Vitra Design Museum Exhibition
Mudun, Urban Cultures in Transit is an exhibition of Brownbook and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein that then travelled to the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
The exhibition presented the varying dynamics and atmospheres of urban areas in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region through ten years of research and documentation by the Dubai-based magazine, Brownbook.
Curators: Ahmed & Rashid Bin Shabib, Janna Lipsky, Farah Sabobeh, Xeina Malki, Leila Peinado, Fatma Al Sehlawi, Mohamed Elshahed, Amira Asad and Vanessa Norwood.
Photos by Jonatas Barros, Leila Peinado, Xeina Malki, Moylin Yuan, Vitra Design Museum and Architectural Association School of Architecture. Video by Jonatas Barros.
The distinct presented mudun (‘cities’ in Arabic) included Ankara, Baghdad, Sharjah and Tangier, as well as the diaspora in Altach, Nashville, Santiago and Södertälje. As a whole, the region’s rapid urbanization has resulted in heterogenous city landscapes that oscillate between deeply rooted connections to tradition and an openness to globalization and technological progress. Because of this tension, the cities of the MENA region provide the grounds for a number of paradoxes – for individual opportunity and development, conflicts and injustice, for both the establishment and for subcultures, as well as for debates about identity and participation in the urban habitat.
The resulting collaged presentation of photographs, text, audio and film offered a thorough and authentic reflection of the region’s multifaceted urban transition since the 1960s. Burnt clay models represented a number of public buildings in the region spoke to an architecture that was created as a symbol of its time.