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Perched on the edge of video art and technology(Daily Star, The (Lebanon) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Review Jim Quilty Daily Star staff DUBAI: The first large, flat-screen television has been set at right angles to the other three. Each of the four monitors is dedicated to a program of video art, each selected by a different curator. Two of the screens are inert, while a serious-looking woman with a note pad confronts the fourth. If the signage is to be believed, this first monitor is dedicated to the "Cloudy Heads" program. An array of breathtaking vistas drifts across the screen – expansive architectural interiors and landscapes – that look as though they could have been shot by an agency catering to tourism ministries. You blink, awaiting the artistic intervention that will cleverly turn this slide-show-style presentation on its head, or otherwise invert it according to this artist's practiced aesthetic gymnastics. A piece of paper suggests the works in "Cloudy Heads" "reference the power of collectively produced codes of communication" and "allude to strategies that attest to both the failure and eloquence of collective languages and their transformative power." The logo of a well-known television brand (Panasonic, say) materializes on the screen, lingers, then fades. You raise an eyebrow at the two Video Bartenders. Their expert smiles immediately reassure you that neither moonlights as a video technician. On the far side of the room, a pair of young women, looking about as busy as the video barmen, sit behind station stacked with black notebooks. In response to your inquiries, one of the women scurries over to look at the monitor. "Do you have the remote?" she inquires. You present the thing to her. "Whoa!" she squeals, staggering back from the remote's array of buttons. "My feeling exactly." Eventually Antonia Carver – one of the faces of Bidoun Projects, and quite easily the busiest person in the room – sorts out the problem. The curatorial partner of Art Dubai, Bidoun Projects is the non-profit curatorial wing of Bidoun, the arts organization and publisher set up in 2003 to support contemporary artists from the Middle East and managed by artists and curators based in New York, Cairo, Beirut and Dubai. The four video programs screened at the subterranean Art Park, one of the Emirati art fair's several side events run by Bidoun Projects. There were several means of ingesting the programs – daily curator-hosted screenings as well as a continuous loop of programs in the screening room adjacent the inscrutable technology of the Video Bar. The four video art programs were markedly different from one another. The most surprisingly effective of them was "Strike a Pose." Sohrab Mohebbi and Özge Ersoy's inquiry into the possibilities and limitations of the relationship between mass media and the contemporary art world is comprised of a compilation of video clips – including news, artist interviews, and promotional films. Arguably the most-peculiar selection was "Hollywood Elegies," which curator Aram Moshayedi says intends to reflect "on the persistence of Hollywood as an experiential framework, rather than specific locale" while referring to the current conditions of production, exhibition, and distribution throughout cultural realms. The only local, that is explicitly Emirati, content was afforded by "Exploding Nostalgia." Curated by Antonia Carver with Masoud Amralla Al Ali, the doyen of Emirati film culture, the six-film selection examined Emirati filmmakers' and artists' use of surreal, experimental imagery in expressing connections with traditions and landscape of the UAE. Once the technical difficulties are destroyed, "Cloudy Heads" proves to be a varied, surprisingly amusing selection of work. "80 Million" (2009, 3'41"), a performance video spoof by Eslam Zeen El Abedeen and Mohamed Zayan, finds the two artists facing one another, each with a foot raised to rest on the seat of a straight-backed chair, while their hands furiously beat the air in time to the durbakeh-riq duet ringing out in the soundtrack. If you are distracted by the shimmering muddiness of the video image, it may take a moment to realize that neither of the performers is actually holding an instrument. No doubt the 80 million in the title has some referent on the landscape of the Arab Middle East (a population figure? The number of political prisoners? Of politicians who promised to drive the Zionists from Palestine?). No matter. Conflated with nearly four minutes of frantic pantomime performance, you're left with a poignant encapsulation of sound and fury, signifying nothing. In Eyad Hamam's "Deaf Countries" (2009, 2 minutes), a moustachioed man stands in front of a map of the world, where the "global south" of Africa and the "MENASA" have been especially framed. "Khalas (Finished)?" he asks, then begins to sign the names of the Arab countries. Those innocent of sign language will be unable to attest to the veracity of the moustachioed man's representations, but his gestures are quite eloquent. The work's appearance is quite unlike that of "80 Million" but, as an understated performative gesture, it assumes a similar pose in the liminal space between aesthetics and hyperbolic political rhetoric. Vartan Avakian's "Arabic Home Interiors: An Introduction" (2009, 3'40") is equally fun but – as is the case with languages, Lebanese dialect included – you can miss some nuance if you don't know what's being said to you. Here, the grainy, smeared interior images that start nowhere, leap and slide across the screen on their way to nowhere, were filmed as transition sequences in low-budget Arab pornography. Originally commissioned by Tokyo Wonder Site, Avakian's restless work delightedly contemplates the amateur interstitial. Haroon Mirza's "Adhan" (2009, 4'30") reinterprets a classic late-1960s faux-folk tune. A cellist performs a single theme from the original tune (mediated by some antique audio-visual technology) while an actor pantomimes a robotic late-century muezzin. The bridge between the adhan/muezzin and the folk tune resides in the person of Yusuf Islam (ne Cat Stevens), who famously renounced his secular humanist cultural production to embrace Islam. The video resuscitation of the lecturing Stevens is regrettable. The most entertaining contribution to "Cloudy Heads" is Nástio Mosquito's "Nástio's Manifesto" (2008, 4'8"), which he entitles "Hypocritical, Ironic and do not give a F**k." Here, the words of the artist's manifesto are literally spelled out over the actor's multiply mediated visage, while Mosquito's chosen voice careers through the text in the manner of a drunken Soviet apparatchik (Borat with more intelligence). The piece read less like a manifesto for art in the new century than a sort of Desiderata for serious-minded people too exhausted for principles. Justine Triet's "Cloudy Heads" (2009, 4'58") is a document of a performance piece. With Ravel's "Bolero" as a soundtrack, the video features a man in a button-down shirt, his head arrayed in wild hair and a long black beard. He strides around the public square of some unnamed city, shouting incomprehensibly, occasionally placing a weighty-looking black book alongside his head. Another, similarly clad, actor looks on silently, as do a few passers-by. Part way through Mahmoud Khaled's 2009 video "Camraderie" (10'30"), the final piece in "Cloudy Heads," the artist decides to abandon his footage of male body builders – with which the work has preoccupied itself up to this point – and replaces it with a solid-blue screen. A few seconds pass and a reassuring text pops up. "Don't worry Your Equipment Is Working Properly THERE'S NO TECHNICAL ERROR." The remarks seem to be referring to the body of whoever happens to be watching the work – invariably refracted through the crucible of the preceding proliferation of shaved, oiled and flexing flesh – much as the technology upon which Khaled's work is being consumed. The reassurance is amusing, since, by this point, the wireless headset has abandoned the videos it is meant to be accompanying. Instead, the rootless aerial has found an upstairs microphone capturing ambient art fair-noise, and has been piping that into your head instead. (c) 2009 The Daily Star. All rights reserved. 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