Venice:
La Biennale di Venezia - 14th International Architecture Exhibition: Bahrain
Pavilion – Fundamentalists and Other Arab Modernisms. For its third
participation, the Kingdom of Bahrain decided to concentrate on the wider Arab
World and use the opportunity of the Bahrain Pavilion to support the efforts of
the Arab Center for Architecture in creating a centralized database of
architectural documents from across the Arab world. The exhibition consists of
a large-scale map of the Arab World that references the colonial maps. A
circular library that contains the exhibition catalogue and gathers a selection
of a hundred built projects between 1914 and 2014 across the Arab World
surrounds the map.
Above. The installation, a dome supports projections of a
commissioned screenplay by Studio Safar, which comprises of a reading of the 22
national anthems of the Arab countries.
Designer
of the exhibition Bernard Khoury and co-curator the pavilion with George Arbid,
Arab Center for Architecture
Bahrain
Pavilion. The collection of essays as well as a selection of a 100 buildings
will form the basis of the exhibition catalogue, above, entitled, Architecture from
the Arab World 1914-2014 a selection, available for consultation at the
pavilion.
Bahrain
Pavilion. In parallel to the exhibition in Venice, significant efforts have
been made toward the collection of a number of documents that have been added
to the database of the ACA (Arab Center for Architecture) that will be online
to coincide with the opening of the Biennale. It is hoped that this will
highlight the importance of collecting architecture archives; a task that the
Arab Center for Architecture is undertaking.