Pecha Kucha Night Bahrain

Over the last year I’ve been part of a volunteer team running Pecha Kucha Night Bahrain. My good friend Mohammed Janahi and Zeyad Darwish (my best friend and who owns this site) received the handshake agreement to bring PKN to our lil island around December last year.

Kuwait, Dubai and many other Arab countries host Pecha Kucha Nights and are growing in popularity.

Pecha Kucha Night started in Tokyo in 2003 and was devised by Klein Dytham Architecture firm. Pecha Kucha ぺちゃくちゃ is Japanese for “chatter”.

It has a unique format where each presenter is only allowed to show 20 slides, each only lasting 20 seconds (thus the whole presentation being 6 minutes 40 seconds long) making it very concise and keeps attention high throughout the event.

So far we’ve had two successful PKNs with the first being as part of Architeture for Humanity global event for Haiti where we managed to raise $900 to build a school in Haiti by encouraging the audience to donate online to the charity (We do not collect money during events as we don’t have the jurisdiction to do so)

The main aim of us having these events here in Bahrain is to showcase Bahrain’s creative community and let people get up close and personal with them. Many Bahrain designers, architects, artists and photographers face problems of clients (foreign clients especially) not trusting in their capabilities and opt out to foreign firms to complete creative projects. Bahrain has massive amounts of creative people with great potential and just lack a forum to showcase their work in a relaxed environment.

Khalid Al-Muharraqi , reknowned Bahraini 3D animation artist will present at our next Pecha Kucha Night on December 4th 2010 @ Shaikh Ebrahim Centre of Culture and Research in Muharraq. In the above video as part of the excellent Bahraini Views series, he talks about his experience with foreign companies who were reluctant to work with him at first because he was “Bahraini” and how he proved them wrong with the quality of his work. We hope that Bahrain’s creative community doesn’t have to live similar experiences and we hope Pecha Kucha Night helps them achieve this.

We’ve held our previous events in different venues as we like being nomadic and get a change of atmosphere each time around. As I mentioned we’re a small group of volunteers and we don’t make any money from holding these events (other Pecha Kucha Nights do). We are always on the lookout for sponsors and new venues to have us!

Previous sponsors have been the Ministry of Culture, Batelco, Bahrain Society of Engineers and this time around we have the Shaikh Ebrahim Centre giving us their lovely venue and design firm Obai & Hill have chipped in and designed our next event’s flyer.

It’s very easy to contact us as we’re all over the web, if you’re interested in:

• presenting at a future event
• hosting us in your venue
• sponsoring us in support of the Bahrain creative community
• being part of our volunteer team

you can email us at pechakuchabahrain [at] gmail.com

Find us on Facebook:  Pecha Kucha Bahrain

Follow us on Twitter: @pechakucha_BHR

Our page on the official Pecha Kucha Night Website: http://www.pecha-kucha.org/night/bahrain

Don’t forget to check out our next Pecha Kucha Night Volume 3 on December 4th 6:30pm @ Shaikh Ebrahim Centre for Culture and Research – Muharraq!