Adjacencies and Overlaps: X-Talk #32 by Rand Abdul Jabbar

The lecture will highlight parallel lines of enquiry and research that have emerged within Rand's practice since 2014, spanning across the disciplines of architecture, design and visual art. About Rand Abdul Jabbar: Rand Abdul Jabbar is a designer, artist and co-founder of the Center for Architectural Discourse based in Abu Dhabi. Her practice makes enquiries into her surroundings, responding to forces of the city. Material investigations and experimentations are infused with cultural resonances as she borrows from and reconstructs the ephemera of place, history and memory. Abdul Jabbar is a fellow of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship, which concluded with a presentation of Reconstructions (2017). A series of installations explore the tension between the tangible and ephemeral. In Reconstructions, time and space is distorted to describe loss in various forms, and to reconstruct memories and situations that lie on the threshold between vivid and fabricated. Recent projects include FORMA (2015), commissioned by Tashkeel; Foresta Sommersa (2016), commissioned by the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation; Excavations (2016), the Pavilion of Iraq at Abwab Dubai Design Week; and LOOP (2017), commissioned by 1971 Design Space. She received a William Kinne Fellows Traveling Prize from Columbia University for a research project entitled “Re-Presenting the City: Parallel Streams of Cultural Development in the UAE” and has continued to explore the relationship between cultural development and urbanism in the Arab world, most recently contributing to the Pavilion of Kuwait at the 2016 Architecture Biennale in Venice with an essay entitled "Cultural Aspirations in the Construct of a Modern Nation" (with Meitha Al Mazrooei).