Curator: Zahra Ali Baba
Deputy curators: Deema Al-Ghunaim and Ricardo Camacho
Commissioner: Council of Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL)
Scientific Committee: Ali Alyouha, Ali Alkhaled
Participants:
Batool Ashour – Lulu Alawadhi – Dalal Alhashash – Bader Abdulaziz – Tasawar Bashir – Sarah Alzouman - Dana Alhasan – Abdulaziz Alkandari – Taiba Alqatami – Brian Duffy – Danah Behbehani – Ruba Alsaleh – Alia Alazza – Osama Hadeed – Rayah Alsabah – Yousef Alsaleem – Musaed Khaled – Meqdad Alkout – Nejood Alnaseem – Faisal Alfouzan – Noorah Alhasan – Roa Alshaheen – Hessa Amin – Abdulatif Aladwani – Dhari Aljutaili – Zainab Alhader – Yahya Ali – Tareq Aljasem – Anas Alomaim – Fatma Alqadfan – Jawaher Ali Reda – Khawla Alhussaini – Sara Alnafesi – Hussa Alhumaidhi – Hasan Ali – Sulaiman Albader – Tarek Jamal – Abdulaziz Almazeedi
كثرة : Kethra
- Overflowing fullness or surplus.
- Affluence; wealth.
- An extremely plentiful or over sufficient supply.
Kuwait’s inherited city is a result of the oil economy and strategies of wealth re-distribution. It resonates the aftermath of Gulf war, immigration, volatile politics and a disappearing past. There is a compulsive need to demolish and erase the old built environment to pave way for the imported ‘ideal’ future city. As a result there is an accumulating archive of delayed possibilities and a reluctant evaluation of the current built environment. A Modernist mentality was assumed at the inception of the first master plan commissioned by the Kuwaiti authorities in 1951. One immediate consequence of this commission was displacing an entire population beyond the city walls and into the new suburbs.
This process altered and degenerated many cultural habits. The changes replaced social norms and challenged the lifestyles associated with the local physical membrane. The tendency to gather proved to be a resilient trace of the pre-oil society.
As a survival strategy for pre-oil modes of existence and a tradition based on ancient Bedouin hospitality, this cultural practice that shaped the city and the public space remains unexplored and sacred in the collective mindset and is increasingly adapted by Kuwait’s diverse communities forming new urban phenomena.
Growing in density by a welfare state economy today these socio-spatial gathering typologies, and local forms of social institutions emerge as registers of a delicate new condition between abundance and overflow.
In parallel, Kuwait’s parliamentary system is also primarily reliant on male communing spaces commonly referred to as Diwaniya to create platforms for negotiations. These information gathering and distribution analogue networks produce cultural and mental landscapes evident in mannerisms and terms that signify membership of a cluster.
The current urban condition remains a challenge to be addressed by a young generation of local architects, planners and researchers seeking a modern yet rooted understanding of the built environment and cultivating future discourses that can provide adequate solutions and operative perceptions.
Kethra is a map of potential proximity and accessibility, influencing the scenarios of rapid change and shaping the identity of relations. This enquiry is to question the tendency of gathering by mapping different attributes relative to urban situations. Through this expansive repetitive gesture, which expands the conditions of ground and altitudes, observations are utilized in order to empower a local practice of architecture.
The Exhibition
Kuwait Pavilion at the Arsenale is an installation that explores the complex social dynamics of contemporary Kuwait society by mapping informal productions of urban culture and knowledge, while elaborating on the inherent potential of social gathering and communing within public and private grounds.
The installation, an acoustic map of conversations, reveals altitudes of talking / negotiating / communicating that network as marginal and mainstream spatial operations, and modes of gathering within the different urban and demographic zones. While marks on the ground of the Arsenale reflect upon the inclusion/exclusion nature of each gathering typology.
These operations or operative grounds and altitude, in their conceptualized condition, emerge as an organism generator of social and political biology and form new evidence recognized by the architectural community in Kuwait as a new ground to rethinking Kuwait’s urban and territorial identity and the lifestyles associated with it.
