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Houston Center for Photography opening reception: Newsroom, Wetiko: Cowboys and Indigenes and Ajyal: Generations

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Photo © 2013 Reporters Sans Frontières

The Houston Center for Photography has three new exhibitions that will be featured throughout the months of March and April as part of the 2014 FotoFest Biennial. All three exhibitions are curated by Madeline Yale, an independent curator and writer based in Dubai and London who has curated more than 30 exhibitions on photography and related media. Yale is a lecturer on photographs for Sotheby's Institute of Art London, American University in Sharjah and Rice University.

For Newsroom, the gallery will be transformed into a reading room with an installation of newspapers covering real-time news from the Arab world, journalistic accounts of reporting in the region, an installation by Reporters San Frontières and works by photojournalists Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Zied Ben Romdhane, Tanya Habjouqa, Remi Ochlik and Austin Tice.

In Wetiko: Cowboys and Indigenes, Egyptian artist-photographer Nermine Hammam manipulated historical paintings of the American West with recent photographs of the Arab Spring, the wave of revolutions, uprisings and protests that has spilled across the Arab world since 2010.

Today in the United Arab Emirates, public and private realms are recurrently defined and negotiated, its customs relatively remaining inaccessible to non-nationals. In Ajyal: Generations, artist Maitha Bin Demithan reveals the cloistered space of UAE's traditions, focusing on its national dress, symbols and iconography. While large in scale, her portraits set on black backdrops are intimate and theatrical. In these isolated context, objects such as the burqa, thoab and bisht are ordained as precious specimens of heritage.

On view through April 27.

WHEN

WHERE

Houston Center for Photography
1441 W. Alabama St.
Houston, TX 77006
http://hcponline.org/pages/home.asp

TICKET INFO

Admission is free.
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