Ruya Labs will be hosted throughout the year in Baghdad, with the aim of nurturing creativity, freedom of expression and international collaborations between artists and cultural professionals. Our past labs are listed below.
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Event
Ruya Lab #5: A Vernacular for Every Day Life (Part II) with Aneta Szylak
The curator Aneta Szylak held a second workshop for artists in Baghdad with the Ruya Foundation. The aim of the 4 day workshop was for artists to develop a vernacular artistic language, so that they can engage with contemporary art practices, while producing work that is relevant to their local context. “A vernacular artistic language…
Event
Ruya Lab #4: Photography
The Fourth Ruya Lab was a day-long seminar about printing, editioning and exhibiting photography for the international art market. The workshop took place ahead of ‘Calling Calouste’ an exhibition of new Iraqi photography commissioned by Ruya, which opens on October 1 2016 at the Gulbenkian Building in Baghdad. Six of the eight photographers participating in…
Event
Ruya Labs #3: A vernacular for every day life with curator Aneta Szylak
Ruya Foundation invited Polish curator and writer Aneta Szylak to carry out a seminar at the Sif Garden in Baghdad, as part of Ruya Labs, our ongoing series of art workshops and seminars for the local artistic community. The workshop was divided into two modules. Ahead of the first module, participants were asked to bring…
Essay, News
Creativity for Survival: Visit to the refugee camps of northern Iraq with artist Francis Alÿs
Ruya Foundation invited the artist Francis Alÿs to Iraq. After hosting a workshop with artists and art students in Baghdad, Tamara Chalabi, chairman of Ruya went with Alÿs on a research trip to the Yezidi shrine of Lalish and two refugee camps, in the Dohuk Province, in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq. The purpose…
Event
Ruya Lab #2: artist Francis Alys gives presentation in Baghdad
Ruya Foundation invited the artist Francis Alys to Iraq. In Baghdad, he gave a presentation of his work to an audience of fifty professional artists and art students from the two art colleges there. He presented the film Reel-Unreel (2011), a project shot in Kabul in which children were asked to play with an old…
Event
Ruya Lab #1: The sound art project Baghdad Wahid
Water dripping from a pipe, someone’s wife snoring at night, a mother singing an Iraqi lullaby, drumming and songs of mourning to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein. These sounds range from the mundane to the sacred, but to the individuals who recorded them last month, they reflect Baghdad – its past and its present.…