Hatem Bourial

Archive available for: Hatem Bourial

• Foto
  Winternachten 2008

  Shabandar Café - Grand Café Oriental

  With: Ahmed Alaidy, Ashur Etwebi, Habib Selmi, Hassan Daoud, Hatem Bourial, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Khaled Khalifa, Laila Aboezaid, Lamis Saidi, Tamim al-Barghouti, Youssouf Amine Elalamy

  Shabandar Café is a programme by Gemak, the new centre for western and non-western art, politics and debate, of The Hague Gemeentemuseum and the Vrije Academie. With Shabandar Café Gemak links up with the Winternachten festival. Gemak is named after the famous meeting place of artists and intellectuals in Bagdad. Enjoy the most refined forms of Iraqi culture: live classical Arab Moqam music, an Iraqi storyteller and poetr, a short Iraqi documentary on Café Shabandar, tea and the tastiest Iraqi snacks.

  The exhisition space of Gemak has been decorated for the occasion in that of the original café, destroyed in March 2007. Honorary guests: the Arab writers taking part in festival Winternachten. An English-Arabic language programme, compiled by the Iraqi visual artist Rashad Selim.
  For more information on the programme see www.gemak.org. In English and Arabic

  Shabandar is the name of a café on Al Mutanabi Street
  where for decades Baghdad's cultural elites met
  discussing books, poetry and politics
  or dropping in for a coffee after visiting the book vendors' stalls
  on the busy street outside

  Everybody interested in books came here
  to buy them in the good years
  to sell them during the sanctions
  to be transported by their covers
  if they were penniless

  On the 5th of March 2007
  one car bomb attack among many
  destroyed Shabandar
  and the book market outside

  Shabandar Café has left Baghdad
  even if its walls are rebuilt
  5000 years of urban culture
  scattered to the four corners of the Earth