AUS architecture and design professors exhibit around the world

Several professors at the College of Architecture, Art and Design (CAAD) at American University of Sharjah (AUS) have recently had their work exhibited worldwide in a series of exhibitions.

Amir Berbic and George Katodrytis, associate professors at CAAD, along with AUS graduate Lamya Gargash, participated in Changing Stakes: Contemporary Art Dialogues with Dubai September 9-29 in Toronto, Canada. The exhibition featured works by eight international artists, examining Dubai's consumerism, urbanization and cultural history through art.

"The exhibition shows, for the first time, a fresh and innovative point of view of Dubai's development, away from the iconic imagery and through multiple and critical narratives relating to culture and history in the form of visual production," said Katodrytis.

According to curator Srimoyee Mitra, "The exhibition brings together eight artists from different parts of the world, whose work present new and innovative ways of understanding Dubai's meteoric rise over the last decade. They challenge fixed and stereotypical notions and develop a broader understanding of the region as one that is intrinsically connected to the processes of globalization and migration."

The exhibition measures the shifts in worldviews and subjectivities represented by the rise of Dubai and the Gulf region. Moving beyond polarizing clichés of Dubai's iconic architecture, the exhibition is a search for complex language to closely examine the city's urbanization, hyper-consumerism, massive immigration and the multiple narratives of social and cultural histories through artistic production.

Another CAAD professor, Mark Pilkington, currently has his work "Roaming Images" exhibited at the Third Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art in Greece, which will run from September 18, 2011 until January 8, 2012.

"In my photographs I use myself as a protagonist who, in this latest work, confronts a number of landscape scenarios," said Pilkington. "The photographs are made as panoramas or as surreal mirrored images. The actions of the protagonist in the photographs could be read as heroic/stoic/romantic or futile in his endeavor to relate to the environment," he added.

The Christinex Art Gallery in Malta will also feature Pilkington's creations in a solo exhibition opening on November 10, where he will exhibit 20 examples of work made during his sabbatical from AUS. This will be followed by another solo exhibition on December 12 at the Tashkeel Gallery in Dubai.