Tasmeem Doha 2019, the international art and design conference, which is hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar) in Education City, will take place on March 13-15. It will feature workshops, exhibitions and prominent speakers from all over the world. It is free and open to the public.

Tasmeem Doha will have three exhibitions as part of the conference and they will take place at VCUarts Qatar, and at the Fire Station: Artist in Residence.

“QAL, the anti-carpet”, an exhibition by media artist and interaction designer Ali Phi, will take place at the Gallery at VCUarts Qatar. The opening reception in the presence of the artist will take place on March 13 at 5:30pm and the exhibition will run until April 13. “QAL” is an interactive, generative, audiovisual installation exploring environmental design in futuristic architecture with roots in Persian motifs.

The carpet is created by an accumulation of patterns on a transparent vertical screen.

The laptop’s screen projects white light towards the hands of the viewer which starts to generate patterns made by its movements. The result is a new, highly detailed, physical carpet in very high resolution. Over 60 patterns can be generated in one second. Some of them have been captured and are printed on the 1.5-meter by 2-meter canvases within the exhibition. Because of the countless possibilities of different parameters, such as the amount of light in the gallery, the sizes and the positions of hands and skin colors, the patterns are unique and it is almost impossible to recreate the same one.

"Elemaun", a performance-driven audiovisual project by Ali Phi, concentrating on Persian motifs and including the regional music of Iran, will also take place during Tasmeem Doha.

The “-162° Trading Power” exhibition at the Fire Station: Artist in Residence, will explore the significance of liquid natural gas relations between Japan and Qatar by using 40 floating printers that source text and images from the internet. The result is a choreographed performance of prints making information tangible. The opening reception on March 14 as part of Tasmeem Doha. The exhibition will be open until March 22.

The project is a collaboration between faculty and students at VCUarts Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, and the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology at Tokyo Metropolitan University. “-162° Trading Power” originally exhibited at the W+K gallery in Tokyo in December 2018.

Tasmeem Doha 2019 (Tasmeem is the Arabic word for design) will be a creative event that will focus on "Hekayat" (stories) as its central theme. Hekayat will provide a platform where storytelling can be explored through various mediums, and stories can be shared and celebrated in a multitude of forms.

Many projects developed in the classroom embrace storytelling as a method for creation and inspiration, resulting in various forms, mediums, perspectives, and pedagogies. And the “Tasmeem In the Classroom - Behind the Scenes” exhibition in the Project Space at VCUarts Qatar during the conference, will take viewers on a journey through the different perspectives of VCUarts Qatar’s faculty and the ways in which they guide their students to imagine, create, interact, and locate stories in their creative work.

Registration for the conference and workshops are now open. Anyone wishing to attend is invited to go to http://www.tasmeemdoha.com/ for more details.

About Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar

Established in 1998 through a partnership with Qatar Foundation, VCUarts Qatar is the international branch campus of Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, a top-ranked art and design program in the U.S. VCUarts Qatar is celebrating a fruitful 20-year alliance between VCU and the Qatar Foundation that underscores the commitment of each institution to excellence, inquiry, discovery and innovation in a global setting.

VCUarts Qatar offers students the opportunity to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in fashion design, graphic design, interior design and painting and printmaking, a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in design. A vibrant community with global reach, VCUarts promises to instill in students a lifelong passion for education and the arts.

VCUarts Qatar offers valuable opportunities for cross-cultural exchange and connects VCUarts to the influential art and design world of the Middle East and beyond. The campus attracts renowned contributors to contemporary visual culture for speaking and teaching engagements, and hosts two major international events: Tasmeem, a biennial art and design conference; and the Hamad bin Khalifa Islamic Art Symposium.

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Leena Chung

Salam!

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