Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East - intersections of transdisciplinary practice and understanding :1st November – 3rd November 2011

Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East - intersections of transdisciplinary practice and understanding will bring together specialists from various fields of research and practices to examine the role of drawing in the contemporary Middle East. Drawing as medium, as a tool, as notation, performance, and as a specific mode of thinking and imagining in the processes of invention, production, reproduction and communication within and across fields and disciplines: from art to science, from technology to ideology and cultural practices.  

The trans-disciplinary approach of the conference will highlight the specificities, as well as the commonalities of the various dimensions, fields, forms and uses of drawing, broadly defined as the production and extension of lines in space, as the creation of meaning by marking surfaces, as the creation and fixation of visible paths that record and communicate patterns of temporal-spatial experiences.

In this sense, drawing is the activity and product that makes explicit the interrelationships of flow and form in mental life. It mediates the flux of internal processes and allows the objectification of mental constructs and operations into practical-material as well as perceptual-symbolic entities.

The central notion of Crossing the Line emphasizes the act and the idea of drawing as, on one hand, the setting of clear boundaries defining symbolic and material entities within a representational field and representational practices, while at the same time stressing the relational nature of all formalizing processes and constructs, of meaning making and communicative processes in general.

In this sense, to draw is at the same time to establish a limit and to surpass it, it is to define the interrelated positive and negative components of any configuration. To draw is to create a boundary that is also an interface between domains, territories, modes of thinking and corresponding modes of being. To create a line is to produce a vector of thought and action, and in this sense, to mark a boundary is already to cross it, that is: drawing is a trans-formative process; it is the creation of new paths, new relationships, new configurations of knowledge.

Dr Marcelo Guimarães Lima

Venue:

American University in Dubai, Dubai, UAE.

Dates: 1st November – 3rd November 2011

Steering Committee:

International Chair: Dr. Irene Barberis
Middle East Co-Chair: Dr. Marcelo Guimarães Lima
Middle East Co-Chair: Associate Professor Julia Townsend

Affiliated Organisations:

Tashkeel, Dubai

Keynote Speakers

Professor Stephen Farthing, University of the Arts London
Mr. Nja Mahdaoui, Tunisia
Dr. Marcelo Guimarães Lima, AUD
Dr Irene Barberis, RMIT University, Melbourne

Metasenta Publications will print a small format book on the full conference papers to be distributed internationally.

There will be three exhibitions to accompany the ‘Crossing the Line’ Conference:

A major exhibition on Drawing in the Middle East. Opening November 3rd

AUD will host an exhibition of A4 drawings collected from across the Middle Eastern region, these will be shown at the conference and later exhibited in Melbourne at Gallery Langford 120. They will become part thereof of the Global Drawing Project  by Dr. Irene Barberis and Stephen Farthing to be published in 2012.