Abounaddara
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Abounaddara (translated as "the man with glasses") is a Syrian video art collective best known for its documentation of life in Syria. The collective's members are self-taught and anonymous. At the start of the Syrian popular uprising, Abounaddara posted a new short video on Vimeo in April 2011 and distributed it via social media every Friday. Their films are the antithesis of amateur footage from the Syrian civil war, often recorded by a shaky camera, with a poor or completely unnoticed tone of a moment of intense violence or emotional release. They won the 2014 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics. The next year, it withdrew from the
Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...
after one of its short films did not screen as agreed during the Biennale's Arena opening program. The group also returned its special mention from the Biennale jury. The group exhibited at New York's
New Museum The New Museum of Contemporary Art is a museum at 235 Bowery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker. History The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-nam ...
in 2014 and removed its videos from the Internet in 2017 after they were used in a show at Milan's La Triennale contemporary art museum.


History

Beginning in 2010 in Damascus, Syria, a volunteer collective of Syrian filmmakers began working on "emergency cinema." They wished to document the life Syrians were forced to endure during the country's civil war. Abounaddara was chosen as the projects name from the first Arabic-language satirical revue, which originated in Cairo, Egypt during the 19th century. In English Abounaddara means "the man with glasses." The anonymous collective releases one video per week on the internet whose aim is to show individual Syrians on all sides of the war in order to show an immediate image of Syrian society.


Selected exhibitions

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documenta 14 Documenta 14 was the fourteenth edition of the art exhibition documenta which took place in 2017 in both Kassel, Germany, its traditional home, and Athens, Greece. It was held first in Athens from 8 April to 16 July, and in Kassel from 10 Ju ...
, 2017 * New Museum, 2014


References


Further reading

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External links

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Vimeo
Asian artist groups and collectives Syrian artists Video artists 2010 establishments in Syria 21st-century art groups {{art-org-stub