CROSSING THE LINE: GLOBAL DRAWING 2015

CROSSING THE LINE: GLOBAL DRAWING

INTERSECTIONS IN FLORENCE

A contemporary Drawing Symposium

 November 6 -7,  2015

A one day symposium in tandem with the exhibition Contemporary Australian Drawing #5.

Companion to the exhibition:

"Contemporary Australian Drawing #5 : Facsimilies",  

Curator Dr Irene Barberis;

RMIT Gallery, RMIT University Melbourne, Wimbledon Gallery, University of the Arts London, Gallery Langford120, Melbourne, New York Studio School Gallery, New York City, SACI Institute Gallery, Firenze

Organisational Structure

Host Chair: Professor David Davidson (TBC)
International Chair: Dr Irene Barberis
Middle East Chair: Professor Julia Townsend
Chair of Publications: Dr Marcelo Guimarães Lima
Keynote Speaker – Dr Janet McKenzie; International Author, Artist and Historian

Main Partners

•Contemporary Australian Drawing travelling exhibition travelled by The Metasenta Foundation, Australia
•SACI Florence [Host organization]
•Global Centre for Drawing, Dr Irene Barberis, Australia, GCfD Crossing the Line Series of International Drawing Conferences ©]]
•CEPAOS Arts and Culture [Professor Marcelo Guimarães Lima, University of Sao Paulo]
•American University in Dubai [Professor Julia Townsend]
•Sponsors, and in-kind Sponsorship
SACI Institute, Florence,
Global Centre for Drawing,
The Metasenta Foundation, ,
The American University in Dubai,
CEPAOS, Brazil

Symposium themes:

Drawing as a transdisciplinary practice
Drawing as an intersection
Crossing the Line: hand and technology in a changing world
Drawing: a portrait and landscape-notations of our time.

http://crossingtheline3.blogspot.com

Crossing the Line 2: Drawing in the Middle East by Janet McKenzie - Studio International

Crossing the Line 2: Drawing in the Middle East

by JANET McKENZIE

Crossing the Line was a conference that brought together specialists to examine the role of drawing in the Middle East with the aim of breaking down the cultural barriers to personal expression

Department of Visual Communication, School of Architecture, Art & Design, American University in Dubai, Dubai (in partnership with the Global Centre for Drawing, Melbourne)
12 – 14 September 2014

Geometric Aljamia: A Cultural Transliteration
Total Arts Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
27 August – 13 September
Crossing the Line 2: Location
Jam Jar, Dubai
12-14 September 2014


Crossing the Line 2: Drawing in the Middle East – intersections of trans-disciplinary practice and understanding was organised by Dr Irene Barberis, director and founder of the Global Centre for Drawing in Melbourne, Julia Townsend, professor of visual communication at the American University in Dubai, and Dr Marcelo Guimarães Lima, director of CEPAOS Arts and Culture Center, Brazil.  It followed Across the Gulf (2008-9) and Crossing the Line 1 (2011). Crossing the Line 2 brought together specialists from a number of fields of research and practice to examine the role of drawing in the Middle East. It looked at drawing as a medium, a tool, notation, performance and as a specific mode of thinking and imagining in the processes of invention, production and reproduction and communication within and across fields and disciplines: from art to science, from technology to ideology and cultural practices. In addition to papers on drawing practice and theory, there were eight artist’s talks.
The Global Centre for Drawing initiates and produces drawing projects around the world, which seek to avoid the cumbersome nature of large-scale academic conferences, preferring to work quickly, and to capture the spirit of artistic practice in societies in flux. The first conference succeeded, but the organisers wanted an ongoing dialogue so expanded and developed the project for a second. Artists and academics were selected from submissions from art schools and universities within the Middle East, including the American University in Dubai (AUD), the American University of Sharjah and Zayed University, and a number came from universities in the United States. Their papers and artist’s talks were mostly based on significant personal and academic experience of the Middle East.  Further speakers and artists came from Australia, the UK, Portugal and Cyprus; a significant number, including those who had been students or graduate students from Dubai and Doha in Qatar at the time of the first conference, attended the second. Saba Qizilbash from Pakistan, and now a professor at American University in Dubai, presented her artwork and provided great insight in to the numerous roles a female artist is required to play.
Crossing the Line 2 included several exhibitions. Location, curated by Barberis at the Jam Jar gallery, comprised 34 works by invited international artists and the conference speakers, and On Location included student works from the New York-based Rome Art Program, founded and directed by Carole Robb. The results of workshops held before the conference were exhibited on the AUD campus. Geometric Aljamia: A Cultural Transliteration,a group exhibition featuring works by Reni Gower and Jorge Benitez, both of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Richmond, US, Julia Townsend and visiting artists from Afghanistan, was held at Total Arts Gallery, Dubai. The large paper-cuts by Gower dominated the space, remarkably evocative abstract works that resonated with a spiritual power. The exhibition explores the connections between Europe, the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East by addressing the fundamental geometry embedded in 2D art. Aljamia is the adaptation of the Arabic script to transcribe texts in European languages. Aljamia manuscripts have long played a significant role in preserving Islam and the Arabic language in the west. By understanding the visual arts as a transliteration of one form of thinking to another, the exhibition revisits the continuing impact of Islamic art, science and philosophy in the modern world.
Under the direction of Susan Schüld, professor of theatre at VCU, Geometric Aljamia and Reclaiming the Wild Colours of our Voices resulted in performance pieces with Benitez at the conference and at Jam Jar gallery. Benitez stated: “As a native speaker of Spanish, I am keenly aware of the amount of Arabic that exists in my language. Many of those words cross into English. After the events of September 11, I wondered how two cultures that shared so much could come to such a terrible moment, and I began to seek an artistic understanding of the tragedy. There had to be some common ground, something beyond religious, cultural and national differences. I looked into the past to find those moments when the west and the Middle East informed each other in ways that are all too often relegated to the history books. Eventually I learned that the Renaissance discovery of linear perspective owed a great deal to Arab experiments in optics.”
In the 30 years since my first survey of contemporary drawing, the definition of drawing has changed beyond measure: conceptual, spatial and subjective, and employing a wide range of materials beyond the traditional. What has not changed, in my view, is the fact that drawing is the most sensitive tool for exploration, the most immediate form of expression and, in turn, the most effective way to define self. Drawing enables the exploration of identity and enables shifts in one’s perception of life, to reposition oneself when faced with change and loss. Perhaps an obvious example is how we adapt to a new place, how we learn to define ourselves in relation to the circumstances brought about by moving cities or through migration, both disorienting and challenging experiences. In the context of Crossing the Line 2 at the AUD, the city itself forms an appropriate backdrop for a society in flux, where the student body is made up of young men and women from many cultural backgrounds. Here, the projects that employ drawing as an appropriate means to explore self and one’s identity were eagerly absorbed.
In my keynote paper: Drawing on Two Worlds: The Osgood Suite, I quoted Tania Kovats from her book Drawing Water: Drawing as a Mechanism for Exploration, a collection of drawings and writings connected by the sea. She describes her drawing practice as “the shelter I run from and return to”. It is a journey pulled by the tides, blown by changeable winds. The works can be likened to a chart of intersecting lines that crisscross over the water. “I draw to find my way out. Drawing fills the space,” she says. “I see drawing as a way of thinking and also evidence of thinking; of going from one place to another. One draws to define one thing from another.” However, to qualify the possibilities in contemporary drawing practice, Kovats quotes Francis Alÿs, who makes an important distinction: “A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.”
Crossing the Line can be described as a conceptual drawing project with multifarious applications. The cultural barriers to personal expression in the Middle East were explained in a number of papers, such as that of Professor Bob Dahm from the American University of Sharjah: Reluctant Image-Makers: Teaching Drawing in Arabia. Dahm explained the difficulty of teaching drawing in the animation school to mostly local students. The majority have not drawn before and there is little history of image-making; students tend to revert to European or Japanese images or prefer to copy photographs. The inclusion of figures is controversial and in some parts prohibited. Dahm’s teaching centres on creating narratives to accompany images; he encourages the students to work from aural historical stories and to paraphrase them in their own words.
The Artist’s Talk by Valerie Hird from Vermont, presented projects she has undertaken in Iran, Egypt and Jordan. After reading personal diaries written during the American civil war, which contained mundane and intimate details of life during wartime, Hird sought to enable female artists in the Middle East to find their own voices. She worked to enable the women to create a narrative that could then be illustrated, thus injecting a non-conflict reality into their lives, a new conversation. One of the most gratifying aspects of speaking to young women students at the conference – whose mothers could not have pursued a creative career – was to be approached and thanked for sharing personal experiences and ideas with them, to be told that it had inspired them.
Barberis, with her indomitable spirit, has instigated and organised numerous cross-cultural and cross-faith art projects. Metasenta and, more recently, the Global Centre for Drawing, Melbourne, were established through her links to universities or cultural organisations in societies in flux. Across the Gulf (2008-9) partnered with Tashkeel, the unique art and design centre in Dubai established by Sheikha Lateefa Bint Maktoum, an important artist in her own right. The major exhibition of works by Emirate artists from Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai was shown at the 2009 Arc Biennial in Brisbane. Across the Gulf has informed Crossing the Line: indeed, all Barberis’s projects are organically linked and have an increased following. By contrast to other Middle East exhibitions around the world, Across the Gulf showcased emerging and established artists, all of whom practised from within their culture, rather than creating a practice in the west.
Drawing is key to the practice of artists who seek to come to terms with the momentous changes taking place around them in political and cultural terms. The definition of personal identity through art practice can be seen to have been of great personal, societal and artistic value. The Dubai conferences will be followed next year by Crossing the Line conferences in Brazil and Jordan.

STUDIO INTERNATIONAL

Crossing the Line : What actually does this mean? - Dr Irene Barberis

Irene Barberis on location in Dubai photo by Jan Hogan

Crossing the Line2 : Drawing in the Middle East, -  ‘location’

Tracing the Lineage: Deconstructing the title – "Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East”
Crossing the Line : What actually does this mean?
Various dictionaries say that ‘Crossing the Line ’or ‘to cross a line’ ‘is to go too far, step over the line …move into uncharted territories, cross from one location to another, or more literally physically ‘to cross a line’.
The force in the meaning propels us to think of something in a negative sense – you have ‘crossed the line’! or in a more positive sense – we are crossing the line – moving forward…we WILL go into uncharted territories….”
As artists, designers, scientists, in fact in any creative domain - we desire or aspire to/cross the line or ‘a line’ – to go further, think deeper, wider more incisively…to push against the boundaries and enlarge our understandings, locations, our knowledge, and experience as human beings.
Drawing in the Middle East – Here is a twofold expression, a double entendre – it is either – ‘Drawing in the Middle East’ – a pulling inwards toward a centre or point – or a geographical location of ‘Drawing in the Middle East ‘– the title was meant to do both – a call for attention through dialogue – in this case through the visual language of drawing throughout the Middle East – and it is also a ‘count’, a type of audit of ‘drawing’ that is happening in the Middle East now – a gathering of artists, ideas, perceptions and projections.

Dr. Irene Barberis

links: Irene Barberis
          Dr Irene Barberis page at RMIT University, Melbourne
          Global Centre for Drawing

Dr. Janet McKenzie - Keynote Speaker at Crossing The Line Conference, 2014

Dr. Janet McKenzie will present the keynote address:

Drawing on Two Worlds: The Osgood Suite

Dr. Janet McKenzie
Author, Artist and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Dundee

Janet McKenzie was born in eastern Victoria, Australia and was educated at he Australian National University (History of Art/ Philosophy) and the Canberra School of Art (etching). She travelled to the UK in 1979-80 and carried out independent research at King’s College, Cambridge. Returning to Australia she taught at the Canberra School of Art, the Victorian College of the Arts and the City Art Institute, Sydney (now College of Fine Art, UNSW) and published: Drawing in Australia, Contemporary Images and Ideas (1986), and Noel Counihan (1986). In 1986 she married architect Michael Spens and moved to Scotland the following year where she settled permanently. Whilst raising a family, her studio practice was primarily painting. She continued writing and publishing and completed her Doctorate at the University of St. Andrews on The Art of Arthur Boyd, under the supervision of Professor Martin Kemp, published by Thames and Hudson (2000). She has co-edited Studio International with Michael Spens since 2000. She wrote Contemporary Australian Drawing #1, published by Macmillan Art Publishing in 2012. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Dundee, and has embarked on Drawing on Two Worlds, a practice-led research project using collaborative drawing to explore issues of identity and dispossession in Scotland and Australia. She delivered the paper ‘Drawing as Discovery’ as the keynote speaker for ‘Drawing Out’, the 2012 drawing conference at The Centre for Drawing, The University of the Arts, London.

Janet McKenzie

Sanctuary 1984 Edition of 30

Drypoint 

14 x 17 cm 

link: Drawing on Two Worlds at Langford 120

CALL FOR PAPERS / PRESENTATIONS

Crossing the Line 2: 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 and its wider international interactions. It is hosted by the Department of Visual Communication, in the School of Architecture, Art & Design at the American University in Dubai, and partners with the Global Centre for Drawing, Melbourne Australia.

Friday-Sunday, September 12-14^th 2014

With accompanying exhibitions and events.

Optional excursions on September 11th and 15^th

Following the same premise as Crossing the Line 1 in November of2011, the Conference invites papers or artist/lab talks to consider the wider implications of drawing, from technology to ideology and cultural practices, from art, science, music, performance and architecture. Drawing can be considered 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.

Continuum: Crossing the Line 1

       “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, CEPAOS Research Center and University of São Paulo, Brazil

Crossing the Line 2

The conference will examine a potentially new nexus of drawing in the Middle East and fresh paradigms for drawing interculturally, extending and building on the themes from 2011:

1 Drawing as a transdisciplinary practice

2 Drawing as an intersection

3 Crossing the Line: hand and technology in a changing world

4 Drawing: a portrait and landscape-notations of our time

5 Pedagogical applications   

How have instructional methods evolved in light of broader definitions of drawing in the last decade? Papers that examine methods and theories of drawing instruction at all levels are welcome, referencing contemporary practice, historical context, experimental projects, etc.

6 Kinesthetics and Performance

As Paul Klee famously explained, ‘a line is a dot that has gone for a walk.’ Drawing, by definition, requires movement, whether physical, metaphoric, or poetic. Papers that consider kinesthetic relationships across the spectrum from performance, dance, science, all forms of the ‘laboratory’ are invited.  Proposals may include a performance component (there may be an opportunity for a soiree of performance drawing. TBC)

Schedule for Proposals:

Deadline for submissions: May 1^st , 2014

Results of Selection Committee: May 7, 2014

The Selection Committee is comprised of
 
Dr. Irene Barberis, International Chair
Prof. Julia Townsend, Middle East Chair

Dr. Marcelo Guimarães Lima, Publication Chair

There are two categories of submission for proposals:

Papers:(25 minute presentation): An abstract of maximum 500 words, images not required, for proposals for presentation. If accepted, the full paper is due for Peer Review by June 1, 2014. Of all of the accepted papers, eleven will be included in the subsequent publication and will be informed by July 1. (There will be up to 20 presentations)

The Peer Review Team is comprised of Dr. Irene Barberis, Dr. Marcelo Guimarães Lima, Janet Mackenzie, Julia Townsend.

The publication will be produced by Metasenta Publications:

Dr. Irene Barberis, Executive Editor

Dr. Marcelo Guimarães Lima, Editor

Julia Townsend, Editor

Luis Castaneda, Designer

Artist/Lab Talks (up to 30 minute presentation): An abstract of maximum 500 words. 3 images. These presentations will not be considered for publication.

ALL PROPOSALS MAY INCLUDE AN IMAGE (related to the proposal) FOR CONSIDERATION IN A CONFERENCE-RELATED EXHIBITION, additional to accompanying exhibitions already planned. Location may be on campus, near the conference presentation room (TBA). Image may be framed or unframed, of any 2d medium, up to 42 x 59 cms, and may be delivered on the first day of the conference. Please title this image “LastName_Firstname_4Consideration” and include title, date, size, and medium in the image list.

Please write to:
crossingthelineconference@gmail.com