) which is going to travel throughout Europe to be connected with emblematic buildings and central museums. Rebuilding the barricade, Charalambidis stresses once again the message that the solution to the Cyprus problem, yet needs a lot of good willing steps, coming not only from the two communities of the island but mostly from the powerful countries and the policies that have been involved in the problem years before the real division of the island. The travelling replica of Ledra’s bariccade is going to carry a plasma TV present-ing the enthusiasm of Turks and Greeks with which they had welcomed the dismantling of Ledra’s part of the wall, a couple of months ago. In parallel, the visitors could be informed about the activities of the H.A.M. (Hollow Airport Museum) and its Art School of which the first team of teachers has been already fixed by: Mounir Fatmi, Gulsum Karamustafa, Wafa Hourani, Pablo Leon de la Barra and Eric Valette.. Atlas group is also another team that has been included in the Museum’s schedule for next spring.

Volunteer soldiers are dismantling the barricade barrels at three points of the Green Line in Cyprus in order to transport them in Sao Paolo for the building of Charalambidis’ platforms.

Since the late eighties, Charalambidis’ multi-media practice has been informed by an intense sense of politicised space, drawing strongly on his experiences as a child, when he and his family were forced to leave their home in the north of Cyprus by the invasion of the Turkish army. Reflecting aspects of his particular position as a
refugee and an emigrant, he had initiated (two decades ago) issues of residence and anti-residence, nomadism, place and “non-place”. Even from his very first participations in international exhibitions, he had established interactive practices, conducting performances, participatory workshops and situations that encouraged the spectators to “use” his works, transferring actually the private emotion into the public arena and questioning the formal, social and cultural implications of modernist architecture, so as the politics of those days. From 1984 (at the age of seventeen) till 1986 he had served his military service at the Green Line, the buffer zone between Greeks and Turks in Cyprus,

during a very hard period for the relationships of these two parts; at that period, even a long soldier’s gaze over the dividing wall, could be a dangerous gesture and the artist himself was indeed a witness of the assassination of two of his companion soldiers during his military service.

One of the first Charalambidis’ interventional events in 1989 at the Green Line was a subtly and rather allegorical homage to the movement of Situationist International.
Charalambidis conceived at that time, that any form of artistic activity in the territory would be infinitely preferable to bloody conflict thus, the idea of a rambling museum, in the form of a participatory artistic platform, could activate the area, providing a representative, exemplary model for other contested areas as well, like in Lebanon, Ireland and Gaza’s strip. Of course in practice the authorities were bound to get in the way and real soon it was quite clear to him that if his will was to carry on this vision, this would be certainly a lonely procedure. In nowadays, twenty years later, political art is “trendy”. Soon after Cyprus had been assigned to organise and host Manifesta 6, many Cypriot artists, had become “political artists” and almost every single one has now at least one project related to the Green Line…

In 2003, Charalambidis had represented Cyprus, at the famous Aria Scarpa - palazzo Querini, showing a variety of projects of his Rambling Museum. The president of Manifesta, Henry Meyric Hughes was the curator of his show and the excellent collaboration between the two men, was apparently of a determining nature for the decision of the committee to host Manifesta 6 in Cyprus. The perspective of an international event like that, stimulated the political feelings, not only of many artists but also of a number of curators who, unexpectedly, became sensitive about Cyprus’ political issue. The most vociferous example was the “Leaps of Faith” international exhibition, the curators of which had apparently followed Charalambidis’ steps, not having understood yet, much of his revolutionary practice, his courageous formula of working and his intense, selflessness and genuine devotion. “Leaps of Faith”, veiled under pseudo-political banalities and safely supported by numerous international corporations, was actually an opportunity for the invited international artists to experience an exotic weekend at a particular location like Cyprus. Protected from any dangerous and risk, the exhibition, had been widely advertised (especially to people who had never been in Cyprus) as a perilous and innovative project, although in 2005 even the circulation between Greek and Turkish communities through the dividing wall was officially permitted! Of course, at the period when Charalambidis had first inspired the artistic activation of the Green Line, the conditions were completely different. In the late eighties, for example, during one of his primary, extremely risky situationistic interventions (photo above) the United Nations troops, interposed the event and arrested the artist, since the whole activities were inverting the status quo of the Green Line and the artist was incurring real dangerous for his life.

Arrayed furniture and structural elements, transferred from the artist’s house to an alternative carnival procession.

Over the years Charalambidis has established an interdisciplinary way of working, involving local communities, universities and scientists, even military camps in his “Social Gym” projects. Combining Beuys’ romantic activism and advanced technology, his work has been a benchmark for political engaged artistic endeavour in the 1990’s and yet. Growing up among Lebanese emigrants in Cyprus, he has been always very concerned on the political situation of the nearby countries and the Middle East problem. His long-term “Arab Guggenheim Museum” project actually reflects these concerns, addressing issues such as cultural identity, multiculturalism, the implications of globalisation and capitalism. He questions ideas of nation or nationality and the emergence of post-national identities, the legacy of colonialism, ideological conflict and religion or the impact of consumer culture and Western materialism. In Charalambidis’ proposal for a progressive carnival procession, the participatory carnival floats could convey a variety of crucial socio political and cultural information on Arab world and the Middle East problem , challenging a new perspective for critical reinterpretation, of the complex relationships between the Western and Eastern civilisations.

Dr. Aspasia Mastrogianni

Art historian and critic,

Professor at the Aegian University, Greece

the Malevich structure

The “Malevich construction” is made mainly out of glass and metal frames, though the several levels of the museum are based on metal columns as mentioned before.

Apart from the top units (artists’ multimedia lab /conference-room) and dark rooms for video installations, the 1^st, 2^nd and 3d floor are made of hemi-transparent glass. The rest of the surfaces are wooden parts. As for the various segmentations inside the museum, panels made out of compressed paper will be used so as to achieve a result as light as possible.

As an inner form of the museum,
especially regarding the ground level,
can be organized concerning its exhibitions needs.
This can be achieved by using the compressed paper-panels
in order to isolate works or create group of works.

Starabucks

.*Starbucks company, as for its corporate social responsibility (CSR), offered to build a coffee shop into the museum and offer its products at cost prices. Also, in collaboration with the museum, Starbucks is gathering through its stores all over the world, English books in order to provide local students with such an educational material (literature, art, philosophy, English) .

Museum Units

On top of the building there are two main units of great importance. The Guggenheim Foundation, apart from having the group of the assistant buildings surrounding the museum, functioning as workshops or studios for artists, thought of having a similar unit incorporated in the main building. This unit’s differentiation is based upon the focus on multimedia practices and computer lab facilities’ usage. Apart from the equipment offered by the museum, educational programs/seminars on new technology techniques and program use are also going to take place. This happens so as to stimulate local artists’ interest concerning contemporary mediums for art production and encourage them to produce artworks under this new aspect, maintaining though their own distinct local character a point of view.

A living Workshop

A parallel workshop had begin along with the opening of the biennial of Thessaloniki and runned till the conclusion of the exhibition. The prospective of inviting the students from the school of Fine Arts to get involved in the project was of great importance. Having the original Mies monument as pattern they proposed ways/solutions of transforming this emblematic structure into a museum. As artists, they presented particular architectural models made out of various material, making also sketches, drawings and 3D plans. Creating 3D visiting plans of the interiors of the museum, they had the opportunity organise an entire exhibition displaying their own artworks in the museum’s imaginary spaces, their artworks/proposals, following the political concept of the museum most probably within a relevant political framework . Thus, the project of having a portable “portfolio” of their works that functions as a political statement, a kind of a political traveling manifesto.

snapshots from the activities involving the Athens School of Fine Arts alumni










photos by Yiannis Papadopoulos

Structure

The construction of the museum had to be such, which could be easily dismantled and carried. It had to be light and easy to reconstruct in any case. The architect thought of using raw materials that could be found in the local area and ended up in using sun-dried cow’s remnants along with mud, for the external cover of the museum. These brick-textured panels will be set on metal unfolding structures bound with each other and based on metal columns. On the back side of the museum, a glass-frame construction has been set on parts of the surface and also another one on the top
of the museum, right in the middle.

Design

Rumble

Mies monument

The brick monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926) in Berlin commemorated the ill-fated Spartacist 1919 uprising. Mies 's design was an abstract brick structure 6 m high, 12 m long, and at the widest, 4 m wide. Related to constructivist sculpture, it has also been compared to Wright's design for the Kaufmann house, "Falling Water." The five-pointed star and hammer and sickle completed the design. The Nazis ordered it destroyed in 1933. It was an exception for Mies van der Rohe to design a political monument, for he was normally nonpolitical. The commission came from Eduard Fuchs, president of the German Communist Party at that time. Mies van der Rohe was later attacked as a Communist because of this commission.

According to the new version, the monument is transformed into a transportable building, to house the Arab Guggenheim Museum. After a period of two year’s activities the structure will be transported in Istanbul for other two years and accordingly to other towns of the Arab world. Due to the troubled political situation of the Middle East -of the Arab region in general - the founder and the shareholders of Guggenheim, had approved the architect’s idea of a portable, rambling museum.

Brick system

In case of war in the hosting country, the boxes of the museum
can be deconstructed and transported to another Arab country
allowing the Arab Guggenheim to continue its task.
Following a premeditated rearrangement of the boxes
the museum can easily be rebuilt at a significant location,
preferably incorporating remnants of the past of each country,
buildings, monuments, antiquities etc.

In Beirut, for case in point, the main building of the museum has
been surrounded by a group of assistant buildings which have been built,
following the original plans of the demolished quarters of the French
military camp; bringing back to life memories of an era that left
its indelible traces on Lebanese people.

The long central buildings of the camp that in the past had
housed the administration and the command’s offices have been
converted into a series of versatile workshops for local and
invited artists while the soldiers’ chambers have
been converted into artists’ studios.