It strives, with the help of the curatorial endeavours of artists and projects that can contribute a different layer to the ever more monopolized artistic scene.
The third issue is “Dubai Graphic and Visual Encyclopedia”, Dubai Manifesto 3/3. Adapted for the latest electronic devices (Ipad, Kindle, etc), Brusselssprout can be downloaded quarterly in ePub and PDF format from the magazine’s official website.
More information on this third issue and some images after the break.
Brusselssprout no. 3 presents “Dubai Graphic & Visual Encyclopedia”. To consider compiling an encyclopedia (of any kind) in post-Wikipedia times is can exercise in emotional withdrawal.
From a position of bewilderment and confusion we choose to act by producing and employing another tool from the land of the naive and outdated, represented by encyclopedic work, devoid of all logic and meaning considering current cultural conditions and speed. What the first edition Dubai graphic and visual encyclopedia presents is a reality that acts as a counterpoint to all the excess of attempts to decipher and understand Dubai. Attempts that are mostly unable to uncover items that shed light on the question ‘What’s it all about’?
Organizing scanning devices for the entire physical reality and processing information in much the same way as the early explorers did in order to reach unknown lands. The encyclopedia will be updated periodically so as to provide an authentic (temporal) guide and a database for Dubai and its times. With the suspicion that perhaps behind all this there’s a new grammar, we also need to develop new dictionaries.
Introducing the Dubai Graphic and Visual Encyclopedia as a tool that continues the work undertaken by Brusselssprout in identifying gaps in local contemporary art production in Dubai and its lack of documentation in many cases. In this issue, and we thus complete our Manifesto for Chapters on Dubai.
