The Future of a Promise

Edited by Anthony Downey & Lina Lazaar

The Future of a Promise Contemporary Art from the Arab World

Published in 2011 by Ibraaz Publishing on the occasion of the exhibition The Future of a Promise Collateral Event of the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia Magazzine del Sale No. 262 Dorsoduro Fondamenta delle Zattere, Venice 1 June – 30 November 2011 www.thefutureofapromise.com ISBN x x x x x x x All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

All efforts have been made to trace copyright holders.

Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions if notice is given in writing to the publisher.

Exhibition Curator: Lina Lazaar Producer: Edge of Arabia Design: A+B Studio, London Catalogue Editors: Anthony Downey and Lina Lazaar Managing Editor: Susannah Worth Design: A+B Studio, London Print: Grafiche Leone, Italy Publisher Ibraaz Publishing Kamel Lazaar Foundation Tunis, Tunisia Editor: Anthony Downey Managing Editor: Coline Milliard Online Content Manager: Lois Olmstead Reviews Editor: Sara Raza Intern: Madeline McClean www.ibraaz.org Images © the artist (except where indicated) Text © the authors (except where indicated) For the book in this form © Ibraaz Publishing Acknowledgements and thanks Kamelouchi, Kasoulirabish, Batakhouti, FJ, Jamce Sevier, Sally Hough, Stephen Stapleton, Abdullah Al Turki, Aya Mousawi, Miriam Lloyd-Evans, Marcus Verhagen, Sven Knowles, Ibrahim Farooq Vahid, Laura Egerton, Abraaj Capital Art Prize team, Derek Downey, Savita Apte, Juan Carlos Farah, Saleh Barakat, Carol A. Chehab, Rose Issa, Anne De Villepoix, Katja Suess and the Sotheby's team, Mohamed Hafiz, Hamza Seriafi, Aya Haidar, Maya El Khalil, Bashar Al-Shroogi, Rami Farook, Christina Cassi, Timo Kaabi-Linke, Andree Sfeir-Semler, Robert Goff, Jessica Sain, Liz McDowell, Jon Lowe, Olivier Meessen, Zineb Sedira, Olivier Hochstaettler, Nadia Khayati, the Artlogic team, Jennifer Thatcher, Edgar Schmitz, Tara Kennedy, Caroline Davis, Tania Palmieri, Jacqueline Salloum, Mara Sartore, Matteo Sartore, Michela Canessa, Isabelle van den Eynde, Tessa de Caters, Rowena Chiu, Alex Lampe, Benji Wiedemann, David McFarline, Tom Carey, Dawkins Colour, Anthony Reynolds, Florence Le Bègue, Holly Cushing, Jeanette Lowe, Aline Biasutto, Selma Feriani, Joy Asfar, Javier Robledo, Anna Swank, Paul Teasdale, Héla Gaida, Sam Bardaouil, Lola Reboud, Sidi Alouane's team.

The Future of a Promise

Finally, thank you to all the artists and contributors to the exhibition and the catalogue.

Edited by Anthony Downey & Lina Lazaar

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Contents 8 Introduction

The Future of a Promise

Anthony Downey & Lina Lazaar

64 V An Open Letter Kamel Lazaar

16 I Promising Futures Lina Lazaar

68 VI Interview with Mohamed Talbi Ibraaz

30 II Being Arab Samir Kassir

72 VII Plates (continued 117)

42 III Revolution and Cultural Mutation

Rachida Triki 46 IV Beyond the Former Middle East Anthony Downey

What do we need to know about the MENA region today?

Ibraaz Platform 173 Artists’ Statements 194 List of Artworks 196 Further Reading 200 Biographies

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I Lara Baladi ⁄ From Diary of The Future 2007-08

Introduction The Future of a Promise ‘The essence of time is that it goes by …What I call “my present” has one foot in my past, and another in the future.’ Henri Bergson, 1896

Diary of the Future is a record of the many people who visited her father during this period, the visits becoming more and more frequent towards the end – as witnessed in the increasing number of coffee cups – when hopes for his recovery were fading; it also displays an intricate network of social relations and alludes to the people who knew and cared for her father; it details the way in which repetition can become a source of solace, a place in which we can harbour our doubts in a time of uncertainty; it presents documentation of a time that was no doubt poignant, if not traumatic, on a personal and familial level. Every visitor who came to see the artist’s father arrived with a visual correlate, an augur of time passing; specifically, the individual and accruing circles of coffee. As her father’s health waned, and the visits increased, the coffee stains increased, metastasising across the tondo-shaped surface like the cancer spreading in her father’s lungs.

Lara Baladi ⁄ Rose ⁄ 2010

Anthony Downey & Lina Lazaar

In 2007, Lara Baladi began a project that attempted to record the future. For six months, following the return of her ailing father to Cairo after 50 years of absence, she watched and photographed the cups of Turkish coffee offered to well-wishers who had dropped by to ask after her father’s health. Coffee would be consumed and, upon Baladi’s suggestion, the cup turned three times and the settled residue subsequently read for any portent of the future.

Baladi, sensing that her father was not going to recover from cancer of the lungs, recorded each of these cups and later used the images in her work Diary of the Future (2010); a project which became both an effective archive of the moment and – in the representation of the runic dregs of coffee – a coextensive anticipation of a time yet to come. So what did those dregs, in all their symbolism and patterns, tell Baladi about the present and the future – and what, if anything, does the work impart to us now?

Diary of the Future is therefore first and foremost a memorial but it is also a record of a time (the past) that was an attempt to divine – if not to subconsciously defer or indeed accept – the future. In its stained glasslike appearance, the work would also appear to encourage us to divine a future. In its intricate engagement with the temporal, the work divulges, to paraphrase the artist, the extent to which our ‘past, present and future are entwined’. It would be relatively easy, in light of this, to present this work in terms that would appear maudlin or despairing. And yet a promise is held out in this work, the promise of a different outcome, the promise of a future free from the precarity of death if not doubt – an impossible promise, of course, but a promise nonetheless. In more specific terms, Diary of the Future offers something fundamental to understanding aesthetic agency and the import of visual culture for producer and spectator alike: the belief, however unfounded or contested, that the aesthetic can potentially help us to engage with the realities of the past and present, if not the exigencies of the future.

It is this sense of a coming or future event that The Future of a Promise sets out to explore and engage with through the works included in this show.

For Baladi, the future is a perilous place and yet this sense of a personal,

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individual sorrow is suffused with something else, something ineluctably associated with the horizon of the future and her relationship to her father.

Of that time, the artist has enquired into ‘how could I show the beauty and the tensions, the sadness and the joy of this communal moment which was neither morbid nor melancholic but rather excessive and strangely positive?’

In this question, Baladi asks a question of visual culture in general and the aesthetic in particular: how does visual culture respond to the present moment in which it is produced, disseminated and received? What does it tell us, if anything, of these moments in time? In posing a conceptual copula of sorts between the aesthetic and the future, The Future of a Promise aims to explore the nature of the promise that is inherent in visual culture. This is not to explore the ‘promise of the future’, which has become something of a cliché, nor is it to posit a utopian vision of a political future that is subsidised by an aesthetic movement; rather, it is to engage with and explore the future of a promise that is inherent within the aesthetic.

It would be tempting, in light of recent events in the Middle East, to render interpretations of the works included here responsive to both the political and social upheavals, not to mention forms of repression, and freedoms currently being fought over throughout the region – and some of the works here do engage with those immediate realities. However, there is the heuristic danger that such readings would be not only prescriptive but in the long term reductive insofar as they could delimit these works to a singular event or series of events. The aesthetic, while of course moored in a particular moment in time, speaks to future ways of thinking and understanding. The works here similarly speak to a future and in so doing propose a promise of sorts – a horizon of engagement (reception) and further possibility (dissemination). They do not only reflect upon reality but anticipate realities to come, the networks and discussions that emerge from cultural discourse, the freedom to express ideas, the imperative of both political representation and the means of self-representation and, in those future moments, the emergence of a civic society and public spaces within which ideas can be expressed without fear of repression.

This exhibition is not a promise to actively engage with nor reflect upon the socio-political and cultural realities of a region, but to use the aesthetic as a potentially pivotal tool in realigning how social and political orders understand the role and importance of culture in discussions about globalisation, modernism, civic society, open debate, political change, freedom of expression, justice and equality, and the overarching need for institutional infrastructures to support culture as an expression of communities throughout the region. This does not, to be clear, make these works political. In their potential to realign the distribution of signs, symbols and ways of looking (not to mention ways of being within a community), they are always already intrinsically political. There is no need, thereafter, to layer these works with political readings as they do not speak to the political as such, but to the future radicality of the aesthetic to realign the very notion, if not sphere of influence, that we associate with the relationship between politics and culture.

II

[01]

[02]

he subject of so-called T democracy in the Middle East is an interesting one inasmuch as it brings about that bugbear of Western neo-conservatism and liberalism alike: an Islamic democracy, which is often seen as a contradiction rather than a reality.

amir Kassir, Being Arab, S translated by Will Hobson, Verso: London and New York, 2006.

The Middle East is currently reverberating to the sound of questions that were once the preserve of exiles, the diasporic community, the tortured, the disappeared, and the dead. What, for one, is the role of democracy – if, indeed, it has one – and self-representation in Arab societies; what are the rights of the individual when faced with the unmediated power of the state; what role, if any, do governments have in the civic sphere; what can be said about freedom of expression and dissension in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen; what is the function and role of public space in the call for increased freedoms in the region; what is needed for an individual to have recourse and representation – as opposed to denial and repression – before the law; who will uphold the right to existence and the basic tenets of humanitarianism; what role does religion play in the formation of the state; who is best placed to serve in government; and who will safeguard the freedoms currently spreading throughout a region that has been marred by malaise, invasion and mis-government for at least a generation?[01] What, in sum, is the future of the Arab world?

The very fact that these questions are being asked, by heads-of-state and protestors alike, within the Middle East and not outside by commentators ensconced in television studios in Washington, London or Paris, gives rise to the promise of a future free from dictatorship and totalitarianism. Surely, what we are witnessing is the beginning of the end for dictators, despots and their murderous henchmen and women alike. Surely, the symmetry of fear, repression, torture, disappearances, corruption, denouncement and death that was needed to maintain such conditions has been sundered and a new order is in the ascendancy. Are we, moreover, beginning to see the emergence of a former Middle East? Possibly, but possibly not. Of course, it would be preferable to think that a new order – an Arab Spring, if you like – can emerge in the coming years but history, the uneven, unpredictable order of event following event, may have other ideas.

It is nonetheless true that perceptions have changed throughout the region and what is doable, sayable, and thinkable in this context has been reconfigured if not profoundly re-calibrated. A promise of something else and the realignment of the socio-political horizons of possibilities to which people aspire has been brought about, and further repression seems to merely steel the resolve of those involved in protests. It was with these points in mind, and against the current backdrop of events in the Middle East, that it became evident that any catalogue accompanying a pan-Arab exhibition in Venice would have to include a variety of voices beyond those associated with critical exegesis and commentary on visual culture. It also became clear that a number of commentators throughout the Middle East had unsurprisingly pre-empted concerns with notions of the future. First published in Paris in 2004, one year before his assassination in Beirut, Samir Kassir’s Being Arab appears at first to be a despairing volume about the so-called Arab malaise.[02] Kassir, clinically and yet with undoubted passion, isolated the reasons behind the Arab malaise that affected the region for generations and attributed it in equal measure to both outside influences and

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[03]

[04]

Ibid. p.15.

Ibid. p.15.

a deep-rooted fatalism within the region. ‘A tracking shot of this atypical continent,’ Kassir wrote, ‘would reveal some contented Arabs, and others who are aspiring to be so, but it would also show at every turn societies in crisis and deadlocked states, all ill-equipped to take their futures into their own hands.’[03] The situation in the Middle East has of course changed since Kassir published his volume; nevertheless, and although written almost a decade before recent events in the region, the selections included here deftly outline precisely the reasons as to why we are seeing popular revolutions across the region. This is not to ascribe to Kassir any sense of divination as such but there is an uncanny resemblance between his text and current commentary on the region, nowhere more than when we consider the question of democracy in the region – whose democracy are we talking about here and what forms could it take in the context of predominantly Muslim countries – and the apparent failure of pan-Arabism. Kassir also observed the revisionism at work and selective elisions involved in readings of the region and its history. Highlighting the period of Arab ‘awakening’ and ‘renaissance’ – commonly referred to as ‘Al Nahda’ – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Kassir noted that ‘after its “golden age” Arab history is viewed as no more than a string of failures, a continuum of misfortune. No mention of the fact that later periods had their share of achievements and success, both political and military as well as cultural.

Strangest of all, no word of a recent past that seemed to be overflowing with promise.’[04] So what, Kassir asked, happened to the promise inherent in the Arab world until relatively recently?

The notion of an inherent promise in the region and a conterminous critique of so-called democracy also underwrites the interview published here with Mohamed Talbi, the 93 year old Muslim scholar and historian whose work has yet to reach a wide audience outside of Francophone and Arab scholarship. In his interview, Talbi suggests a number of interrelated ideas, many of which come down to the question of interpretation. However, it is central to his argument that we consider democracy as ‘a new-born political management method, which has recently been considered the best or the “least” worst in our societies’. Talbi also notes, in a significant nod to the effects and legacy of both imperialism and globalisation (the latter seen by many as a form of neo-imperialism), that 50 per cent of the Muslim community belongs to the diaspora; namely, minorities living in their countries of origin such as Russia, India, Germany or England. With such diversity, Talbi argues, which will surely become only more complex with time, ‘how could one realistically aspire to an Islamic political unity or sense that one voice can speak for all?’

If the diasporic context of the so-called Middle East is realigning debates within the region, the relative youthfulness and media-savviness of the main actors who are taking to its streets and squares continues to question any definition of the region as culturally atavistic, politically backward looking, or indeed socially static. In recent months, as Rachida Triki points out in here essay here, social networks, in all their recording and

relaying of events, have acted ‘not just as the mirror of a reality, but a representation of the reality to come’. Social networks, she argues, ‘become participatory apparatuses allowing interactivity and shared creation through a system of transmission’. Calling for the civic participation of spectators and actors alike, the artists she discusses aim to recreate social links and bring communities into being – which would appear to be precisely the ambition of the protestors who have bravely taken to the streets throughout the region.

Such questions return us to the promise of culture in the Middle East and North Africa and how it contributes to both engagement and the emergence of public spaces for discussion and open displays of dissensus and disagreement. The equation of civic and public space and how the aesthetic can not only realign both, but also anticipate such spaces, is the focus of Anthony Downey’s essay, which attempts to consider the role of culture in the political and social events that are unfolding as we write. Culture and its institutions involve forms of social participation, Downey argues, and it is in these moments of engagement that aesthetics can open up a space for plurality and difference to emerge. Culture, in its capacity to engage public space, can anticipate the very conditions for such spaces to come into being – and if there is one thing that is contested in the Middle East today it is the role and function of public space.

There is perhaps a need here to be overt when discussing the show accompanying this catalogue: none of the works in The Future of a Promise can change the social conditions or political correlates of the Middle East.

On their own, however, they can offer individual commentary and a prism through which to re-articulate the realities of a complex and increasingly divergent region and encourage the participation of people in the civic order of discussion and dialogue. In part, this is what the curator of this show, Lina Lazaar, expresses when she isolates key elements at work in this show.

In works by Driss Ouadahi, Raafat Ishak, Emily Jacir and Fayçal Baghriche we see both promise of open borders – one of the ‘free trade’ remedies offered by the uneven hand of globalisation – and the coextensive closing down of borders and the restrictions placed upon travel. In Taysir Batniji’s work, we also see an engagement with architectural models of space and restriction that looks towards a dystopic future rather than the modernist ideal of the skyscraper and so-called ‘cities in the sky’. It is precisely such a vision of the future dominated by ‘cities in the sky’ that we see unfolding in the Gulf Arab States and the creation of, to paraphrase Lazaar, the ultimate prosthetic utopia: gondola trips on Arabian canals, surfing on artificial waves, and skiing down slopes in shopping malls. Elsewhere, Ahmed Mater’s Antenna (2010) reflects upon the importance of knowledge as encountered through televisual means of communication in the region and, in turn, the role of social networking in popular revolt there and the hope for a better future if not different life that is inherent in such media.

What is this glimpse of a different kind of life; what promise does it hold out today when read against the backdrop of civil war and indiscriminate death on the streets and in the squares of the Middle East and North

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Africa. Whatever that promise may be, communication and the means to relay information hold out a promise here that speaks to the aspirations of an entire region. It was with the entire region in mind that the publisher of this catalogue, Ibraaz, posed a question in 2010 for its online research platform. ‘What,’ the editors asked, ‘do we need to know about the MENA region today?’ Having collated over 40 responses, more than we imagined we would, it quickly became evident to us that we had effectively compiled a timely, if not unique, reaction from scholars, artists, curators and historians alike. It was therefore decided that a selection from these responses should be also published in the catalogue, representing as they do an extensive engagement with the region at a time of unparalleled change.

A platform is a space for speaking in public. It is an opportunity to express ideas and thoughts. It also suggests a formal declaration of a stance or position on any given subject. The choice of Venice for this show, as Kamel Lazaar points out in his succinct open letter, should not be overlooked, offering as it does one of the most significant platforms for the dissemination and reception of culture in the world. ‘Since the birth of the Republic of Venice – “La Sérénissime” – in the Middle Ages,’ the author of this letter writes, ‘the city has gradually become a thriving economic power, no doubt in part because it managed to become the centre of gravity for trade between the East and the West and thereafter opened up the Byzantine and Islamic worlds alike.’ This is pivotal to understanding a key aspect of the The Future of a Promise: the ability, that is, for culture to not only reflect upon a region and offer ways for communities to emerge and engage, but also for culture to cross borders and continents and thereafter become a crucial element in opening up and redistributing our sensibilities and how we understand (or fail to understand) the world in which we live in today.

Finally, a further question is posed throughout this catalogue: are the artists in The Future of A Promise showing us the beginning of the end of the term ‘Middle East’ as a shorthand way to understand a complex and diverse collection of countries. And if we are experiencing the nascent development of the former Middle East, how does that reflect upon our understanding of the so-called West? What lies beyond the former Middle East if that is indeed what we are seeing emerge. Are we looking at a new geographical, social, political, economic, religious and historical frame of reference under construction within the Middle East that necessitates the jettisoning of the very term. Can the aesthetic in this instance effect that most utopian and yet elusive of goals: the overthrow of one way of thinking for another and the promise of a coming event, a new world order, and a redistribution of how we look at and attempt to understand the world in which we live?

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The Will of Life Abou El Kacem Echebbi (1930)

I

Promising Futures, Contemporary Visual Culture in the Middle East

In an age when the promise of the future has become something of a cliché, one might want to reverse the terms of the question and ask what the future of a promise would entail. In its most basic sense, a promise is the manifestation of an intention to act or, indeed, the intention to refrain from acting in a specified way.

A commitment suggests hope, expectation, and the assurance of a future deed committed to the best interests of all. A promise, in sum, opens up a horizon of future possibilities, be they aesthetic, political, historical, social or critical.

The Future of a Promise aims at investigating the nature of the promise as a form of aesthetic and socio-political transaction and how it can be made manifest in contemporary visual culture in the Arab world today. In the Arab consciousness oral language was historically the ultimate purveyor of culture, identity and pride. It was the Qur’an in the seventh century which would have the greatest lasting effect on Arabic culture and its literature.

More value is placed on someone’s word than any written promise.

The well-known idiom Kalimat Sharaf – ‘word of honour’ in Arabic – embodies the idea that a broken promise automatically brings opprobrium in its trail. In this light, Ayman Baalbaki’s installation Kalam Faregh (2011) aims at exploring the necessity to reinstate in the word, the substance and weight it once embodied – both physically and metaphorically.

‘Inshallah is the absolute determinism within divine framework which can introduce at every moment a space of freedom.’ Mohamed Talbi, 2011 © Ali Pistach

Lina Lazaar

If the people will to live Providence is destined to favourably respond And night is destined to fold And the chains are certain to be broken And he who has not embraced the love of life Will evaporate in its atmosphere and disappear.

Some of the promises made in the artworks featured in this exhibition were broken, others fulfilled but most have remained suspended or en devenir (in becoming). Rather than a linear dissection of the horizon of possibilities, this essay will propose a spatiotemporal journey through the complexities of the promises enunciated in or in the Arab world’s visual art.

From macro-global to secular and individual, the promises held within globalisation and the underlying prospect of a future free of geographical and national boundary will be explored. Subsequently the discussion will be narrowed down to the numerous promises inherent within architecture and its ability to incubate and generate collective memories. We will thereafter investigate the increasingly precious singular and private space – the space which is ironically only achievable through collective and public negotiation – and to what extent communication and social engagement enable all sorts of individual freedoms to emerge.

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takes place,’ says Pete Adey, ‘space is understood to be striated by social relationships and practices. Here, mobility is given meaning … not just in terms of consumption, but also importantly in terms of production; how movement is given meaning in economic, social, cultural contexts – which can become ideologically bound to place.’[02] Begun in 2006, Egyptian Raafat Ishak sent a standardised letter to 194 governments requesting citizenship.

The replies, mostly in English, were phonetically transcribed into Arabic script. He then affixed those replies (and non-replies, for that matter) onto each of the associated nation’s flags. Minimal in their execution, the limited palette of soft pastels has created a visual uniformity corresponding to the homogeneity of the responses. Half of the requests remained unanswered whilst the other half was divided between the elusive quest for foreign capital and interrogatory scepticism. Cultural meaning here lies in the symbolic framework of immobility and the racial, territorial, economic, political and historical factors at work in such states of being. Ishak’s installation effectively displays the semiotic semaphore of exclusion and non-movement. This spectre of internment and non-mobility is a facet of Driss Ouadahi’s Fence paintings, which further investigate the ambiguities of globalisation and its one-sided ideal of mobility.

Inverted Globalisation and (Im)mobility In the late eighteenth century, economist Adam Smith coined the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ to describe the self-regulating nature of the global marketplace. Competition, self-interest, and supply and demand, these would effectively regulate, for Smith, the market’s cycles. Two centuries later, it is arguable that these systems still regulate the market, but now it is the uneven hand of globalisation that determines global relations within it. On the one hand, globalisation holds out the promise of mobility, exchange of goods, free trade and international travel, but on the other it increasingly regulates and prohibits precisely such mobility to those without the wealth or the legal rights to secure the right to travel. This is becoming all the more evident when we examine immigration policies across the world today and the figure of the dispossessed, the refugee and the so-called economic migrant, all of whom exemplify the condition of modernity for the multitudes who are being increasingly marginalised by the uneven processes that underwrite globalisation.

Fayçal Baghriche ⁄ Souvenir, 2009 and Épuration elective ⁄ 2004-09

Raafat Ishak ⁄ Responses to an immigration request… ⁄ 2006-09

Raafat Ishak’s Responses to an immigration request from one hundred and ninety four governments (2006-09) positions itself as a response of sorts to forms of mobility and immobility within and beyond the Middle East.

In this large scale installation of 194 panels, the artist aimed to investigate in a quasi-scientific manner the spectrum of human movement, whilst analysing the mechanisms within a geographical as well as a social context. ‘Rather than a blank canvas upon which mobility

Driss Ouadahi ⁄ Fences 1 ⁄ 2008

The introduction of the Schengen Agreement in Europe in 1991 is just one of the more overt examples of how Western states have effectively created fortresses around their borders. The irony here is that the Schengen Agreement was supposed to be about the freedom of movement between borders – those, that is, who had signed the agreement. The price of that increased freedom of movement was the strict control of those outside of the controlled zones. This was particularly obvious during the recent upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East and, in particular, the civil war in Libya which led to thousands of Tunisians and Libyans fleeing the region to Lampedusa, an Italian island viewed by some as the gateway to Europe.

Detained at the island’s port, the refugees have been corralled into camps described as unfit for human existence by numerous humanitarian groups.

Although the arrival of the refugees was essentially a humanitarian crisis, the response of Fortress Europe was anything but charitable. The temporary nature of the refugees’ presence has created a suspended space, a patchwork of recognisable spaces which has formed a new territory yet to be named.

These territories begin as spaces of ‘exception’ and yet they appear to be the rule for those caught in civil wars, strife and the beneath the uneven hand of globalisation and international law.[01]

Rooted in the grand tradition of landscape painting, Ouadahi’s minimalist, quasi-abstract depictions of chain-link fences stretching uninterrupted from edge to edge, seemingly without end, are all the more significant for their affiliations with previous forms of abstraction and painting in general. A fence, however, is effectively a means of control and containment: it either keeps people in or out. Fences 1 (2008) highlights the fact of separation but also suggests unbound opportunities on the other side of the barrier.

This is not to suggest a utopian, borderless world but to allude to it as an ideal in the minds of many who seek better lives elsewhere. Moreover, political power, social control and sovereignty would not be thinkable if removed from forms of territorial compartmentalisation. These territorial matrices should nevertheless be subject to negotiation in times of warfare and humanitarian crises, allowing room for adjustments and what David Newman calls ‘reterritorialisation’, whereby the territorial configurations of power are continually ordered and reordered.[03] Both Ishak and Ouadahi explore precisely these conceptual forms of ‘reterritorialisation’ and how it can negotiate the often binary codes of inclusion and exclusion.

Fayçal Baghriche’s Épuration Élective (2004-09) furthers this engagement through an aesthetic form of subtraction: a wall painting of stars of every form, colour and configuration, against a sky blue background. From all the flags in the world, Baghriche has taken out every defining feature except the symbolism of stars. Hierarchy becomes irrelevant: the stars are united by their uniform background. Épuration Élective sits alongside Baghriche’s Souvenir (2009), a borderless and luminous globe spinning so fast, that viewers cannot determine or demarcate borders, nations

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or even continents. The title Souvenir also alludes to the commodification of travel and tourism for the affluent in the modern world; a form of travel that is set in stark contrast to the necessity of mobility for those in exile or seeking asylum. Alessandro Petti has argued that ‘a space without separations is not a space that abolished and lost all memory of difference of class or nationality, but is a space that has learned to deactivate its control devices so as to render new collective usage possible’.[04] It is perhaps by going back to the simplest, almost childlike representation of the earth and the sky that Baghriche can imagine a less restrictive development of globalisation.

Emily Jacir ⁄ embrace ⁄ 2005

is the creation of a fissure in the order of the sensible, which would allow absolute freedom in audience’s reaction or at least the expectation of it: ‘The dream of the suitable political work of art is...the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as vehicle’, and thus acceptable political art would allow both: ‘the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused…by the uncanny, by that which resists signification…the ideal effect is always the object of negotiation between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of an art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.’[07]

This conceptual form of dematerialisation, however imaginary, and a strict demarcation of space, is a significant feature of Emily Jacir’s embrace (2005), an empty luggage conveyor turning in claustrophobic circles in the middle of a room.

Although familiar, this object has been rendered uncanny, and the sense of ever-decreasing circles and spaces of confinement alludes to the absence of a ‘right to return’ for Palestinian people and the restricted freedoms placed upon any form of travel to and from Palestine. According to Marc Augé airports exist as non-places, because no one goes to the airport to be there, only to leave. Similarly Jacir’s conveyer belt embodies the transient, transparent and a-temporal characteristics that have come to define Palestine as a non-destination, but just a mere mental desire.[05] Al-Amari camp ⁄ © Yazan Khalili Banksy ⁄ Cut Out and Keep ⁄ 2005 Image courtesy of Pest Control Office

Taysir Batniji ⁄ GH0809, detail ⁄ 2010

Anri Sala ⁄ Dammi i Colori ⁄ 2003 © Anri Sala ⁄ courtesy of Tate Images and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich

As a state of exception, where law seems suspended, the condition of Palestine is perhaps the most pertinent example of immobility in the world today. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 13 states that ‘[e]veryone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’.[06] Both promises at the heart of this declaration are to this day denied to the Palestinian People. In embrace, Jacir has reversed this promise and created an inverted form of mobility: she details the very essence of the paralysis that has come to define the non-horizon of a Palestinian state. The facts of this non-horizon are also examined in Taysir Batniji’s project GH0809 (2010) which he undertook after the three-week incursion of Israeli troops into the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008–2009. As he himself is not permitted to return to Gaza, the artist has worked for nearly two years with a Palestinian photographer to take precise images of houses damaged during the war. To complete this project, Batniji has thereafter (and with a significant degree of mischief) created real-estate advertisements and displayed them as if we were looking at a real-estate company office offering homes in Gaza. The bare and sanitised commercial visual language creates a fiction of fake normality that temporarily suspends it from politics. Gaza is no longer depicted in the backdrop of geopolitical references. Instead, the selected homes have reduced to the materiality of real-estate commodity. It is in this imaginary space that ‘4 rooms, 2 sitting rooms 2 bathrooms with garden and sea views’ becomes commercially available in Gaza. According to Rancière the ideal effect of politicized art

Acting as a cynical testimony on the commodification of the occupied territories and the effects of immobility and the restrictions placed upon individuals, Batniji conceptually displaces the border of the Gaza strip to an imaginary space that is, in turn, prefigured in forms of capital and material accumulation. He puts the viewer in the position of prospective buyer where a legal agreement can be effected: the promises that, subject to the sufficient, but as yet ‘to be defined’ form of financial exchange, the realestate company will commit to deliver the homes to you, the buyer/viewer.

There is here an ambiguity between fact and fiction that confuses whether or not these homes are actually for sale. Admittedly, the artist has omitted the ‘asking price’ and address of these homes, or even the inclusion of a Gaza real-estate brand, but the work still creates a series of connections whereby the possibility of these homes being available, or indeed someone actually wanting to buy them, becomes almost real.

II. Architectural (dis)topias In a world where states of exception have become the norm, Palestine has become the sine qua non exceptional non-state. Suspended from the political and civil rights that were used to govern their lives since they have become refugees, their lives are governed by United Nations conventions and the occasionally arbitrary application of international law. In Yazan Khalili’s Colour Correction (2009), the artist engages with the everyday reality of Palestinian camps and embarked on a somewhat utopian project of digitally colouring a photograph of Al-Amari Refugee Camp, which was supposed to be a temporary camp set up in the face of crisis, but has since been consolidated into the largest urban camp in the West Bank.[08] Palestine was historically built out of old and porous monochromatic stones which do not readily lend themselves to paint or the interventions of graffiti.

Ironically, any physical and artistic intervention is very much limited to the concrete support of either the refugee camps or the segregation wall which gives Khalili’s re-colouring of the buildings a humorous but nonetheless stark undertone.[09] There is, however, a sense of the artist attempting to give dignity to a condition that for many remains singularly undignified.

There are similarities to be found here with Anri Sala’s Dammi i Colori (2003), a project initiated by the mayor of Tirana to paint the wall and balconies of the city in the hope of creating an optimistic urban

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Kader Attia ⁄ Untitled (Skyline) ⁄ 2007 ⁄ Courtesy Galerie Krinzinger

Nadia Kaabi-Linke ⁄ Preparatory material for Flying Carpets ⁄ 2011

intervention. Unlike Sala’s Dammi i Colori. Khalili’s selection did not follow a colour-coded system of any sort, as it would have been seen as further restricting an already firmly entrenched laboratory for control and surveillance. Instead, colours were randomly distributed and the process of injecting colour onto a black and white landscape creates the very form of heterogeneity and diversity that is denied to many Palestinians. It is with such issues in mind, albeit in a different context, that Nadia KaabiLinke engaged in a process of documenting, over a period of ten days, the movement and presence of the clandestini who sell counterfeit goods on Venice’s Ponte del Sepolcro. Life-size bridge installation Flying Carpets (2011) gives architectonical physicality to the transient immigrants who daily sell their wares on the bridge but are largely ignored by passers-by. Unless, of course, the hawkers become subject to the draconian laws surrounding immigration and the selling of counterfeit goods. Whatever the rights and wrongs of selling counterfeit goods – another product of uneven globalisation – the status of these individuals remains unclear. They are consistently outlawed and yet remain indelibly subject to the law. They are, in sum, beyond the law but always, sometimes fatally, subject to the law. [10]

King Abdullah Economic City ⁄ (cc) Marshall Strabala

Nadia Kaabi-Linke ⁄ Flying Carpets, technical drawing ⁄ 2011

The structure of Kaabi-Linke’s ‘bridge’ is itself imposing, consisting as it does of over 2,000 strings that hold the structure together. The precariousness of this edifice could be seen as a metaphor for the precarious state of being an illegal immigrant in Venice. Although this ‘bridge’references the city of Venice itself, the 11 square frames constituting the bridge are also the exact outline of the rugs on which the immigrants display their goods. The notion of the flying carpet, having its roots in the legends of 1001 Nights is also alluded to in the way in which those selling goods on the bridge can, if the police are spotted, gather up their goods in their ‘blanket’ and take flight. Flying Carpets could be read, in this context, as a comment on consumerist culture, restoring the original meaning of Hermes, commonly reduced to luxury handbags, as the mythological Olympian God of boundaries and of the travellers who cross them.

Hermes, like others before and after him in Greek mythology, was also associated with hubris, an overweening pride before the fall. The glint of hubris has long shone on the glass walls of the soaring skyscrapers that dot the skyline in the Gulf States. Over-reaching ambition has always been at the heart of the creation of great cities and Kader Attia’s Untitled (Skyline) (2007), consisting of 19 discarded fridges that have been turned into skyscrapers through use of mirrored tiles, creates a landscape of shimmering beauty which, upon closer inspection, reveals a reflection of oneself and perhaps our own hubristic desires.

Untitled (Skyline) stands as a tribute to modern architecture and its glassy serenity but could also be read as an indictment on the cost that such buildings incur on a human level. It is no secret that many of the buildings being built in the Gulf States are done so on the backs of what can only be considered a form of modern indentured labour.

In 2007, Sheikh Maktoum revealed the future of his imagineered urbanism, and declared that by 2015 Dubai would be an Arab city of global significance, rivalling Cordoba and Baghdad – two cities representing the urban jewels of medieval Islamic culture. The ‘city of a thousand and one cities’, sells itself on the dream of a suspended universe that would have dissolved the boundary between reality and science fiction.

A pastiche of dream and reality all underpinned with the aim of creating the ultimate prosthetic utopia: take gondola trips on Arabian canals, surf on artificial waves, or ski down shopping hills. The purpose of the game is to distort any form of geographical reference whilst collecting all sorts of capitalist superlatives: the world’s largest theme park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and the first underwater hotel. Some have praised and others attacked Dubai and everything the city stands for, but one should not alienate a widespread feeling shared in the Arab world, of those who over the years have lovingly watched it grow and feel an uncanny yet allencompassing sense of pride.

Many ancient cultures resorted to monumentality in architecture to represent symbolically the political power of the ruler, or the state itself.

Architectural structures would therefore mirror the exercise of state power and repression. It is in approach that Attia questions the role of architecture in shaping the structure of power in society. On the other hand Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem’s economic city maquette, Hajar Al Asas (2011) wittingly questions the rationale behind these multibillion petrodollar projects – and the fact that the the Arabian Peninsula endeavours in building a series of nonautochthonous mega polis, when the world’s richest country is still subject to substantial flooding and hundreds of deaths as a result of a few hours of rain? Why not engage in improving the original and existing urban structures in place? Whilst Abdulnasser Gharem highlights the inadequacy of the architectural planning currently favoured, Ziad Antar is more interested in architecture’s ability to accurately encapsulate the

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© Ali Pistach

Ziad Antar ⁄ Cairo, 2005 ⁄ Burj Khalifa, 2010 ⁄ UAE Coast 3, 2010

essence of any given time.

In his Expired Series (2011) Antar collected a number of unused and beyond sell-by-date film rolls from the 1970s which he inserted into a camera from the 1940s, opening up a liminal space defined by the blurred interrelationship between physical and temporal dimensions. In his triptych Cairo, Burj Khalifa, UAE Coast 3 (2011), an unconscious architectural narrative of the Middle Eastern landscape is created at a glance: the gloomy haze of Cairo and its landmark 1960s Maspero building, the oldest governmental television organisations in the Middle East and Africa, pictured alongside the Babelian shard of glass that is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and then, incongruously, the deserted coastline of the United Arab Emirates. ‘With film photography, you have the magic of not knowing exactly what will materialise’, the artist said. ‘With expired film, there is a double magic: you don’t know what will survive to be printed.’[11] There are a series of inversions here: Antar documents a period of time that is both looking to the past but is also anticipating the future development of the film, in sum a return to the past which can only occur in the future.

‘I have experienced something I never actually lived,’ added the artist.

Antar challenges photography’s efficiency and the assumption that the photographic outcome is essentially predictable. The organic yet instant sense of time passing opens up a whole new space, making any attempt to date or contextualise the subject obsolete.

Abdelkader Benchamma ⁄ Sculpture # 9 ⁄ 2011

This sense of the unknowable is key to Abdelkader Benchamma’s oeuvre, which is firmly rooted in those infinity small yet powerful particles. Abstract elements and pure graphic illuminations attempt to render that which, by its very nature, cannot be seen. Similar to swirling cataclysms, Benchamma’s drawings are graphic metaphors for the uncontrollable proliferation of modern cities and the expansion of international communications networks. Science shows that only about four per cent of the energy density in the universe can be seen directly. The other 96 per cent cannot be ascertained by our senses; this is commonly called the dark matter. Systems of communication come apart, disperse and then coagulate elsewhere – this is the lesson of discourse.

III. Democracy is coming Recent events in the Middle East have been reflected upon by commentators and the many voices within social networks; in most cases, it is those same commentators and voices who have played a pivotal role in organising and in some cases anticipating those events. The rapid transmission of ideas and information across the region has enabled communities to realign and re-territorialise public spaces – the very spaces that are being contested on a daily basis. As a system of production, visual culture is a network of references and relies upon, perhaps is even pre-empted by, the notion of communication and discursive systems. Whilst a number of artists have engaged with social networks, some of the works included here directly allude to both communication systems and art as a mode of communication and reception. Ahmed Mater’s Antenna (2010) for example, is a reflection of the importance of knowledge as encountered through televisual means of communication in the region. To paraphrase the artist, Antenna is both a symbol and a metaphor for growing up in Saudi Arabia. ‘As children,’ Mater notes in his statement for this publication, ‘we used to climb up to the roofs of our houses and hold these television antennas up to the sky. We were trying to catch a signal from beyond the nearby border with Yemen or Sudan; searching – like so many of my generation in Saudi – for music, for poetry, for a glimpse of a different kind of life.’ The means to relay information hold out a promise here that speaks to the aspirations of an entire region – a region that has recently put its hopes in the power of social networking to effect change.

Mater’s transformation of the antenna into a luminous symbol of freedom and opportunity reflects on the paramount importance of communication in isolated places that are removed from the cultural mainstream. The freedom to share ideas, and engage in the social, cultural and political dialogues they inspire, is essential to understanding the constantly evolving environment

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Mounir Fatmi ⁄ The Lost Springs ⁄ 2011

Mona Hatoum ⁄ Drowning Sorrows ⁄ 2002

we live in. Mater’s use of the ‘assisted readymade’ as a vehicle through which to communicate more complex ideas to a universal audience is also characteristic of Mona Hatoum’s sculptures and installations. In Drowning Sorrows (2002), there is a wry comment on a precarious form of communication – a message in a bottle. Hatoum’s adaptation of everyday objects into unfamiliar arrangements creates a shift of function and meaning in which the viewer is forced to re-examine the familiar in search of relevance. Like Jacir, there is an uncanny element at play in her work: Cut so as to appear as if floating on water or sinking into the floor, Hatoum’s bottles draw upon a series of ideas including, but not limited to, a reflection on despair, the passing of time, and perhaps the failure of these intimate messages to reach their intended destination.

The question of communication in the context of so-called democracy has likewise raised a number of questions: whose democracy, for one, are we talking about? And why is it held up as a paradigm for the Middle East when it has failed populations and communities the world over? The recent uprising in the Arab world has raised this as a pivotal question but, equally, has shown the way forward for the effective use of social networking in a time of conflict and confusion. Although the actual degree of influence that information technologies may have had in recent events is still debatable, the fact that many people have been able to share information and coordinate protest against authoritarian rule is indisputable.

Reproduction of the Pablo Picasso’s Guernica © 2006 Getty Images

Kader Attia ⁄ La Colonne Sans Fin ⁄ 2010

The self-immolation of a desperate market trader – the now iconic Mohamed Bouazizi – in Sidi Bouzid was instantaneously brought to an international audience by both Al Jazeera and Facebook, resulting in further revolt and demonstrations throughout the Arab world. Demonstration and forms of communication, not to mention the spectre of so-called democracy, underwrite Kader Attia’s La Colonne Sans Fin (2010) which takes its name and inspiration from Constantin Brancusi’s monumental Endless Column (1938). Thirty metres high and consisting of 17 diamond shaped modules, Endless Column is Brancusi’s crowning sculptural masterpiece and represented his ultimate simplification of pure, dynamic form (and a monument to honour the Romanian loss during the First World War). Whilst Attia’s work references Brancusi’s seemingly never-ending ladder to the skies, its meaning and the effect it inspires is wholly different. Consisting of megaphones stacked end-to-end in an unbroken, silent chain, La Colonne Sans Fin is a meditation on the violent clashes between French police and the segregated communities of North African immigrants living in Paris’s impoverished suburbs. Its meaning remains tantalisingly elusive: does it embody the need for an unbroken and peaceful dialogue between migrant minorities and those in government? Or does it represent the ultimately silent voices of persecuted minorities? Again, we return to the role of effective communication in times of crises and, perhaps, in ushering in more representative systems of government and civic society.

The main factors behind the spring of the Arab world are universal. Whether called dictatorship, oppression, nepotism or whatever else, all of these lead to forms of injustice. But what is truly historical is the shift that seems to be linking Islam to universal principles of freedom, democracy and social equity. Demonstrations are still taking place after Friday prayers and sajjadas (prayer rug) are laid out in front of tanks. While prayers are still directed towards Mecca, their content is very much heading towards social equity. Islam’s transformation is a key factor in this process of regeneration which might signal the onset of a post-modern Arab and Islamic world.

Mounir Fatmi’s Installation The Lost Springs (2011) is a trenchant comment on the unprecedented revolutionary blow from the masses to the despots and totalitarian rulers of the MENA region. Fatmi’s piece brings together a row of national flags set against the wall; whereas the Tunisian and Egyptian flags are supported by brooms, other Middle Eastern flags are pinned directly to the wall. The flag of each of the Arab world countries is reduced to mere ornamentation for regular wooden brooms, questioning their status as flags – in a manner similar to Faycal Baghriche’s Épuration Elective – whilst simultaneously reflecting on the uncertain future of the Middle East for many of the people living there today.

Perhaps one the most remarkable promises of this century, made by Western governments to the Arab world, was the implant of democracy in the Middle East. A democracy often perceived as a molecular package, carefully stored in stem cell banks, which would at the right time be airlifted to Baghdad or Basra and inserted like a chip into Iraqi soil. The fact of the matter is that unless a promise is enunciated by the principal in charge of its administration, it will fail. The uprisings have embodied and incorporated the dynamic of the people and their energy. It is this chaotic dislocation and energy that fascinates Ahmed Alsoudani, depicting as he does in his paintings, the atrocities of war and the pent up energy within a solemn promise of freedom that is in danger of being reneged upon. Seeking political asylum in 1999, Ahmed Alsoudani left Iraq for the United States where he continued his studies. His paintings and drawings reflect the troubled contemporary history of his home country, yet also belong to a long tradition of painting depicting war and brutality. Often compared to Picasso and Goya, Alsoudani’s oeuvre is a poignant comment upon the atrocity of war in the twenty-first century. It is also no coincidence that in February 2003, when Colin Powell appeared in the UN to ‘justify’ the urgency to engage a war with Iraq, officials there, upon protests from the US, conceded and hung a blue curtain over a tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica.

Officials thought it would be inappropriate for Powell to engage in war rhetoric with the twentieth century’s most iconic protest against the cruelty of war as his backdrop – and they were no doubt right, but for all the wrong reasons.

In Alsoudani’s work, carefully rendered architectural, static forms are juxtaposed with active drawing and brushwork, in which bodies coalesce and recombine into abstract, morphing objects. Alsoudani’s paintings often begin with a disturbing image, but in their construction and the

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Ahmed Alsoudani ⁄ Untitled ⁄ 2010

repeated reworking of a particular instant in time, they tend to transcend horror. De-rootedness and excavation of the very heart of the Iraqi soil is evident in Untitled (2010) which, with its abruptly sliced trees, appears to be awakening ghosts of the martyrs who resisted, for different reasons, both Saddam Hussein and the US-led military occupation. Alsoudani’s subjects are portrayed as violently distorted, presented not as sociable and charismatic types but as isolated souls imprisoned and tormented by existential dilemmas. ‘I’ve been living with these moments all these years,’ the artist notes, and ‘this is what I mean when I say my work is not about documentation.

I’m addressing things that happened in the past but you can feel the present in them’.[11] There is a significant degree of promise in the way in which an idea is made manifest in a formal, visual context – the promise, that is, of potential meaning emerging in an artwork and its opening up to interpretation. There is also the ‘transaction’ between what the artist had in mind and the future (if not legacy) of that creative promise and the viewer. Whilst the artists included here are not representative of a movement as such, they do seek to engage with a singular issue in the Middle East today: who gets to represent the present-day realities and promise of a region and the horizons to which its people – in however varied and disparate ways – aspire?

[01]

Ursula Biemann has defined these undefined locations as a ‘space in-between, this interstice …a cultural location in its own right that needs to be visualised, named and legitimised’. See Ursula Biemann, Performing the Border, downloaded from <mart8.ica-sofia.org/conf6.htm> [Date accessed 20 April 2011]

[02]

dey, Pete and Paul Bevan, “Connected Mobility?” in International Conference: Alternative A Mobility Futures, Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University (9-11 January 2004)

[03]

avid Newman, World Society, Globalization and a Borderless World: The Contemporary D Significance of Borders and Territory (2005), downloaded from <www.uzh.ch/wsf/WSFocus_ Newman.pdf> [Date accessed 20 April 2011]

[04]

AAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) Presentation, February 2009, downloaded D from <www.decolonizing.ps/DA_february09.pdf> [Date accessed 20 April 2011]

[05]

arc Augé. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso: London M (1995).

[06]

he Universal Declaration of Human Rights <www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml> T [Date accessed 15 April 2011]

[07]

Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum: New York (2004) p.63

[08]

he Al-Amari camp had undergone a series of architectural alterations before been given the T status of a ‘concrete heaven’. In 1948 it was a transient and ephemeral ‘parking lot’ made of tents and light material, then in 1950, UNRWA intervened with the construction of housing units, using local brick and block-work walls with corrugated iron ceilings – deemed quick and easy enough to dismantle. It is only in the early 1960s that the camps were authorised to build additional floors and the much praised concrete ceilings. See WB Research Office: Camp Development Pilot Research Project, downloaded from <www.ochaopt.org/documents/ opt_campprof_unrwa_amari_oct_2008.pdf> [Date accessed 15 April 2011]

[09]

I t is no surprise that graffiti artist Banksy wondered, in the introduction to his most ambitious project to date, ‘how illegal is it to vandalise a wall, if the wall itself has been deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice?… Turning Palestine into the world’s largest open-air prison.’ See <www.briansewell.com/artist/b-artist/banksy/banksy-palestinian-tag.html>

[10]

he status of the immigrant is perhaps best personified in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law”, a T parable from The Trial (1925), where the obstacles to accessing the Law, for Kafka’s hapless character, constantly defer the very thing he wants most: access to the Law. The structures of the Law are precisely that which effectively disallow access to the Law.

[11]

ndrew Pulver interview with Ziad Antar quoted in “Photographer Ziad Antar’s Best Shot”, 9 A March 2011 <www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/09/photographer-ziad-antar-bestshot> [Date accessed 12 April 2011]

[12]

Goff, Robert and Cassie Rosenthal eds., Ahmed Alsoudani, Hatje Cantz: Ostfildern (2009), p.62

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II

Being Arab, translated by Will Hobson, (Verso: London and New York), 2006.

A DEEP SENSE OF MALAISE PERMEATES EVERY CORNER OF THE ARAB WORLD Some people in Europe, and even in the Arab World, might consider the picture I have painted of the Arab malaise as itself a sign of the crisis, in so far as its presupposition of a global Arab entity smacks of pan-Arabism. One school of thought, inspired

by American neoconservatives, maintains that the persistence of Arabism is one of the causes of the Arab world’s backwardness.

This is most improbable. The picture would be no more cheering if one were to consider each Arab country separately. Admittedly, a tracking shot of this atypical continent would reveal some contented Arabs, and others who are aspiring to be so, but it would also show at every turn societies in crisis and deadlocked states, all ill-equipped to take their futures into their own hands.

Painful though it may be, it is worth conducting such a review of the Arab world, and Egypt, which has long played a pivotal role in it, is an obvious starting point. In the overpopulated Nile valley, with its vast economic disparities, the Egyptian state displays a chronic inability to manage its country’s human resources, let alone play a role beyond its borders. A hypertrophied bureaucracy blocks the workings of an economy that combines the worst of both worlds: the disadvantages of state capitalism, once rashly called socialism, with the failings of ultra-free-market economics. Emblematic of this sclerosis is the highest office of state, which has been held by the same man for 23 years, a record of longevity unsurpassed since Muhammad Ali in the nineteenth century. At least he initiated the country’s modernisation and set in train decisive reforms, the effects of which were felt for over a century. His successor shows no such ambition, nor, oddly enough, does he even portray himself as a hero, unlike his predecessors – perhaps because he knows that the real power lies with the military, from which he came, which is itself another sign of the impasse. Such ‘modesty’, however, hasn’t prevented either the personalisation of the regime or the extensive practice of nepotism: accusations of wheeling and dealing have been levelled at the president’s elder son for years, while certain political and economic circles openly lobby for his younger son to inherit office. But Egypt’s impasse is not merely a matter of governance. The whole society, including the elite, seems so in thrall to an ideology of stagnation that the few voices of protest are easily coopted by the regime to become stooges of a pseudo-democracy. Meanwhile Islamism looms large: fuelled by a popular religious revival and indulged by the government, it has been spreading for years, veiling women and closing minds in ever increasing numbers.

Samir Kassir

To the south of Egypt, the Sudan, having barely emerged from a 20-year civil war, now threatens to descend into a new one. Scene of an extraordinary squandering of natural riches, this colossus of the African continent and the Arab world is one of the least advanced countries on the planet. This in itself should sum up the stasis in which it is mired. Despite the end of the civil war, its integrity as a state remains in jeopardy, since the agreement

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that concluded hostilities explicitly allows for the possibility of the animist, Christian-dominated South breaking away after a transitional phase. Not to mention the immeasurable damage it has done to Arabs’ reputation in black Africa. Not content with having oppressed the South, the Arabized, Muslim North now gives allegedly out-of-control militias carte blanche to persecute the people of Darfur.

To the west of Egypt, Libya has been frozen in Gadaffism for 35 years.

The global populism of the ‘guide of the revolution’ has alienated it from the international community and caused it to fall out with most of the Arab states. Oscillating between the Levant, the Maghreb and Africa, Gaddafi’s Libya has ended up abdicating any claims to be a regional power in return for a certificate of good behaviour dramatically conferred on it by a West at war. Its isolation is far from over, however, since the soi-disant ‘regime of the masses’ has produced a political vacuum in a closed society under constant police surveillance.

[01]

akhzen, literally M ‘warehouse’, is a term for the governing elite in Morocco, often considered a barrier to democracy.

[02]

he secularist Habib T Bourguiba (CE 1903-2000), first president of Tunisia (CE 1957-87), enacted pro-Western reforms during his presidency, promoting education and women’s rights.

[03]

ouari Boumédienne H (CE 1932-78), president of Algeria (CE 1965-78) initiated a programme of state-driven industrialisation, nationalising the oil industry in 1971.

Further west, each of the three principal countries of the Maghreb after their own fashion offers equally dispiriting images of the Arab impasse. Morocco has embarked on its democratic transition too late and only to a limited extent. Reined in by the palace, the multiparty system hasn’t even been able to reduce the hoarding of wealth that is embodied by the Makhzen system,[01] which has meant the party of government, the former opposition, losing its credibility. After a brief improvement in the press, freedom of information has once again got short shrift. Unalleviated by political progress, problems of underdevelopment fuse with the rhetoric of militant Islam to produce networks of jihadists, which then spread to other countries. In Tunisia, Islamism is kept in check for the moment by the police, who use their power to take the entire society prisoner and silence any democratic expression or criticism of the mafia-type corruption that is feeding on the country’s economic growth. This authoritarianism has in turn fostered a culture of tacit dissent among the working class – and elsewhere – that distorts the genuine social achievements of Bourguibism.[02] But Algeria is undoubtedly the most dramatic embodiment of the Arab predicament, and perhaps the most resonant, more so even than Egypt, because it was once such a symbol of promise.

Having been one of the pillars of the Arab world, Africa and the NonAlignment movement for two decades, Algeria, although its leader still symbolizes that dynamic period, has seen its political role shrink dramatically at both a regional and a global level, while suffering catastrophic internal upheaval. Like Morocco, the ‘socialist’ excesses of Boumédianism[03] served as a pretext for the class in power to enrich themselves, while after a misguided change of course the economy proved itself ever more incapable of sustaining an expanding democracy, despite considerable oil revenues. The ensuing loss of faith in the political process soon allowed a revival of militant Islam, to which the ruling military found no answer other than repression, which in turn led to civil war.

Fortunately Algeria has emerged from this, and reclaimed freedom of speech in the process, but it is still dependent on a regime that only has a civilian

facade and, crucially, lacks any real prospects, something for which all the president’s media and diplomatic experience is far from compensating.

Looking east of Egypt, to the Levant, the picture becomes even bleaker.

The havoc radiating out from the Iraqi inferno alone should convey the extent of the impasse the Arab world has reached. Iraq unites the three ills obstructing the future: dictatorship – and what a dictatorship, still traumatic even after its fall – foreign occupation and, thanks to the occupation’s blunders, a wave of blind violence that justifies itself in the name of religious messianism. Instead of Iraq growing into the Arab Prussia it showed signs of becoming in the 1930s, the extraordinary squandering of its riches threatens to turn it into a second Somalia. Arabism has degenerated from a source of optimism to a stain on Arab identity, which it will take a long time to remove.

A stain that Syria, its neighbour and Baathist twin, continues to compound.

Suffocated for 40 years under a dictatorship that, although less bloodthirsty than Iraq’s, has still brutally run it into the ground, systematically bled dry by powerful mafias, and weakened by a culture of fear, Syria is now in a position almost without equivalent in the Arab world – apart perhaps from Libya, although it doesn’t have Libya’s oil – in that it combines the corruption of the former Soviet republics with a Chinese-style closed police state. Bordering Syria to the west and still in its shadow, thanks to its intelligence services, Lebanon has embarked on a unique regression. Having barely emerged from a war that tore its society apart and deprived the Arab world of one of its laboratories of modernity, Lebanon has in the fifteen intervening years forfeited most of the advantages that had long set it apart, starting with an open, resourceful media. Certainly it can pride itself on having liberated its territory from Israeli occupation through the resistance of its people – or part of its people – but now even that achievement has been appropriated by Syrian obstructiveness and Islamist activism. Not to speak of the republican tradition that had managed to survive the war, however grievously wounded.

Paradoxically, of all the Arab countries of the Near East, it is Jordan, without any natural resources or democratic tradition, that seems to be doing best. But a perennial obsession with security hampers its halting transition to democracy, and the influence of parliamentarisrn has so far been confined to providing a platform for the most sterile populism, thereby reinforcing conservatives’ and tribal groups’ opposition to any improvement in women’s rights. At the same time Jordan’s geopolitical position, next to the two centres of instability, Iraq and Palestine, raises the question of its durability as a state, especially since Palestine feels like a permanently open wound every day to its population, over half of whom are Palestinian refugees.

The picture might appear superficially more attractive if one turns to the Arabian peninsula. I do not of course mean the Yemen, which carries no echo of any Arabia Felix, real or fictional, of old. One of the least advanced countries in the world, its unification – between the tribal, militarised

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North and the Marxist, ex-colonial South – has resulted in women’s rights, one of the few achievements of socialism, being challenged and produced a regime that controls and manipulates a nominally pluralist system, while compromising with lawless regions run by breakaway tribes and groups of jihadists.

I am thinking, rather, of those countries on the other side of the peninsula where societies previously untouched by developments of any kind in the Arab world have been utterly transformed by the black gold in the space of two generations. So much so that some people have started to think that the Arab world’s future, particularly when globalisation is increasingly geared around the Pacific, may lie in the luxury emirates of Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and, to a lesser extent, Bahrain.

It is impossible not to be impressed by the metamorphosis these countries have undergone. In Dubai, where skyscrapers proliferate in a cityscape worthy of Chicago, the titanic programme of development and modernisation has even managed to impact favourably on the climate – irrigation and green spaces have caused a drop of two degrees in average summer temperatures.

But beneath these obvious, showy successes lie elements of a grave instability. The structure of the populations and the restrictions imposed on citizenship, for a start: most people living in the emirates are foreigners, Arabs and otherwise, who have no political rights not any prospect of ever acquiring them through naturalisation. At least half of the nationals live in conditions of scandalous inequality by virtue of the circumscribed status of women, still generally covered from head to toe – except when they go to Beirut on holiday. In the case of Bahrain, there is also the religious issue, in which the Shia are relegated to the status of second-class citizens.

A still greater threat facing this string of rich emirates is the fact that modernisation remains merely window dressing. The dominance of tradition, symbolised by the fetishisation of national dress – and the obligatory veil – stifles social change. The same people who swear allegiance to the global economy are often responsible for financing that other global enterprise, jihadism. Qatar is an obvious case in point: despite the American military presence there, the Islamist faction in the ruling family is so strong that it could engineer a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Al-Jazeera. Kuwait is an even more striking example: the country owes its survival entirely to America’s protection but, like Jordan, its revived parliamentarianism only intensifies opposition to the modernizing legal change the Americans supposedly want. […]

This is undoubtedly an incomplete picture, but it nonetheless allows us to pinpoint the other major failing of the Arab world besides its impotence in international affairs – its democratic deficit. Lack of democracy may not be a specifically Arab problem, but the Arab world is still the only region where virtually every country suffers in this regard. Actual dictatorship may be confined to just two countries, Syria and Libya (Iraq’s being of recent

memory), but it casts its shadow over them all and, by setting the context for pseudo-democracies such as Jordan, restricts genuine political participation.

Nor has citizenship gained enough authority in any Arab country to drive democratic change. But it would be a mistake to impute the crisis of citizenship to any cultural predisposition. The real crisis in the Arab world is the crisis of the state.

The state is experiencing a crisis of one form or another in almost every single Arab country. The first, and perhaps most serious, symptom of this upheaval is the recurrent phenomenon of states’ internal unity being challenged. Lebanon has been spared this, but it is looming in Sudan, and now a country like Iraq, which has long been considered durable, is threatened. On a smaller scale, other countries have suffered violent expressions of internal groupings, either along the lines of religion, asabiyya, such as in Bahrain, the east of Saudi Arabia, Syria and even Egypt, or distinctive ethno-cultural identities such as in Algeria.

An equally alarming, although less obvious, symptom of the crisis is institutions’ general lack of popular credibility. There is good reason for this: none of these states has shown any continuity in institutional matters. On the contrary, if there has been a marked tendency since independence, it has been that of institutions progressively losing substance.

In countries which at one stage or another have followed a ‘socialist’ path, the struggle for national liberation has perversely tended to remove all trace of the legally constituted state from the governing elites’ thinking, even though some of the foundations of such a state date back to the last decades of the Ottoman era. Economic liberalism has not made much difference; if anything, it has made things worse, as one can see from the erosion of the independence of Egypt’s judiciary, which was comparatively protected under Nasser. In other countries, monarchies that have demanded direct loyalty to the king haven’t even needed a concept of citizenship until recently. The best an Arab opposition can therefore hope for is a more restrictive version of the Mexican model of democracy – that is to say, a regime that permits a certain degree of freedom of expression while offering no real possibility of a change of government. This is demonstrably the case in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco. But these half measures are inadequate to produce a genuine political process, as Algeria has shown. It took this route between 1988 and 1992 before the experiment had to be stopped because it was out of control. The deadlock the Egyptian regime seems to be in today is another example. It goes without saying, of course, that a modicum of free speech is a long way short of a legally constituted state. Any factions that are considered a real threat to the regime in power tend to be denied it anyway.

One cannot therefore speak of ‘citizens’ in countries where the ruling powers, republicans though they may be, see only subjects.

Another symptom of the crisis of the state, which probably has the most potential significance for the Arab world, is the tendency of governments, voluntarily or otherwise, to relinquish sovereignty in economic and financial matters. The question of sovereignty, apparently so significant when it

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comes to explaining the futility of plans for Arab integration, goes out of the window when the world order is involved, or when integration involves non-Arab countries, as in the talk of ‘complementarity’ and ‘normalisation’ which was a feature of Arab-Israeli negotiations in the 1990s.

In this sense, the political dysfunction in all the Arab states, whatever their regimes, plays a part in perpetuating foreign hegemony, in the same or almost identical way as the manipulation of debt and control of economies paved the way for the West’s political and military hegemony in the nineteenth century. This tendency, discernible before September 11, has been thrown into fresh relief by the ‘War on Terror’ and to an even greater extent by the Iraq war. In many respects it represents a return to classic colonial domination, not just in Iraq itself, but also in the Gulf states where the American bases, unlike in Turkey, enjoy extraterritorial status, and elsewhere. Many national police forces – even that of the easily offended Syria – now receive training from the FBI. The only ‘continent’ where all its members suffer from the democratic deficit, the Arab world is thus also the only one where the lack of democracy is allied to a foreign hegemony, generally indirect and purely economic, but in the most extreme cases – Palestine and now Iraq – resembling a new colonialism. Consequently the feeling of impotence fuelled by this domination is coupled with a civic powerlessness, which is all the more overwhelming because the Arab unconscious filters it through nostalgia for a forgotten but still fantasized-about glory. Not only can the current regimes not give, or restore to, their states the ability to take the initiative in international affairs; they also forbid their citizens any license – if not to change these regimes, then at least to breathe new life into them through popular participation, or at the very least create a popular solidarity that could defuse any external threat as it arose. Instead, whether it is called Israel or the United States, this threat is used as a pretext for a permanent state of emergency that moves, with complete disregard for the law, to neutralize politics and ban all its regulatory mechanisms, starting with parties and associations. The crisis of faith in the political process then runs its course, until there is nothing left but religion to channel people’s frustrations and express their demands for change.

Although today militant Islam appears primarily to target the West, it was initially a product of the impasse in Arab states. Saudi Arabia is an exception, since its political and religious establishments have been blurred since the kingdom’s founding. But everywhere else the rise of political Islam took the form of a reislamization of society in response to what were considered to be inefficient, iniquitous, or impious, governments, rather than a reaction to the culture of modernism. Obviously the Iranian revolution played a role, giving the religious revival an anti-Western cast and then passing this on to Arab Islam through the Shia in occupied Lebanon. But the Sunni version of political Islam did not adopt this anti-Western stance for a long time, at least not until the end of the Afghan jihad left the former mujahedin under bin Laden free to choose a new enemy. In Egypt and Algeria meanwhile, reislamization concentrated entirely on internal politics.

As a product of the democratic deficit, political Islam’s rise could only be a response to the crisis of the Arab state and the deadlock of Arab societies.

A form of resistance to oppression, it also arose from the failures of the modern state and the broken egalitarian promises of progressive ideologies; in this sense, it resembles the rise of fascism in Europe. Indeed, once the religious veil is removed the societal attitudes of the Islamist movements reveal many similarities with fascist dictatorships. If one is to admit political Islam’s claim to be a force for change therefore, one must accept that the democratic deficit is permanent and that the Arab world will never make its appointment with modernity.

As a constituent element of the Arab malaise, the illusion that political Islam could offer a way out of the crisis is striking. Generally speaking, we should not forget either that the focus of religious thought, even before bin Ladenist jihadism, is a regression in the literal sense of the word – that is, in terms of Arab history. Contemporary Islamism in fact wants to do away with all Arab history, recent and classical alike, in order to recover the forty or so years of ‘pure Islam’. But it is only when we can recover this history in its entirety, that we will be able to envisage an end to the Arab malaise.

THE ARABS’ MALAISE IS MORE A FUNCTION OF THEIR GEOGRAPHY THAN THEIR HISTORY Are the Arabs the centre of the world? Setting aside Arab discourse, the part they have played in international affairs for over half a century suggests one should not dismiss such a seemingly presumptuous question too hastily.

The Palestinian question and the Arab-Israeli conflict, virtually uninterrupted since the end of the Second World War; the Suez crisis and its knock-on effects; the Algerian war; more recently, the long chapter of the Lebanese war; the upheavals in Iraq, from the Iran war to the invasion of Kuwait and the American occupation; the convulsions of Islamism in Egypt and Algeria; September 11’s repercussions in the Arabian peninsula, to mention only the most striking episodes – so much has happened that has focused the attention of the world’s media and governments on the Arab world. Editors may cite the dramatic nature of equally emphasises the alltoo-often-forgotten factor of geography.

To understand the history of the Arab world, one must inevitably take account of its geography, particularly because the region is atypical from a geographical point of view. Straddling two continents, not all its terrestrial borders are natural; moreover, its identity lies primarily in its shared history and a deep seam of shared culture (however diversified its expressions have been, and continue to be). Both these elements explain the existence of a regional organisation defined by linguistic identity, the League of Arab States, and the prevailing use of a voluntarist term, the Arab ‘homeland’, for the region. Atypical though it may be, however, this geography does have a number of features that have shaped contemporary Arab history.

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The first and unquestionably foremost of these is its position in the heart of the Old World, facing Europe. It is almost a truism to say that their region’s proximity to Europe has had the most implications for the Arabs.

There’s no need here to retrace the long history it has engendered: from the conquest of Andalusia and Sicily to the colonization of Algeria, by way of the crusades and the imperial division of the Levant after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Suffice to say that the Arab world is the only part of the colonial world to have confronted Europe in the pre-colonial era and to have dominated the encounter for long stretches. This alone explains why the European view of Arabs is rarely neutral, while fuelling Arabs’ resentment at no longer being the power they were.

Once Europe had established itself as a global power and was bent on expanding overseas, the Arab world by its very proximity was fated to become Europe’s stepping stone. Neither the crossing of the Atlantic, nor the circumnavigation of Africa, courtesy of Vasco de Garna’s Arab navigators, reduced the Mediterranean’s significance. In fact, with the expansion of European trade that followed the end of the Napoleonic wars, control of the Mediterranean, now ascendant Europe’s mare nostrum, once again became a major prize. At stake were the Ottoman markets, heavily targeted by British and French manufacturers, and above all European imperial ambitions.

North Africa commanded the western gateway of the Mediterranean, while Egypt held the key to the east – both the land route to India and the second sea route that opened up with the Suez Canal.

[04]

uly Monarchy: the reign J of Louis Philippe, last king of France, from July 1830 to February 1848, when the Second Republic was proclaimed.

While the geographic factor may not completely explain the complexity of the Eastern Question, one can still see its influence at some of the most significant moments in the region’s history. Even before the Suez Canal was built, the British Empire had been alarmed by the rise of Muhammad Ali, ally of the July Monarchy,[04] and had gone to the aid of the future Sick Man of Europe with Austria and Russia (despite the fact that the latter had designated the Ottoman Empire its ‘hereditary enemy’). France then had to join them to preserve the European alliance, at which point the first idea of a Jewish state or, more specifically, a Jewish kingdom, was mooted. There were no Jewish founding fathers at this stage, only English Protestants whose rationale, purely strategic, was the potential benefit to Great Britain in having a buffer zone between Egypt and Syria under its control.

This plan had no immediate consequences; the other British project of the time, concerning India, was more concrete. In 1839, Great Britain took possession of the port of Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea and established the town and hinterland as a colony – the future South Yemen, which became a Marxist-Leninist state in 1968. The issue of the security of the Indies route also entailed control of the Persian Gulf, a bolt-hole for pirates plying the Indian Ocean. Rather than direct rule, the British navy opted for the protectorate system, initially imposing a treaty on the sheikhs of the region, which turned the Pirate coast into the Truce coast, now the United Arab Emirates. The same approach was used in 1399 with the sheikh of the little town of Kuwait – even though Ottoman rule was more overt there in the form of the Governor of Bassora – and the Sultanate of Mascate.

In the meantime the British had not forgotten Egypt. Despite the waning of Egyptian ambitions after Muhammad Ali’s death, geography remained decisive. Failing to block the construction of the Suez Canal, London decided to take control of it once it was built, first economically, by ‘redeeming’ the debt-crippled Khedive Ismail’s shares in the Universal Company, and then strategically, by using the same debts as grounds to impose a protectorate, which was to last three-quarters of a century.

An identical geopolitical logic dictated the division of Ottoman spoils in the context of the Great War. The Levant was obviously a target in itself; for France as much as for Great Britain. Yet it was the part it played in their imperial strategies that prompted the two great powers, allies and rivals by turns, to consider it a major prize. At stake for Great Britain was the security of the Suez Canal, which in turn guaranteed British command of the Indies.

London was consequently prepared to go to any lengths to control Palestine, including backing a new version of the plan for a Jewish state formulated by the nascent Zionist movement. Conversely, the sense Britain had after the Second World War· that it would have to give up India influenced its decision not to make a stand to keep Palestine when its former Zionist allies turned against it. As for France, while possession of ‘French Syria’ – Syria and Lebanon combined – was certainly in the interests of Lyons’s and Marseilles’s business circles, its real attraction was that of ensuring France’s continued colonial domination of North Africa, culturally rather than geographically. This explains why France, after having to renounce Palestine, was anxious to divide Syria, and then stubbornly insisted on keeping it on, despite the cost. According to an idea already current at the start of the century among activists of the Committee of French Asia, but only explicitly formulated between the wars by the Orientalist Robert Montagne, whoever controlled the Levant, home of the nascent Arab nationalism, would control the Maghreb and the new air route to Indochina.

Anyone can of course choose to skip this entire history of domination and simply say that Arabs, unable to see the real benefits, have always looked the modernising gift horse of the West in the mouth. But, apart from disregarding how much acculturation has gone on for the last century and a half, such a view obscures how beleaguered the Arabs have been: first by having to defend themselves against colonial powers, then by having to liberate themselves from colonial supremacy. You can put a number on the human cost of the Algerian war, just as you can count the thousands of Egyptian peasants who died building the Suez Canal. But how can you calculate the economic and political price of the tension that grips people searching for their place in the sun, when they come up against the obstacle of daily foreign domination? How can you say how much energy has been diverted away from development by the colonizer’s presence? How can you quantify what the social sphere has lost to the cause of political mobilisation? How can you express the sacrifice the Individual has to make in the People’s debilitating struggle?

The Arab world is clearly not the only region that has been forced to fall

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behind in its development because its liberation struggle took priority (how could it not?). But of the entire colonial world, only the Arabs have been exposed throughout the twentieth century – and into the twenty-first – to the stratagems of power that their geography seems permanently to invite.

The end of the colonial era did not signify an end to the imperial threat for them. Only a few Arab states won independence – of a largely nominal sort – and as colonial domination waned, the setting-up of a foreign state that presented itself as the West’s intermediary caught the Arabs off guard.

[05]

sahal: an abbreviation T of Haganah LeYisrael, the Israeli armed forces, or IDF. The Haganah was previously a Jewish paramilitary organisation in the British Mandate of Palestine, and was the main precursor to the Israeli army.

This is the real meaning, and certainly the real effect, of Palestine’s nakba.

It was not simply a catastrophe because the defeat of the Palestinians and five Arab armies at the hands of the Zionist Haganah, or Tsahal as it was renamed,[05] was seen as a humiliation – the Arabs at the time not knowing that the Haganah was larger, and of course better equipped, than all their troops put together; nor because in emptying Palestine of its Arabness and making refugees of its people, the foundation of the state of Israel interrupted the human, political and cultural continuity of the Levant.

It was a catastrophe above all because it signified to the Arabs – at least to those of the Levant – that foreign rule, which seemed to be on its way out after the Second World War, was there to stay and that they were as helpless to confront it as they had been at the end of the First World War. This was made to seem even more damning when the victorious state of Israel in turn refused to compromise on the partition plan which the Arabs belatedly said they were ready to accept after the Conference of Lausanne.

Revolving around this permanent source of crisis, the entire political life of the Middle East was marked by the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states from then on and, in an extremely revealing way, Iraq, one of the potential leaders of the Arab world, ended up being marginalised.

Geographically removed from the conflict, it would not play a major role again in Arab affairs until another threat emerged, much later, on its eastern flank.

Crushing though it was, the nakba did not prevent a reaction in Arab countries. A series of military coups d’état followed: liberal parliamentarianism was shelved, except in Lebanon, and, unable to redress the power imbalance with Israel, the new regimes wasted no time in putting their societies behind bars. One can obviously lament this, and reject the argument that such political authoritarianism is necessary in times of confrontation with foreign hegemony. But if one considers history without the anachronism of hindsight, isn’t it possible to understand that Arab societies as a whole, not just their ruling generals, wanted a moral and military rearmament? This question seems all the more legitimate because the Arab reaction was not purely militarist, as Nasser shows.

That extraordinary chapter saw Egypt put an end to Great Britain’s imperial hegemony for good, become an international political player at the forefront of the Third World and Non-Alignment movement, and make undeniable domestic progress, first of all in education, then in development and social democracy.

In the end, the Nasserite adventure no doubt failed. But here again, how can

one disregard the debilitating effects of the conflict with Israel, and, perhaps even more significant, the role this conflict played in the strategies of the world powers? First, Egypt’s two former colonial rulers, Great Britain and France, band together in 1956 to ask Israel to give them an opportunity for revenge against Nasser. Then the new American superpower sets up 1967’s nasty surprise with a skillful campaign of diplomatic disinformation, and uses the paralysing effects of the Arabs’ defeat to advance its pawns in the Great Game of the Cold War and impose a Pax Americana in Israel and the Middle East – which, it transpires, will be an indefinitely prolonged form of crisis management.

The Arab-Israeli conflict shows that the end of the colonial era did not render obsolete the geopolitical calculations that had determined the history of the Arab world until then. The Mediterranean, along with the Persian Gulf, continued to focus the attention of the world powers on the region – initially in the context of the Cold War, where the Mediterranean played a fundamental role in NATO strategy. The Great Game staple of the Russian push towards warm seas was reinvented in the context of the confrontation between the two blocs, and the obsession with containment thereby transferred to the Middle East, with incongruous effects. The Cold War-influenced policies of the West – America, Britain and France – drove first Nasser’s Egypt, then Syria, and then Iraq to turn to the USSR, a state of affairs that only seemed to reinforce the ‘free world’s’ imperial designs on the Middle East. These had begun to take on a new urgency at the end of the 1970s, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan revived the fear of the Russian push south and, combined with the repercussions of the Iranian revolution, made control of the Arab world’s eastern flank an absolute necessity for the West.

In the meantime the realities of geography had been supplemented by those of geology. The Arab world may have had its place in imperial policy before the discovery of its reserves of hydrocarbons – and even before oil’s economic utility became paramount – but oil entrenched power’s strategies. Prospected but not yet exploited, Mosul’s oil was already at the heart of British and French negotiations at the end of the First World War; by rejecting the first version of the Sykes-Picot agreement, the latter retained their interests in it.

Oil also anticipated the new hegemony of the United States in the Middle East. In the 1930s, the major American oil companies began doling out sinecures to cement their alliance with the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdel Aziz; the relationship was sanctioned by the meeting on Roosevelt’s yacht in the middle of the Second World War. Oil will never cease to cloud people’s minds. Whatever the conditions in which it is produced, it will remain essential to the economies of the industrialised countries. Neither the development of other sources of energy since the historic readjustment of prices in 1973, not the stockpiling of substantial reserves in the West has shown any sign of sidelining the question of the oilfields’ security – quite apart from the fact that the oil-producing countries also contain a wealth of raw materials, and have constituted a massive export market for the West since the 1973 boom.

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Today in Tunisia and Egypt, and perhaps soon in other oppressed countries, reality exceeds the wildest dreams of emancipation.

For decades, anti-democratic practices forbidding freedom of speech and the use of public spaces led to a withdrawn attitude which often steered artistic creations toward the sphere of intimacy – partly to avoid political censorship. This position was also a subtle way to question the modes of identification and subjectivation of the marginalised citizen. Among the best-known works adopting such a stance, one can quote films such as Nouri Bouzid’s L’homme de cendres and Moufida Tlatli’s La saison des hommes, Alaa Al Aswany’s novel L’immeuble Yacoubian or else Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Jaibi’s play Jounoun. More recently, multi-media installations, video works and performances – usually by female artists dealing with womanhood and its social and cultural implications – have deliberately taken an existentialist approach when tackling difference and exclusion.

These fictional apparatuses have, at different levels and more or less subversively, re-appropriated the real in order to highlight the various forms that domination and alienation can take.

Featuring linguistic, visual and sonic media, these works question the fake normality of the politico-cultural system. Alternative music bands, rappers and one-man-show performers, subtly dealing with multifarious forms of repression and alienation, have captured the imagination of young people looking for ways to express themselves. The continuous rejections experienced by the artists as well as their frustration at the ministry’s biased cultural policy have generated a genuine force of resistance and a desire to get rid of this incapacitating system. One must note that the censorship exerted on the media, filmic and literary production has ended up creating a sort of self-censorship that has resulted in fewer and fewer interesting productions.

III

Revolution and Cultural Mutation The role of the web in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the new participatory artistic strategies cropping up throughout the Tunisian territory.

Sonia Kalel and Sana Tamzini ⁄ HORR 1 ⁄ Place Bir Lahjar, 19 February 2011 ⁄ Action – Tunis' Medina ⁄ Photography: Sana Tamzini Courtesy of the artists

Rachida Triki

What happened in Tunisia and in Egypt during the last few months has shown how much new media has been able to actualise the present and to anticipate events – and how much these fictional apparatuses have become catalysts for action.

Tunisian and Egyptian peoples’ fights for freedom and dignity have been called youth revolution and cyber revolution; these revolutions have also arisen through the image and its powers. It is clear that the use of the web has allowed the emergence of new forms of images that are altogether informational, fictional and creative. Combining speed, visibility, movement and content, these systems have generated in real time a communicative and infectious intensity. Facebookers have exploited the

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power of the images they produced or reproduced by bypassing the various forms of censorship and widely circulating photos of upheavals and acts of repression – not just as the mirror of a reality, but as a representation of the reality to come. These snapshots, often captured in dangerous situations with video cameras, cameras or mobile phones, have functioned like rallying cries – and thus have become participatory apparatuses allowing interactivity and shared creation through a system of transmission. Webusers’ imaginative strength has contributed to undoing the icons of power and to submitting them to various misappropriations in order to exorcise the monster. These new approaches are part of a resistance through new forms of individuation from creative and desiring social subjectivities. Interactive and creative actions have revealed how perversely our perceptions are managed.

They place us beyond a univocal conception of art and open up a field of possibilities allowing difference and plurality.

Faten Rouiassi ⁄ Art dans la rue, 27 ⁄ February 2011 Action ⁄ Courtesy of the artist

In free Tunisia today, artists have chosen to manifest their new reality with installations and musical performances, as well as with other actions in public spaces. They respond to the radically new socio-political situation we are currently living in and materialise the ongoing revolution’s space and time. These artists’ strategies allow interactions that call for the civic participation of the spectators/actors and recreate social links in the neighbourhoods’ micro-societies.

One must notice that the strength of these new ‘real-fictions’ lies in the fact that these initiatives do not simply accompany events but also contribute to them. This is true in the visual arts where the pictorial transcends itself in the materiality of the revolutionary object, like for example, in Tunis, in the works of artist Amel Zaïem, which combine painting with bits of burnt wood evoking the shape of a guillotine, representing the future of all dictatorship. But the performances and interventions in public space are no doubt what most spontaneously respond to the current circumstances. Besides the various graffiti and tags sprayed on the facades of official buildings and on the walls of the occupied Kasbah, these actions are what best encapsulate today’s new social situations and new ways of living one’s civic commitment. Sana Tamzini and Sonia Kallel’s happenings in the street have artistically expressed a hymn to freedom, which they associate with values such as the respect of the other. They have worked with young design students, putting together performances with their makeshift barricades that enacted the creation of neighbourhood associations (HORR 1, Place Bir Lahjar, 19 February 2011). Another, equally efficient strategy has generated an interesting local dynamic in the area of Carthage Byrsa in Tunis, on a wasteland that had become a dumping ground for burnt cars during the insurrections.

On 27 February 2011, these angry ruins were pictorially revisited, tagged

and transformed by artist Faten Rouissi and several art and architecture students, as well as by local people. Artistic strategies favouring relational aesthetics to pure contemplation respond to a new field of sensitivities and the way it can be circulated. They are becoming more and more frequent throughout the Tunisian territory and manifest the active presence of social subjectivities – the ones of artist-citizens, fully immersed in a new reality where everything is possible.

Rachida Triki is a philosopher, art historian and curator, currently full Professor of Philosophy at Tunis University, specialising in Aesthetics. She is also Founder and President of the Tunisian Association of Aesthetics and Poetics (ATEP), Vice President of the International Association of Poetics (SIP), member of the Executive Board of the Euro-Mediterranean Association for Art History and Aesthetics (AEPHAE), and delegate on the Executive Board of International Association for Aesthetics (IAA).

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IV

Beyond the Former Middle East Aesthetics, Civil Society, and the Politics of Representation ‘‘There exists a specific sensory experience – the aesthetic – that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community.’ Jacques Rancière [01]

Anthony Downey

I A slap. An act of violence visited upon an individual that proved to have an afterlife that exceeded anything imaginable in the moment it was both delivered and received. On the morning of 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed Tunisian residing in Sidi Bouzid, a small town south of Tunis, was attempting to make ends meet by selling vegetables from a cart when, at 10.30am, he was harassed, slapped in the face by a municipal official, had his wares and scales confiscated and, upon complaining to the local governor’s office, was denied a fair hearing to air his grievances. These are the known facts of the matter according to eye-witnesses but it is what happened next that would give rise to an unprecedented revolution throughout the Middle East: at 11.30am, almost one hour after being harassed and slapped in the face, Mohamed Bouazazi purchased a can of gasoline (or possibly paint thinner), doused himself with it in front of the governor’s office, and set himself alight. These are the brute facts of the matter: a slap translates into an unforgiving act of self-immolation and thereafter into a conflagration that has brought with it both unforeseen freedoms and brutal repression in equal measure.

A slap. How did a relatively innocuous, but nonetheless humiliating, slap escalate into an act of self-immolation and thereafter into a series of regionwide conflicts? Admittedly, I pose this question without offering much hope of answering it; nevertheless, we might get closer to an answer if we enquire into what was contained in that slap in the first place and what forms of personal misery, social abjection and political abasement resided in this act of violence. Within this slap, at its irrevocable core and key to its combustive effect, we find both ignominy and despair; we find the desperation of a man who opts to sell vegetables on a street (which is not in itself an undignified trade if you were allowed to go about it unmolested); we witness the poverty and impoverishment of a whole generation of people cowed by despotism; we can perceive in this slap the totalitarian presence of Tunisia’s one-time president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (along with his avaricious family and treacherous flunkies); and we can observe the thorny issue of gender (a woman slapping a younger man in public as if he were a child).[02] If we were to examine this slap more closely, we could also see the undoubted contempt for the rights of an individual under a despotic order – a contempt that is insidious insofar as it makes everyone an accomplice in the degradation of others; we could likewise detect evidence of the ill-gotten, ill-placed and ultimately illegitimate administration of power. There is, moreover, ample proof of a poverty of spirit and lack of empathy on the aggressor’s behalf (a totalitarian regime diminishes not only the brutalised but, perhaps just as pertinently, the brutalisers too). And there is in this slap, ultimately, the all too obvious manifestation of the years of malaise that had gripped an entire nation of people who had appeared to have resigned themselves to lives halflived. All that, and more, resided in this slap and it was this that culminated in an act of self-immolation that has in turn ignited an entire region.

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Tunisian protesters demonstrating beneath a poster of Mohamed Bouazizi © Salah Habibi/AP

There were two widely seen photographs of Mohamed Bouazizi circulated by the media after his self-immolation – three if we count the less well known one of him engulfed in flames as he stumbled blindly along the road outside the governor’s office. The first photograph showed him – or at least gave an outline of his form – bandaged head-to-toe, post-immolation and lying prostrate in a hospital bed in the Ben Arous-based Burn and Trauma Centre.

He had garnered the full attention of officialdom by then, complete with a seemingly penitent and soon-to-be ousted Ben Ali at his bed-side. Bouazizi is surrounded by doctors and nurses and possibly impervious to their presence – it is difficult to say as we cannot behold his charred face nor his unseeing eyes. The second photograph circulated shows Mohamed Bouazizi in more promising times. He is smiling against a red backdrop, possibly a carpet hung on a wall, and is mid-clap, his two hands just about to join one another in what is often seen as a universal expression of joy – or, indeed, warning. It is possible, of course, that the warning was there all along: a clap would eventually become – under the everyday conditions of totalitarianism and injustice – a slap. And that slap would thereafter realign not only the social and political constellations of the Middle East but the expectations surrounding the region and what constituted its aspirations and hopes for the future. Promise turns to admonition and the perdition of despair only to return to a promise again. Bouazizi’s self-immolation, whilst in itself an act of profound, irremediable disconsolation, has given rise to the promise of change throughout a region; despair has turned to hope, the very hope that he himself had fatally forsaken.

Demonstration in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Tunis asking Moubarek to Dégage ⁄ (cc) Wassim Ben Rhouma

It would of course be desirable to think that a new order – an Arab Spring, if you like – can emerge in the coming years out of the events that are unfolding in the Middle East as I write, but history – the uneven, unpredictable, unforeseeable order of event following event – may have other ideas. To paraphrase Stephen Dedalus’s musings in Ulysses, history may yet still turn out to be the nightmare from which we are trying to awake. It is nevertheless true that perceptions have changed throughout the region and what is doable, sayable and thinkable in this context has been profoundly reconfigured if not irrevocably recalibrated. A promise of something else and the realignment of the socio-political horizons of possibility to which people aspire has been effected, so much so that further repression seems to merely steel the resolve of those calling for change throughout the region. The Arab malaise, so expertly dissected by writers such as Samir Kassir, which has lain so heavily on countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, to name but two, has been lifted and the promise of a future free from tyranny has been uttered.[03] But what is the future of that promise; where does it go from here; where will it be sustained and what other act of violence will be visited upon it? Perhaps those are the real questions: what is the future of the promise we are currently witnessing in the Middle East and North Africa under the conditions of continued repression?

II It may seem inopportune or even insensitive to talk about culture during a time when people are being murdered in the streets by the apparatuses of totalitarian states and demented despots. However, I would suggest that this is precisely the time to talk about culture; in fact, there is perhaps no better time to talk about culture than now. Although writing in a different context, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 to be precise, Raymond W Baker has convincingly argued that the looting of museums and the burning of libraries in Baghdad and elsewhere was not an inevitable after-effect of military incompetence and negligence (which would at least offer a degree of mitigation by dint of sheer idiocy), but the inevitable effect of policies that actively disregarded the imperative of protecting cultural landmarks in favour of base economic motives and short-term strategic advantage.[04] Although a list of 20 key sites in need of immediate protection was drawn up in advance of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the National Museum being first on the list, the only one that received such protection was the Ministry of Oil. This bias towards strategic short-termism left a country denuded of the very artefacts and cultural objects that would be needed to give any nation a coherent – albeit contested – sense of individual belonging and communality; the very sense of communality that generates both forms of historical consciousness and social cohesion. History, in sum, needs culture.

And culture in Iraq, from its looted museums, burned libraries and the wilful, invariably unprosecuted murders of intellectuals and academics, was effectively annihilated.[05] A country deprived of culture exists in an ahistorical vacuum. With no sense of ontology, a degree of insight into where we are coming from and the nature of our being as a result, there can be no teleology; no development towards an end, whatever the latter may consist of in the long term. Without culture, people are at best unmoored from the very co-ordinates of history needed to produce a coherent narrative, be it social or political, in the present and, crucially, the future. It is this knowledge that no doubt drove protestors and soldiers alike to successfully protect the Egyptian Museum in Cairo when it came under attack from looters earlier this year. Similar acts of cultural defence were witnessed throughout Tunis following the popular uprisings in the wake of 17 December 2010. The culture contained within both the National Museum and the Egyptian Museum was indeed shared.

It gave narrative and substance to a sense of belonging and would have, in the case of Iraq, greatly contributed to the rebuilding of a nation state that currently seems ill-prepared and unable to curtail and go beyond the internecine warfare and strife that continues to afflict it. Minus culture, that rebuilding, that sense of national cohesion, that sense that there may indeed be a long term common purpose, is not only all the more difficult to attain but most likely irretrievable.

How then are we to understand contemporary visual culture within the context of civil war and political unrest? To ask such a question is to engage both a plethora of possibilities and to coextensively descend into a veritable rabbit-hole of diminishing interpretive returns. Firstly, if visual culture is

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reducible to commentary on recent events, it risks becoming both reportage and agitprop; its aesthetic momentum and impact ultimately given over to and usurped by rhetoric and inevitably elided by self-righteousness. Why should visual culture respond to the immediacy of events and why should we want it to? I would suggest that such expectations are in danger of missing a fundamental point: visual culture, in all its aesthetic availability and ability to realign ways of seeing and our understanding of the world and our place in it, is always already political.

This is to observe that there has been a disconnect in recent years between aesthetics and politics whereby art was invariably seen as political only if it addressed politics in an overt fashion, whether it be in relation to forms of inequality, the mistreatment of individuals by the state, miscarriages of justice, the various wars and clandestine operations carried out in the name of the people (whoever they may be), and the seemingly never-ending ‘war on terror’. In order for any aesthetic proposition to maintain an urgency and ability to reconfigure ways of thinking and seeing, and thereafter engage if not challenge any politically motivated order of looking and understanding, it must, somewhat paradoxically, avoid being reduced to the category of the political. This onus, inasmuch as it speaks to artists, carries with it an imperative that curators, writers and art institutions in general would do well to observe. If history has imparted anything to us, and the history of art in particular, it is that politically sanctioned or censored art can only ever result in the banalities of agitprop.[06] In what remains of this essay, I want to propose that visual culture contains an inherent aesthetic imperative and promise that cannot be reduced to either political posturing or the seemingly abstract qualities of formal arrangements. The aesthetics of visual culture, to use Jacques Rancière’s phrase, can reframe the ‘distribution of the sensible’ – that which can be seen, said or heard in any given milieu – and thereafter re-contextualise both material and symbolic space; or, simply put, insofar as it determines the way in which we see the world, the aesthetic subsequently plays a significant part in defining our place within it. For Rancière, artistic practices, to the extent that they participate in the socio-political and cultural realm, ‘take part in the partition of the perceptible insofar as they suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular’.[07] If we can agree that perception defines forms of participation in – not to mention the relationships formed within – social orders, then it is less problematic to accept that those modes and means of perception can also define and thereafter predicate who is included and, more critically, who is excluded from participating in political and social orders.[08]

III Culture and its institutions involve forms of social participation. In these moments of engagement, aesthetics can open up a space for plurality and difference – not to mention dissensus and disagreement – to emerge.[09] Aesthetics and visual culture can thereafter invite not only forms of civic participation but equally anticipate the very space needed for such forms of engagement to be effected. The aesthetic order in which culture exists is essential, I want to suggest here, to understanding notions such as engagement and the role of civic society in promoting equality and justice. This is one of the key lessons of Rancière: politics and aesthetics are indelibly imbricated; they are both engaged in defining if not contesting the realm of the sensible (that which can be seen, said and heard) and they are both about either policing or indeed provoking what and, crucially, who can be seen, said and heard.[10] Thereafter, politics and aesthetics can determine who is included and who is excluded in any given ‘distribution of the sensible’; who is the subject of equality and who is abandoned to the realm of non-representation.

There is perhaps a need here to be overt when discussing the show accompanying this catalogue: none of the works in The Future of a Promise, to be clear, can change the social conditions or political correlates of the Middle East. On their own, however, they can offer individual commentary and a prism through which to re-articulate the realities of a complex and increasingly divergent region and encourage the participation of people in the civic order of discussion and dialogue. Culture, in the form of shows such as The Future of a Promise, encourages the production and exchange of knowledge, some of which will inevitably challenge the partitioning and distribution of meaning (and social relations) in societies through the region – that much is a given.[11] This is to further observe the extent to which art as a practice asks key questions about modes and means of representation, history, orders of knowledge and their retrieval, the impact of conflict on culture, the role audiences play in the production of meaning, the development of civic society and the uses of public space, and the institutional contexts within which such questions can be addressed. Which in turn begs the question as to what part, and to what degree, culture will play in the formation of civic society – not to mention the sphere of the political – in countries where dissent can result in imprisonment or worse.

The politics of visual culture in the Middle East, albeit to different degrees depending upon each country, has always been involved in a politics of representation and thereafter treated with a general level of suspicion if not downright hostility.[12] Which returns us to the question of how culture – the aesthetics of contemporary art practice – operates within and as part of the socio-political and historical moment of its production, dissemination and reception, nowhere more so than when inequality would appear to be the predicate as opposed to the exception to the rule of law and order. Before this question can be fully answered, it is important to note that aesthetics, visual culture in particular, does not promote equality – to suggest it does is to merely instrumentalise culture; rather, the aesthetics of visual culture

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IV There is an elusive image in The Future of a Promise, a painting of wire fencing by Driss Ouadahi that is both imminently abstract and yet abstractly imminent; by which I mean, a reading of this image could focus on its painterly abstraction – recalling, for example, the grid-like monochromes of Frank Stella or Ad Reinhardt – or the literal imminence of wire fencing and its primary function: to keep people out of an area or contained within a certain boundary. We could, of course, go for both readings: this painting, steeped as it is in the history of painting – from miminalism to the

A bridge, fashioned as a flying carpet, traverses a room, hanging slightly above the viewer. In its three-dimensionality, it holds out a significant degree of aspiration and perhaps transcendence. Where does Nadia KaabiLinke’s Flying Carpets (2011) emerge from and where is it going? Is there an invitation to take on a journey in this work, a transaction inherent in the promise of the aesthetic to effect a community – no matter how elusive – of viewers or participants? A bridge is, after all, a point of conjunction and transformation, a leaving behind of one state or location in acceptance and anticipation of another. However, Kaabi-Linke’s bridge is also a reference to Il Ponte del Sepolcro in Venice where traders, legal and illegal, precariously Il Ponte del Sepolcro, Venice ⁄ © Jeanette Lowe

Frank Stella ⁄ Jill from the series Black Series II ⁄ 1967 Image © Albright-Knox Art ⁄ Gallery/CORBIS © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2011

The key question here is therefore concerned with a singular enquiry: what role will culture play in the Middle East – alongside the social and political realignment of Arab societies – in the development of civic society and the institutions of democracy, whatever the latter may mean in the context of predominantly Muslim countries.[14] Commonly used to refer to the social and voluntary institutions that underwrite communities and social orders, as opposed to government interventions or commercially-driven initiatives, the formation of civic society in the Middle East is a key if not the key issue being addressed on the streets and in the squares of cities across the region. Instances of organisations that promote and uphold civil society include academia, activist groups, community foundations and organisations, cultural and environmental groups, and voluntary associations working with so-called disadvantaged communities – the very groups that are conspicuous in their absence across large swathes of the Middle East. Visual culture, in its bringing together of individuals in the form of a given, albeit elusive, community, is very much part of the development of civil society; it is likewise a combative and on occasion antagonistic force. It would be worth reiterating the number of artists exiled, shows shut down, and artworks censored in recent years in the Middle East – not to mention the relative neglect of cultural institutions across the region and the arbitrary religious edicts issued on the subject of representation – but it would be a litany that perhaps misses the point: culture, in its expression of a specific milieu and ways of thinking, seeing and doing, effectively realigns the order of politics and the horizon of social and political potential if not promise. Despots and self-styled rulers are therefore right to fear expressions of culture as they do those other bugbears of totalitarianism: education and research, both of which we find as cornerstones to any progressive cultural institution.

geometric abstraction of traditional Islamic painting – is also about the architecture of control and restriction. In bringing to bear the history of painting on the subject of confinement and perhaps internment, if not imprisonment, Fences, Hole 2 (2011), questions any easy reading of the image or appropriation of it. In the context of the various conflicts in the Middle East, the topic of internment would have an undoubted resonance and Ouadahi’s work is, in this context, a painting that engages a global art tradition, conjoining both Western and Islamic modes of expression, that in turn brings the aesthetic – a distribution of the sensible – to bear upon the issues of land and statehood. If, however, we reduce this image to just that reading (internment, imprisonment and confinement), we risk ignoring its obvious aesthetic engagement with broader cultural forms and the history of art. For some, the fact that this painting can bring together Western styles of minimalism and Islamic geometric abstraction could be seen as political in and of itself insofar as it disavows any binaristic reading of cultural production within and beyond the region. Painting, the history of art, confinement, restriction, all come together here in a debate about the politics of aesthetics.

Driss Ouadahi ⁄ Fences, Hole 2 ⁄ 2011 Photography: Amir Ouadahi Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery, New York

promotes ways of thinking and seeing that realigns the distribution of the sensible order and thereafter an individual’s relationship to a socio-political order – and that can, indeed, lead to equality or a redistribution of roles and modes of participation within that order.

Again, perhaps this is why culture, the agency and potential of the aesthetic, is only tolerated in parts of the Middle East – including the UAE and the very countries undergoing conflagration as I write – in a self-contained and heavily-censored version or, indeed, when it is safely repackaged in various outposts of Western institutions for the purpose of giving the privileged few a frisson of engagement but not the material substance of adequate political representation.[13]

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Mounir Fatmi ⁄ The Lost Springs ⁄ 2011 ⁄ Courtesy of the artist and ⁄ Galerie Hussenot, Paris

it is open to adaptation and accrual in time – goes some way to challenging preconceptions about a static Middle East mired in the malaise and neglect of the past.[15] Ayman Baalbaki’s painting of keffiyeh-clad youth also goes some way to engaging precisely the sense that certain symbols, in their abstract and aesthetic impact, cannot but challenge orders of seeing and thinking. The keffiyeh is a traditional cotton scarf worn by many who journey to or live in the Middle East. Its practicality has been long attested to as a protector from sun and sand when travelling in the desert and arid regions. It has been worn by Yemenite Jews and other Semitic people since biblical times; it has become the national symbol of Palestine (carefully nurtured by Yasser Arafat); it was adopted by Lawrence of Arabia and Erwin Rommel; it has been associated with Leila Khaled (during her time with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine); and donned by protesting youths from Paris to Tahrir Square and, more recently, adapted by American and Coalition forces stationed in the region. However, and from within our contemporary consensus in respect of the Middle East, it has been deemed an item promoting support for terrorism.[16] Baalbaki’s painting undoubtedly plays upon all of these meanings conterminously and again address how aesthetics and politics – brought together here in an item of clothing – are indelibly imbricated. trade their wares with the tourists who flock to the city every year. The socalled real world and the world of the aesthetic conjoin here in an object that is a metaphor for change.

Flags return in Mounir Fatmi’s The Lost Springs (2011), which displays 22 unfurled flags with two of them – Tunisia and Egypt – supported not by flagpoles, as we might expect, but brooms. Fatmi’s overt comment on the sweeping out of the old, with the use of an actual broom, gives way to the possibility of more brooms being added to the piece over time. This work, far from looking to the past, attempts to anticipate the future and – given that

Ziad Abillama ⁄ Untitled (Arabes), installation Art Dubai 2011 Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery, Beirut

Kaabi-Linke’s Flying Carpets also maintains and develops a minimalist tradition that speaks to the concept of trans-location, another concept that has particular purchase in the context of the Middle East and its diasporic hinterlands. We find a similar aesthetic at work in Ayman Yossri Daydban’s 1967/1948 Flag (2010), which consists of a metal sheet – which appears to have undergone an amateur bout of panel-beating – folded into a make-shift Palestinian flag. The flag looks disheveled and crumpled, if not forlorn – a metaphor, perhaps, for the seemingly permanent and forsaken state-of-exception that is Palestine today. And yet, this work, like all artistic production, is also involved in the continuum of art history, the legacy of minimalism and conceptualism in particular, that brings a discussion of aesthetics to bear on the politics and inequities of statehood, the praxis of minimalism, and the science of vexillology. The politics of statehood and the lack thereof are also the subject of Emily Jacir’s embrace (2005), which reveals an object – a conveyor belt for luggage – familiar to anyone with access to an airport, and yet coextensively renders it uncanny in its circular form. It is this circularity and inevitable return that reveals a bitter aside upon the purgatorial state of existence – minus, that is to note, the right of return – for many exiled Palestinians.

Baalbaki’s Al Maw3oud (2011), also plays to and exposes the durability of racist tropes that continue to define views of the Middle East and we daily witness, in reactions to the keffiyeh for example, the openly racist and derogatory images – the callous Arab, for example, or the militant driven by so-called radical Islamic ideals – that continue to predetermine representations of the region. Such tropes have a pedigree of sorts and can be found in Orientalist paintings from at least the eighteenth century onwards.

Based on an 1821 play by Lord Byron, Eugène Delacroix’s apparently instructive Death of Sardanapalus (1827-28) depicts the disdainful figure of Sardanapalus who, upon being told that his palace is about to be overrun, gave orders for his concubines to be slain rather than for them to fall into the hands of the enemy. This cruel and despotic act, and the events surrounding it, are apocryphal and it comes as no surprise that Sardanapalus did not exist but was an invented figure that strategically transcends drama and history.

In his notes to the works of Lord Byron, the literary scholar and poet Ernest Hartley Coleridge, grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote the following of Sardanapalus’s pedigree: ‘It is hardly necessary to remind the modern reader that the Sardanapalus of history is an unverified if not an unverifiable personage… The character which Ctesias [a Greek writer who popularised the theme] depicted or invented, an effeminate debauchee, sunk in luxury and sloth, who at the last was driven to take up arms, and, after a prolonged but ineffectual resistance, avoided capture by suicide, cannot be identified.’[17] The absence of a verifiable antecedent here does not appear to have stopped the licentious, cruel and vengeful Arab becoming the default image of Arabness from Delacroix’s time up to and including Western media images and Hollywood-inspired imagery.[18] The visual constellation of these fears

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Constantin Brancusi ⁄ Bird in Space ⁄ 1924 Image © The Gallery Collection ⁄ Corbis © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011

can be found in Ziad Abillama’s work Untitled (Arabes) (2011), a signpost in which it appears that all roads seem to lead to Arabs, a neo-conservative nightmare writ large on the ‘road map’ of the Middle East and beyond.

I mention Brancusi’s work here for two reasons: one, it challenged a particular ‘distribution of the sensible’ and, secondly, his later masterpiece, Endless Column (1938), has become an iconic touchstone for many contemporary artists, not least Kader Attia who pays homage to it in La Colonne Sans Fin (2008), a seemingly never-ending column of megaphones reaching to the ceiling.[19] The formalism of Brancusi’s abstracted column, which was made as a memorial to the Romanian soldiers killed in the First World War, is here adapted to a more contemporary form of protest and memorialisation. The visible here is made of the audible – or at least that which aids noise and sound – and the megaphone becomes a symbol of communication (for protestors) and coextensive repression (as used by the police). La Colonne Sans Fin is, in sum, responsive to the history of art as a practice and, coextensively, demonstrative forms of political engagement and control within and beyond the Middle East and North Africa.

On the face of it, Raafat Ishak’s Responses to an immigration request from one hundred and ninety four governments (2006-09), and Jananne Al-Ani’s Shadow Sites II (2011), would not appear to have much in common. However, both are engaged with detailing the politics of land ownership and the restrictions upon mobility that are placed on individuals. Ishak’s series of works stem from his collation of various responses from immigration offices the world over to requests for visas for Arabs to travel to those respective countries. These responses were subsequently trans-literated into Arabic and displayed as ciphers of sorts inasmuch as the literalised responses, when rendered into Arabic script, make very little sense to Arab speakers. For Ishak, the responses to immigration requests are also a form of seriality that

Whilst the recipients of such letters are left in a limbo-land of sorts awaiting some form of transition, in Jananne Al-Ani’s Shadow Sites II, a film made as part of a body of work called The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People, this form of existence in limbo reaches a far more fatal conclusion. The desert in this film becomes a place of forensic examination Yto Barrada ⁄ The Magician, film still ⁄ 2003 ⁄ Courtesy of the artist and Studio Yto

Constantin Brancusi ⁄ The Endless Column, in Targu Jiu, Romania, 2008 Image © Malcolm Lightner/Corbis © ADAGP, Paris and Dacs, London 2011

In 1926, there was an intriguing and well-documented court-case in the United States that was prompted by the photographer Edward Steichen’s attempt to import one of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space sculptures, the latter being elongated abstractions of movement as much as they were three-dimensional representations of birds. At that time, there was no tax paid on art objects; however, the customs official did not view Brancusi’s abstracted bird figure as art and instead duly declared it an industrial item and thereafter placed a tax on it. In the subsequent trial, ‘Brancusi v. United States’ (New York, October 1927), a successful appeal was made against the US customs decision but not before two witnesses for the US government were called, one being the sculptor Robert Aitken. Arguing that he saw no beauty in the object nor did it resemble a bird to him, Aitken agreed with the defence that the object – having aroused no aesthetic feeling in him – could not be considered art. We have here, writ large in the annals of history, a conflict between an old aesthetic order wedded to naturalism and verisimilitude and, conversely, a modernist appeal to abstraction and a more subjective view of the world. The aesthetic here redistributes a sensible order – developing in turn a schism in the accepted ways of looking, seeing and thinking – and appeals to a new community of viewers and interlocutors.

recalls, in part, the uncompromising abstractions of Malevich who was a key reference in Ishak’s earlier work. Again, the history of art is brought to bear upon the less abstract and all too immediate reality of political if not cultural exclusion.

– right down to the remotest detail and landmark – into notions such as ownership, inclusion and exclusion, atrocity and genocide, and the aesthetics of landscape. Through this work, the artist examines, to paraphrase the statement accompanying this piece, what happens to the evidence of atrocity and genocide and how it thereafter affects our understanding of the landscapes into which the bodies of victims disappear. The desert, a contested space that was often depicted in Orientalist painting of the late nineteenth century as an empty place – and therefore ripe for exploration and annexation – is here scoured for the very evidence of existence, even if it is in the form of remains, that contradicts any convenient notion of the desert as deserted or indeed neutral.

A magician on an impromptu stage stands in front of a makeshift curtain and singularly fails to execute, amongst others, a trick involving a reluctant chicken and its refusal to be hypnotised. This should be funny – and Yto Barrada’s The Magician (2003) is indeed very funny. The recalcitrant chicken thwarts an elderly magician’s ability to complete a trick that he has probably failed to complete many times in the past. The camera’s presence has also no doubt produced a degree of hubris in this thwarted

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magician. There is a Beckettian quality to this film: a failure to transcend the physical reality of day-to-day slights and the humiliations brought upon one by age that becomes an end in itself, a form of heroic (if purgatorial) failure that resignedly commits, with each passing failure, to fail better.

And yet there is an infectious promise in this short film, a sense that our willingness to suspend disbelief, the only pre-requisite of a magic trick, can be entertained again and again, despite the outcome. Perhaps this is the promise of visual culture: the transaction we enter into with the object or film or performance that promises nothing and yet holds out the promise of transcendence – or, more mundanely, an occasion for rethinking our world and its precariousness.

We may need to pause here and ask what the works in The Future of a Promise ultimately show us. They show us a region that is carefully policed and geographically contained and yet porous and fluid. In their demographic, they show us an art practice that is international and the product of sites of artistic production that stretch from Baghdad to Berlin, Cairo to Chicago, Tunis to Toronto, Alexandria to Allepo, Sharjah to Sydney. They show us a region not only with multiple artisitic movements, but one without a coherent political standpoint or indeed a singular degree of religious affiliation. They show us a region in crisis over the very notion of culture and representation. They show us an artistic community realigned along the lines of an eminent diaspora, indigenuous movements, and the development of an Arabic modernism, not to mention the influence of international art practices. They show us artisitic practices recontextualised by globalisation and the sinuous channels of capital. They figure alongside the role of social networking in the region – evident in Ahmed Mater’s Antenna (white) (2010), for example – and ways in which social networking groups have recently re-territorilialised the routes and means of communication. They reflect upon and anticipate the very social and public space needed to effect forms of civic engagement. None of which, I should add, necessarily makes these works political as such; rather, it makes them something far more radical: they are involved in a redistribution of the ‘sensible’ order and in that moment can redefine visual, social and individual forms of participation within and engagement with those orders. What these works shows us most clearly is a promise to engage the aesthetic as a potentially decisive tool in the realignment of how social orders understand the role and importance of culture in the development of civic society, public debate, social change, political equality and open discussion. They pursue a horizon of thought that opens up the potential of the aesthetic to anticipate the very parameters of civic society, its needs and its demands. For every artwork censored in the Middle East, for every show pulled, for every director summarily dismissed, the cost is immeasurably high: namely, the forfeiture of a civic and just society bolstered by freedom of expression and cultural debate – and no amount of billion-dollar window dressing and ill-defined, moral throatclearing will compensate for that.

While not wanting to be too prescriptive, I would propose, by way of a conclusion, that the works on show here and in this catalogue hold out the promise of emancipation from the ill-conceived diktats of politics and

the often ill-informed edicts of religion. In their potential to realign the distribution of signs, symbols and ways of looking and thinking (not to mention ways of being within a community), the practices represented in The Future of a Promise are always already political and capable of redefining roles and modes of engagement within a given socio-political order. And perhaps that is most evident when we ask the following: are visual artists such as those in The Future of A Promise showing us the beginning of the end of the term ‘Middle East’ as a shorthand to understanding a complex and diverse collection of countries. Are we looking at the emergence – through the prism of visual culture – of a ‘former’ Middle East as we did in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s. And if we are experiencing the development of the former Middle East, how does that reflect upon our understanding of the so-called (former) West? What lies beyond the former Middle East if that is indeed what we are seeing currently emerging on the streets and in public spaces in the region. Are we looking at a new geographical, social, political, economic, religious and historical frame of reference under construction within the Middle East that necessitates the jettisoning of the very term. Can the aesthetic in this instance effect that most utopic and yet elusive of goals: the overthrow of one way of thinking for another. Only time will tell, but what remains beyond doubt is that nothing will ever be the same again in the Middle East, not least the very notion of the Middle East as a term of reference for those within and, crucially, beyond this amorphous, complex and far-from defined (if indeed defineable) region. This is not, finally, about the promise of the future and the hubris of achievement as such; rather, this is about the precarious future of a promise that is made again and again in the aesthetic moment of artistic production and the networks of communication, debate and exchange that emanate from these activities.

Author’s Notes Anthony Downey sits on the Editorial Board of Third Text and is the Programme Director of the Masters in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. He is also the Editor of www.ibraaz.org, a web-based research forum that takes the MENA region as its point of focus and research. He has recently written essays for Representing Islam: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Press: Newcastle, forthcoming 2011); Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art (Thames and Hudson: London, 2009); Iran Inside Out (Chelsea Art Museum: New York, 2009); Art and Patronage in the Near and Middle East (Thames and Hudson: London, 2010); Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art (Cambridge Scholars Press: Newcastle, 2010); Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artist’s Writings (revised ed., University of California Press: California, forthcoming 2011); Cultural Theory, ed. by David Oswell (Sage Publications: London, 2010); and Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (John Wiley and Sons: Oxford, 2012). He is currently researching a book on politics, ethics and aesthetics.

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[01]

ancière, Jacques “The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy R and Heteronomy”, in New Left Review (March/April 2002), pp.133-151 (p.133).

[02]

he arresting officer in question was one Fedya Hamdy who has reportedly since fled T Sidi Bouzid.

[03]

amir Kassir’s Being Arab was first published in Paris in 2004, one year before his S assassination in Beirut. To date, despite a tribunal having been set up to investigate the death of Samir Kassir, no one has been ever brought to trial.

[04]

aker, Raymond W, Shereem T Ismael and Tareq Y Ismael, eds., Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why B Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, Pluto Press: London (2010).

[05]

he targeted assassination of over 400 intellectuals, lawyers, artists and academics in T Iraq following on from the coalition invasion of the country in 2003 remains one of the most shocking and sobering events in what has become an unmitigated disaster for the people of Iraq. Their deaths have not gone unnoticed, although nearly all remain un-prosecuted. Writing in Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, Dirk Adriaensens has detailed how the first wave of assassinations of academics coincided with the invasion in 2003. He also notes an SOS email sent by Iraqi scientists complaining that ‘American occupation forces were threatening their lives’. See Dirk Adriaensens, “Killing the Intellectual Class: Academics as Targets” in Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, pp.119-148 (p.119). On the final pages of this volume the editors compiled an 18-page, small type list of the academics murdered in Iraq since 2003, which was in turn compiled from the BRussells Tribunal list which can be read at http://www.brussellstribunal.org/academicsList.htm. To read this document in full is to come away with a profound sense that whatever else is wrong with Iraq today, this list is testament to a gross and calculated failure to protect the Iraqi population in the present and, most damningly, provide for their futures in the form of education and culture. Generations, simply put, will be left bereft of the very things needed to build a nation.

he scenario is, of course, more complex than I am allowing here. A fuller account of these T debates would need to engage with, for one, Theodor Adorno’s writings on both aesthetics and politics. Whilst not wanting to simplify Adorno’s complex arguments on the nature of commitment and engagement (in the context of both aesthetics and politics), his scepticism towards politically committed art is instructive, critiquing as it does its tendency towards becoming agitprop. To paraphrase Adorno, such art tended to preach to the converted rather than transform social and political consciousness. The danger of politically committed and politically sanctioned art, in this context, was that it resulted in being neither interesting art nor, indeed, effective politics. None of which, however, should detract from Adorno’s belief that the aesthetic could critique social and political orders and thereafter offer a different way of imagining and engaging with the world. ‘Committed art in the proper sense,’ Adorno argued, ‘is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions … but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes.’ See Theodor Adorno, “Commitment” in Aesthetics and Politics, Verso: London (2007; first published 1977), pp.177-195 (p.180) and Aesthetic Theory, Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main (1970), passim.

[10]

I t is crucial to note here that Rancière’s use of the term police or police order (la police or l’ordre policier) is not to be confused with the notion of the police force (la basse police) as a unit of the state. Rather, the term ‘police’ is used to define not repression as such but a ‘distribution of the sensible’ that distributes a population along lines of both inclusion and exclusion. These forms of partitioning and allocation of ‘bodies’ are based upon an individual’s predicated relationship to the ‘distribution of the sensible’, which is effectively a ‘system of co-ordinates defining modes of being, doing, making, and communicating that establishes the border between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable’. This is the order of consensus that Rancière interrogates throughout his work on both politics and aesthetics. In its abolition of dissensus and disagreement, consensus is the presupposition that the entire population, the multitude, the community, or the many, call it what you will, can be taken into account and incorporated into a political order that is policed through a distribution of the sensible or a ‘symbolic structuration’. This, again, is the logic of democracy as much as it is the logic of totalitarianism: everyone must have their place and be consigned (if not resigned) to their place. Consensus not only polices the political order but determines each individual’s role in relation to the social and political order. ‘Politics,’ Rancière argues, ‘exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part. It begins when the equality of anyone and everyone is inscribed in the liberty of the people.’ See Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. by Julie Rose, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis (1999; first published 1995), p.123, and Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum: London (2004), p.89, passim.

[11]

I have addressed this question at length elsewhere; see Anthony Downey, “The Production of Cultural Knowledge in the Middle East Today”, in Art and Patronage in the Near and Middle East, Thames and Hudson: London (2010), pp.10-15.

[12]

here is a separate essay to be written on the role of censorship and self-censorship in the T Middle East in relation to visual culture. At the time of writing, for example, the one-time Director of the Sharjah Biennial, Jack Persekian, who was also a Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, had been summarily dismissed because of the apparent offence caused by the inclusion of Mustapha Benfodil’s Maportaliche/It Has No Importance (2011), the latter having since been removed from the 10th Sharjah Biennial.

[13]

I would not want to give the impression here that culture is not regularly instrumentalised by neo-liberal, Western governments, nor the sense that it is not subject to censorship and the withdrawal of public monies and support. In the United Kingdom, for example, and with a very different emphasis but similar political inflection, artistic practices that support ideals such as inclusivity, consensus, voluntarism, multiculturalism and social cohesion – all of which underpin the moral communalism that is key to the ideology of neo-liberalism – have long been supported by the funding policies of Labour and Conservative governments alike. It would seem, moreover, that in light of recent cuts to the arts institutions in the United Kingdom we could be seeing the emergence of art forms geared specifically towards such funding.

[14]

he subject of so-called democracy in the Middle East is an interesting one inasmuch as it T brings about that bogeyman of Western neo-conservatism and liberalism alike: an Islamic democracy, the latter being seen as a contradiction rather than a reality for many. The subject deserves an essay in its own right – what, for one, do we mean by democracy and why exactly is it offered as a panacea for the Arab world when it patently fails to address inequalities and political forms of (non)representation in the so-called West? It is perhaps indicative that two essays could appear within four days of one another in London arguing, in the case of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, that the Arab world represented the future path that a more enlightened, egalitarian, form of democracy could take and, more conservatively, Niall Ferguson conversely arguing that democracy could not ‘catch on’ in the Arab world as it had no precedent there. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers”, The Guardian (24 February 2011) and Niall Ferguson “Why democracy will not catch on in the Arab world, The Evening Standard (28 February 2011).

[15]

new broom may indeed sweep away the old guard and it is all the more significant that this A work was censored when recently shown at Art Dubai in 2011.

[16]

I n 2007, an American clothing store, Urban Outfitters, stopped selling keffiyehs after complaints from pro-Israeli activists, and thereafter issued a statement to the effect that the company had not intended ‘to imply any sympathy for or support of terrorists or terrorism’ in the act of selling keffiyehs. See Michal Lando, “US chain pulls ‘anti-war’ keffiyehs”, in

[06]

[07]

ee Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Aesthetics”, at www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/ S archives/001877print.html [Accessed: 22 April, 2012]

[08]

See Jacques Rancière’s, Aesthetics and its Discontents, Polity: Cambridge (2009), p.115 passim.

[09]

or Rancière, politics proper cannot emerge from our current ‘distribution of the sensible’ – in F particular, neo-liberalism – insofar as the latter is based on consensus rather than dissensus or disagreement. It is in the moment of disagreement that the political subject proper emerges, not in the moment of consensus. It is precisely on the basis of disagreeing, for example, about the war in Iraq, and having debates that we enter into the realm of politics proper – which means, somewhat paradoxically, that we need to disagree if we want to agree with Rancière’s thesis. The policing of our political realm and the consensus around our current ‘distribution of the sensible’, nevertheless, continues to disavow and effectively depoliticize (and in some cases criminalise) the very realm of the political to the extent that protest and disagreement are rendered illegitimate responses. Who gets to say what, where and when is effectively proscribed by a consensus around the ‘distribution of the sensible’. For a further discussion on the role of dissensus and disagreement in politics, and his understanding of those terms, see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. by Julie Rose, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis (1999), pp.21-42.

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The Jerusalem Post (19 January 2007). Downloaded from http://fr.jpost.com [Date accessed, 16 April 2011] [17]

ee Ernest Hartley Coleridge, The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, Volume V, John Murray: S London (1902), p.4.

[18]

Planet of the Arabs ⁄ 2005 Directed by Jacqueline Reem Salloum

[19]

I am reminded here of Jacqueline Salloum’s Planet of the Arabs (2005), in which we see snippets from a collection of Hollywood-inspired images representing the mendacious, cruel and violent Arab. This stock character ranges from the self-styled ululating terrorist overlord seeking retribution on an infidel Western culture to the buffoonish figure of the bumbling, oleaginous Arab. Taking her inspiration from Jack Shaheen’s 2001 book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, Salloum observed that from over 1,000 depictions of Arabs viewed in filmic form only a dozen were positive and 50 were what could be considered even-handed. Films with the most anti-Arab content, according to Shaheen’s account, include The Delta Force (1986), True Lies (1994) and Rules of Engagement (2000), all of which appear in Salloum’s film and all of which enjoyed extensive distribution to cinemas world-wide.

Endless Column has been a point of reference for many artists, perhaps most notably Carl Andre who, rather than cutting into the work, arrived at the notion of the work itself being the cut into space.

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V

An Open Letter

In 2008, whilst attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, I participated in one of the side dinner-discussions dealing with art and the markets for it. The specific theme was the Art of Investing in Art, and a question regarding the value of collecting contemporary Arab art was posed. The moderator, who will remain nameless, subsequently volunteered the response that Arab art is an ‘ethnic’ form of artistic expression and that it was therefore mostly, if not exclusively, of interest to Arabs only.

I could not help jumping in at this point and explained that I did not share this view, which tended to ostracise Arab art, and I further suggested that Arab contemporary art is of a universal nature – firmly part of a global art history and contemporary artistic practices – and that many Arab artists, for want of a better phrase to describe very divergent practices and people, were not only at the centre of what was once called modernism but continued to share and develop contemporary forms of artistic expression. I still believe this and today I am even more convinced that it is the case.

In our crisis of humanism and the ever-present conflicts that blight our world – which are in turn propelled and no doubt exacerbated by uneven forms of globalisation and the one-sided deployment of information technologies – the unrelenting drive for economic growth and competitiveness is weakening the very fabric of humanity and a shared sense of community. To the moderator, I added that I had always hoped that art and culture would provide the very points of reference that could help us fend off the rhetoric behind the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’. In turn, culture could also help mitigate the deterioration of meaningful dialogue about shared aesthetic and cultural values. In its communal ethos, I would further suggest that culture is still the appropriate forum for dialogue and cultural exchange between people and communities – in spite of the conflicting economic and political pursuits – and needs to not only be seen as such but promoted by all means, be they public or private.

This may seem idealistic to some – and perhaps it is indeed idealistic.

However, The Future of a Promise, the first pan-Arab contemporary art exhibition to take place in Venice to date, is a timely illustration of the type of exchange and dialogue that needs to be promoted and fostered in our less than promising times. Whilst this show is billed as an Arab show, which is as much a demand of the Venice Biennale and its nationallyinclined pavilions, it details an important and often understated element in contemporary Arab visual culture: it is a global, diasporic site of artistic production that implicates cities from Beirut to Berlin, Cairo to California, Tunis to Toronto and Riyadh to Rio de Janeiro. Far from being of interest to Arabs per se, it has, moreover, an international following and The Future of a Promise is testament to that.

Kamel Lazaar

The choice of Venice for this show should not be overlooked either. Since the birth of the Republic of Venice – ‘La Sérénissime’ – in the Middle Ages, the city has gradually become a thriving economic power, no doubt in

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part because it managed to become the centre of gravity for trade between the East and the West and thereafter opened up the Byzantine and Islamic worlds alike. Successful trade activities were accompanied by extraordinary artistic and cultural exchanges. They developed as a continuation of the very exchanges that were started in the eleventh century – at the time of the ill-fortuned Crusades – in the areas of glass, ceramics, carpets and textiles.

Glass blowing, for example, was originally imported from Palestine and the first Arab book published with Arabic script outside of the Middle East was produced in Venice. It is all the more pertinent that Venetian artists were exposed to Egyptian, Berber and African influence – in the form of techniques and the savoir faire of Islamic art, for example – and traders in turn returned to the Middle East with examples of European art.

It is all the more appropriate that The Future of a Promise, which if it is anything is the offering of a bridge between various people and various art practices, should be held in Venice – a city that has been a bridge for trade and culture between the East and West for a millennia. It is equally fitting that one of the key works in this show should be a bridge; namely, Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Flying Carpets (2011). Where does this carpet in the shape of a bridge emerge from and where is it going? Is there an invitation to take on a journey of sorts in this work, and a further journey in the context of the show itself. I hope I am not giving too much away when I note that the bridge is also a reference to Il Ponte del Sepolcro in Venice where, appropriately, hawkers trade, as they have done for generations, offering their wares to the passing tourists who flock to this city every year. East meets West in this work – a literal and metaphoric bridge – and in the form of a flying carpet; the latter a mainstay of One Thousand and One Nights, a book beloved by schoolchildren the world over.

No letter, open or otherwise, on the Arab world today could fail to mention the recent upheavals in the region and the ongoing unrest and brutal repression of civilian protestors. There is no doubt in my mind that the Arab world, its youth in particular, is yearning to regain its dignity and freedom after many decades if not centuries of oppression, invasion and dictatorship.

Far from being insular, an insidious view that does not stand up to both reality and experience, this Arab Spring will nurture a further level of artistic creativity in all forms of artistic expression. Inspired by universal values and ideals, rather than the limited, local horizons of politics and economics, culture will undoubtedly effect further dialogue between the Arab world and the so-called West. Without it, pursuit of a better future can be only for the few and built upon a series of inequalities. Embedded in The Future of a Promise, in albeit a modest way, is yet another small step in that direction. Inshallah.

Kamel Lazaar is President of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, which is based in Tunis.

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VI

Interview with Mohamed Talbi 10th April 2011

[01]

Ibraaz

What is your mission as a historian and Muslim scholar?

Mohamed Talbi

I am a historian and I therefore do not wish to make any statement in the name of Islam because I do not hold the mandate to do so. In fact, no one is in a position to claim infallibility to tell or hold the Truth.

I shall, however, say that I am leading a fight against the rigid and conservative interpretation of the Quranic text.

The prevailing conservative interpretation of the Quran is not the only one available to us. According to Abu Hanifa, in 150 Hegira, God does not only speak to the dead but also to the Living.[01] If his words are alive, as mentioned in the Hadith, then we are compelled to ‘[r]ead the Quran as if it has been revealed to you’. This would imply that I have to listen to it with today’s spirit, in my very present situation, and interpret it as such.

he hegira refers to the T Muslim era reckoned from Muhammad’s departure from Mecca in 622 AD.

This is very much part of the dynamic interpretation of the Quran that I want to advocate. I prefer it over a conservative and static reading that tends to prescribe and over-determine the orality or ‘speech’ of the text. I want to give that speech back to God, against those who have monopolised it and pretend to be the only infallible speakers. If I were in front of God, I would tell him: ‘This is how I understood your words. I did my best to understand you. It is now up to you to judge the sincerity of my approach.’

[02]

[03]

Ibraaz

n Ijtihad is the making A of a decision in Islamic law (sharia) by one’s own personal effort (jihad) and above and beyond any madhhab of jurisprudence (fiqh). An Ijtihad stands in opposition to a taqlid, a form of copying or obeying without questioning. he Ummah is the whole T community of Muslims bound together by ties of religion. It is effectively a spiritual community that unites Muslims in their attachment to Islam.

The injunction here is to read the Quran with your eyes.

There are several possible interpretations of the Quran yet only one text. This leads us to evoke the right to be different. All sects and modern movements are the result of various interpretations of the Quran. Some justify violence and legitimise it by rejecting pluralism and the right to be different. And these are precisely the ones I condemn. Hence, it is essential to reach with pen and ink, rather than blood, a cultural space that banishes violence and intellectual terrorism. A space which allows an evolution of the Quran, or at least an interpretation that is compatible with the evolution of the society or an Ijtihad.[02] Ibraaz

MT

The Muslim community or Ummah seems to be torn between two ideological positions: a secular tendency from one side and a conservative tendency on the other.[03] Do you think there is hope for a possible political unity to emerge from such tendencies and the tensions associated with sharia?

The Ummah has been at the centre of political clashes. Some Islamic movements use sharia in a limited, literalist manner which does not take into consideration the exigencies of the

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present. They tend to instrumentalise history and build up a series of chimeras that often violently interfere with those who live in today’s world.

no means encouraged, as I have argued, by the Quran. It is not a religious notion of Islam, nor is it an ideal of Islam. And yet why is the Arab world still in a situation of international embarrassment and ignominy? The answer is that it has chosen since the nineteenth century to walk backwards rather than engage with modernity.

However, 50 per cent of the Muslim community belongs to the diaspora, namely, minorities living in their countries of origin such as Russia, India, Germany or England. With such diversity, which surely can become only more complex with time, how could one realistically aspire to an Islamic political unity or sense that one voice can speak for all? We should reject the desire that society must be governed by the sacred text, and concentrate, instead, on the nature of its reading. The Quran is not politics. It is neither a Constitution nor a code of behaviour.

It is Light and the Source of Inspiration that is viable at every moment of time and life.

So what is, in your opinion, comprises the road to Modernity?

Quran is modernity. The Muslim world or Ummah needs to free itself from the historical and ossified magma of narrowly defined dogma. Free itself from the fear of the future.

According to some interpretations, the future does not hold any promises; in fact, it only holds the promise of a dreadful and perpetual fall. Any form of innovation is condemned and a version of modernity – let us call it the Taliban model – holds to the belief that those who hold onto their ancestors – and dress and live like them – are the ones who will be saved in the afterlife. They will say to God: ‘I lived amongst the irreligious people but I hung onto old pious people. I clung to them. And for that reason I will be saved.’ Again, such narrow beliefs cannot accommodate modernity.

Islam is, first and foremost, a secular religion where the people are sovereign not the rulers. It is interpretations of the sharia that has spread chaos and strife. We must, therefore, get rid of the lies before being able to understand the foundations of the Muslim faith and Islamic thought. The sharia is man-made invention. In fact, the terms sharia or indeed ‘politics’ do not belong to the Quranic lexicon and is nowhere to be found.

Ibraaz Ibraaz

If Islam is a secular religion, does this mean that there could be cohabitation between democratic ideologies and Islamic values?

MT

MT

[04]

or further discussion of F this process see the Quran, 42: 32-39.

Ibraaz

MT

The term democracy does not exist in the Quran, which is quite normal. Democracy is a new-born political management method, which has recently been considered the best or ‘the least’ worst in our societies. The term, Shu’ra, however exists in the Quran. It is a generic term that means ‘consultation’ or ‘dialogue’ which does not necessarily relate to any specific political system but to life as a whole. Shu’ra means to assess the rights and wrongs before making any decision, be it in the family, nation, or humanity as a whole.[04] The Sh’ura ensures different kinds of freedom, including bodily freedom, freedom of expression, and the freedom of justice for all as well as social cohesion. This is the kind of Islam I defend. Dictatorship is, by definition, an abuse and a denaturalisation of the Quranic message. In addition, fighting for freedom is a must for the Muslim. Freedom is not a gift; it is an eternal struggle for justice and freedom that is never completely won.

How can we further explain the political regimes in place in the Arab world presently, not to mention their underlying forms of dictatorship and despotism?

Dictatorship is only a social phenomenon and one that is by

[05]

4 January 2011, was 1 the day the then President, Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, following a popular uprising, stepped aside after more than two decades in power in Tunisia.

Do you think that the event in Tunisia in January 2011 has marked the beginning of a political, social and cultural promise made to the Arab world?

Tunisia has opened a new chapter in the history of the Arab world, one that I culturally support. Arab is not a race but a cultural affiliation. 14th January is a day we will all remember.[05] It was the day Tunisia paved the way to the most fundamental political changes in modern Arab history, with new concepts but above all new aspirations and the sense that freedom had been denied to us for far too long. But I am not suggesting the Western imperialistic notion of freedom – the one that allows you to invade and declare war anywhere there is oil present. On the contrary, I would like to think that Arabs are now in a position to give voice to the deepest meaning of the word ‘freedom’ and negotiate it within an equation that includes justice. I believe that Arab thinkers have got an important mission in their hands. It is their duty to re-think freedom and the way it is interpreted by the West.

Freedom in the context of egalitarianism, fairness and empathy is in my view the most important promise made by the Arab world today.

VII

Plates Raafat Ishak, Lara Baladi, Taysir Batniji, Jananne Al-Ani, Ayman Baalbaki, Ziad Antar, Kader Attia, Manal Al-Dowayan, Ahmed Alsoudani, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Abdelkader Benchamma, Ahmed Mater, Ayman Yossri Daydban, Mona Hatoum, Abdulnasser Gharem, Driss Ouadahi, Fayรงal Baghriche, Mounir Fatmi, Yto Barrada, Emily Jacir, Ziad Abillama, Yazan Khalili

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Raafat Ishak â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Egypt, 1967

Responses to an immigration request from one hundred and ninety four governments 2006-09 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

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Lara Baladi – Lebanon, 1969

Turkish coffee cups and labels Photographic documentation for the project Diary of The Future 2007-08 – Courtesy of the artist – ‘The Arab tradition of reading the future from the residue left after drinking Turkish coffee was a perfect vehicle to record this period. My father’s visitors unwittingly became part of an elaborate ceremony. I documented and archived this process chronologically.’

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Rose, from the Diary of the Future project 2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist, Gallery Isabelle van de Eynde, Dubai and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis

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Taysir Batniji – Gaza, 1966

The Sky Over Gaza 2001-04 – Courtesy of the artist

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GH0809 (16 of 103 panels shown) 2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut

Watchtowers (detail) (overleaf) 2008 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut

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Jananne Al-Ani – Iraq, 1966

Shadow Sites II, installation view Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2011 – Photography: Tom Brown

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Aerial I, III, IV, II, Production stills from Shadow Sites II Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2011 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Photography: Adrian Warren Courtesy of the artist

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Ayman Baalbaki – Lebanon, 1975

Al Maw3oud 2011 – Photography: Agial Art Gallery, Beirut Private collection

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Wake Up Sisyphus 2008

I Built My Home 2008

– Photography: Agial Art Gallery, Beirut Private collection

– Photography: Agial Art Gallery, Beirut Private collection

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Kalam Faregh (Empty Words) 2011 – Photography: Agial Art Gallery, Beirut Private collection – ‘Cut-out texts borrowed from flirtatious, frivolous poems/ messages sent by lovers through SMS on Arabic satellite televisions… The dichotomy of Kalam Faregh lies in the shorthand superficiality of those insignificant texts, compared to the historical value of language in the Arab consciousness as the ultimate purveyor of culture, identity and pride.’

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Ziad Antar Lebanon, 1978

Burj Khalifa 2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Selma Feriani Gallery, London

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UAE Coast 3 2010

Cairo February 2005

– Courtesy of the artist and Selma Feriani Gallery, London

– Courtesy of the artist and Selma Feriani Gallery, London

Kader Attia – France, 1970

La Colonne Sans Fin 2010 – Courtesy of Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris

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Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2011 – Courtesy of the artist and the Kader Attia studio – History of a Myth: The Small Dome of the Rock consists of a miniature sculpture comprising two silver nuts of different sizes holding in place a brass bolt. A camera is placed alongside this assemblage to capture its form, which is then projected onto a large canvas, enlarging it to many times its size. Once projected to this monumental scale the tiny assemblage evokes an architectural representation of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. A new level of power is bestowed onto the nuts and bolt through evoking the Dome of the Rock, one of the world’s oldest existing Islamic buildings.

This work creates a space for interpreting our contemporary global culture, where pieces of information ebb and flow; where meaning is diluted and the true value of things can be lost. The historic references of the Dome of the Rock are numerous, especially in Arab-Muslim history, with the complex contemporary conflict immediately brought to mind.

An additional audio component – the evocative sound of wind against the mosque’s esplanade – recreates the sensory experience of Kader Attia when he visited the monument.

Emanating through two small speakers placed in front of the image, visitors are given the impression that the sound is coming from the projection. The mysterious, amplified noise reverberating through the dark space, illuminated only by the striking projection on the canvas, creates a lasting impression on the viewer. The strength of the wind and deep reverberation suggests the end of one period and the beginning of a new era.

Photography: Max Milligan

History of a Myth: The Small Dome of the Rock

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Manal Al-Dowayan – Saudi Arabia, 1973

Suspended Together 2011

– Courtesy of the artist and Cuadro Fine Art Gallery, Dubai – ‘A closer look shows that each dove carries on its body the permission document that allows a Saudi woman to travel… regardless of age and achievement, when it comes to travel, all these women are treated like a flock of suspended doves.’

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Ahmed Alsoudani – Iraq, 1975

Untitled 2010

Untitled (overleaf) 2010

– Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison, New York & London

– Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison, New York & London

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Baghdad 1 2008 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison, New York & London

Ibraaz Platform 001 A platform is a space for speaking in

For platform 001, the question 'What

public. It is an opportunity to express

do we need to know about the MENA

ideas and thoughts. It also suggests the

region today?' was posed. We received

formal declaration of a stance or position

over 30 responses, ranging from those

on any given subject.

that formally engage with the question, responses that challenge â&#x20AC;&#x201C; rightly â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the

Unique to Ibraaz is a 'platform', a question

parameters of the question (what do we

put to writers, thinkers and artists about

mean by MENA, why now, and who is 'we' in

an issue relevant to the MENA region. This

this question); responses in the form of

platform is sent to respondents both in

images, poems, polemics and even a joke.

change every six months.

For all responses, texts, films and images see www.ibraaz.org

117 www.ibraaz.org

and beyond the MENA region and it will

Khaled Alhamzeh

Nazgol Ansarinia

Fine Arts: Status Quo and Some of its Problems For the past decades, culture, including visual art, has not been a priority for most governments in the region, and this has led to the status quo in fine arts we experience today. The isolation between the public and the arts is the result of the lack of serious programmes to educate both students and the public. The public in general seems to have no interest in fine arts and for this reason governments don’t feel the need to invest effort and money in it.

The only people aware of this dilemma are the artists themselves and the few individuals highly interested in the arts. It seems – for now at least – that there is no common ground for these two sides to start discussing ways out of the status quo. Initiatives by fine artists and cultured people should be encouraged and discussed in order to convince not only the governments but also the private sector to be more involved with creating real and effective institutions working for the benefit of culture.

Nazgol Ansarinia Etelaat (from the Reflection series) 2011 Paper collage 21 × 21cm Courtesy of the artist

Nazgol Ansarinia is an artist based in Tehran.

Khaled Alhamzeh is an artist, Editor-inChief of the Jordan Journal of the Arts 118

Arts, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan.

Khaled Alhamzeh Homage to Maillol (The Mediterranean) 2010 Video still Courtesy of the artist

119 www.ibraaz.org

and former Dean at the College of Fine

Rayya Badran

Pryle Behrman

Sitting in the sweltering sun of Sharjah on a large rolled carpet on the open esplanade

In an email dialogue between Beirut-based architect Tony Chakar and critic Stephen

facing the museum, I express to an acquaintance, my uneasiness and inability to

Wright (published in the catalogue for Out of Beirut at Modern Art Oxford in 2006),

respond to the question. We need MENA (I had continually mistaken it for MENASA,

Chakar takes Wright to task for his habitual use of the label ‘Middle East’:

unconsciously adding yet another region to the equation, another source of anxious unknowing). Having travelled in and around the aforementioned region more than I

‘The more I thought about it the more it didn’t make any sense. What does it mean

have, his response is intuitively political, to the point: ‘Why don’t they ask their troops?’

that I’m from the “Middle East”?... In fact, the region itself doesn’t exist. We might

Nothing prepared me for the array of answers I got from friends and acquaintances as

talk about it as much as you want but it’s still not there... Do you think I might be able

I uttered the apprehensive question, perhaps as an attempt to relieve myself of this

to understand what it means to live under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship or to be

responsibility. The responsibility of accurate answerability.

“liberated” by the Americans? Or would I be able to understand what it means to be living under the constant threat of being “transferred” from Ramallah to Jordan? Or

To articulate an incisive and substantial response to what should or ought to be

would I be able to understand what it means to live in a megalopolis of 20 million people

unpacked is always an uneasy position, and yet it is appealing to work through. How to

like Cairo?’

organise the things we have experienced from it, what we believe we know of it and what we read about it. MENA is a space of dissonance and confounding narratives. Nothing is

The anti-government protests that have swept the MENA region at the time of writing

ever as it seems, as it is told, as we want it to be.

(March 2011) suggest to me that, contrary to Chakar’s assertion, there is indeed a have unfolded in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya show the sagacity of his belief that local

flickering lights, I asked myself the question that had been so obsessively occupying my

differences remain crucially important as well.

mind: ‘What do I need to know?’ My answer was and is still there, incessantly looping a sense of unfulfilled desire to know more. What have I got to share and with whom? When an articulate answer will present itself, very little will be known.

Rayya Badran is a writer based in Beirut.

Pryle Behrman is the Reviews Editor of The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ).

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shared sense of identity across the area. However the different ways that events On the aeroplane flying me to Cairo that evening, as I looked at the city’s sea of

Ursula Biemann and Shuruq Harb

Achim Borchardt-Hume

When we began our research into the current art landscape of the Middle East,

The political and cultural density of the Middle East is as diverse, rich and complex

we noticed various reasons why the bonds between regional art communities are

as that of Central Europe with which it shares a history of struggle about disputed

weakened. Prevailing art discourses are largely externally driven; the way in which art

borders, clashing ideologies and religious turmoil. The fact that the term by which the

is circulated, marketed and publicised doesn’t respond in any significant way to the

region is commonly identified is a British invention is just one sign of how inseparably

conditions and needs of the artists in the region; curatorial selection criteria favour

intertwined the histories of the Middle East and of the Western world are. More than

individualised production easily resulting in a competitive climate; young artists prefer

ever, the region is becoming one of the turn tables within an increasingly global reality

an education abroad, rather than in other Arab countries; and mobility between distant

– with the free exchange of ideas often at risk of being caught up in conflicting political

regional art centres is generally impeded.

and economic interests.

With the social and political restructuring of Arab societies, many initiatives for

To face the challenges and to maximise on the opportunities that result from this

building strong civil networks and institutions are bound to emerge now. What’s most

unique situation, an accelerated pace of learning, unimpeded by ideological impositions,

needed at this point is the strengthening of direct dialogue among artists that will

is paramount. It is in the creation of a critical space otherwise non-existent, to explore,

lay the grounds for a discourse on art and visual cultural from the bottom up. We need

reflect upon and discuss the complex reality that art in the region plays a vital and

platforms where artists can speak their mind about foreign investment in the arts,

necessary role. For this to grow, we need to know more about the life of ordinary

national cultural politics, massive institution building, their relation to the international

people, and how their reality compares to that represented in the media, especially

art industry, and their needs for de-centred and revised histories. All these are vital

the aspirations of the young, both on an individual and wider social level. We need a

structures underscoring art production and the sharing of ideas.

forum for genuine exchange and for free information flow. We need two-way traffic. finishing line, if we want such an exchange to be meaningful and fertile over a sustained

Founding co-editors of ArtTerritories.

period of time.

Achim Borchardt-Hume is Chief Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. He was previously Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at Tate Modern, London.

Artterritories.net Activating interview trails on art and visual culture in the Middle East

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More than anything we need openness, not to fix a goal, not to have a pre-determined Ursula Biemann and Shuruq Harb are

Tony Chakar

CPS Chamber of Public Secrets

Come Out and Play The question ‘What do we need to know about the MENA region today?’ triggered a series of questions from my part. My contribution will be these questions; the aim is to start a game of Q&Q (instead of a Q&A) with no rules and no time limits.

Who is this ‘we’ mentioned in the question? Why does this ‘we’ feel compelled to know anything? And what kind of knowledge does it feel compelled to accumulate? What is the MENA region? When did this acronym come about? Why the Middle East and North Africa? How come they are singled out and brought together? How much do the countries of this region have in common? Would it be more interesting to ask about their differences?

As for the Middle East – the middle of what East? The East of what? The East of the West? The East of Europe? The Europe of the ‘Western democratic values’? The same Europe who was worried about the influx of ‘illegal immigrants’ while in Egypt the protesters were re-using slogans from the French Revolution? What happened to that

Finally, why this sense of false urgency? Why ‘today’? What about yesterday or

CPS Chamber of Public Secrets (initiated by Khaled Ramadan and Alfredo Cramerotti) is

tomorrow? Not good enough? Does this ‘we’ feel the urge to know more because of

a production unit of art and media working since 2004 in the organisation, production

what’s happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria? Is that it? So – NOW

and diffusion of films, documentaries, political fictions, festivals, TV, radio programmes

we’re interesting?

and art exhibitions. www.chamberarchive.org

Tony Chakar is an architect and writer based in Beirut. He teaches at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) and at the University of Balamand.

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Europe and when will this Europe get over itself?

Chamber of Public Secrets Here, There, Then, Elsewhere 2011 Video, 21’ Produced by CPS Chamber of Public Secrets

Najwan Darwish

Aida Eltorie

This question is like a trap: ‘what do we need to know about the MENA region today?’

History repeats itself – this line used across the disciplines is a proven liturgy to

It feels like a trap, or a puzzle, rather than like a question because it was asked with

contemporary compendiums. When you detail the visual narratives, the region becomes

no explanations. The only indication I had was that the answer should not exceed 200

the medium designed to mark your place in history. Whether in the Stone Age or the

words and that this question (‘trap’) occurred in the context of a project aiming at

Digital Age, information is your power, and revolution your tool.

developing thoughts, writings and publications on the visual culture of an area known as MENA – which is an acronym in Latin letters. Although I am supposed to be one of its

Egypt just witnessed its first revolt since 1952; a revolution against autocracy and

inhabitants, this region does not exist for me. It only exists for those who use this term

oppression, a revolution against social scrutiny and silence. Triggered by what initially

for it. I cannot translate this acronym from its Latin form into any language from this

arose in Tunis and is now running through the veins of Algeria, Bahrain and Libya,

region. As soon as I write it down in Arabic, the area ceases to be. It does not even exist

the Egyptian Revolts became the global emblem of a civil freedom sparked by a post

in the consciousness of the peoples from this region. It is a term known only to a very

on Facebook.

limited category of specialists.

But will the future keep the rebels’ Is there any need to remind you of the neo-colonial nature of this term, that it is a

promise?

become a dull industry, and that even criticising it has grown tiresome? In this moment

The MENA region is this question mark.

overwhelmed with revolutions, the liberation of individuals and societies cannot be

If you know your history, you might also

fulfilled without liberating the region from the political terms and conceptions that

know what will happen next. No matter how

have hijacked its image and stymied its existence. The liberation should also extend to

many times history repeats itself, we can’t

cultural perceptions, including the liberation of visual culture – such as writings and

seem to stop our process of repetition.

practices – from fabricated geographical notions. I have written 200 words while still trying to ‘exit’ from ‘MENA’. Have I escaped the trap?

Artists are the documenters. They mark the time and place of the event regardless

Najwan Darwish is a poet and critic from Jerusalem/Palestine.

of how their verses are voiced: loud and clear, proud and magnificent, unsightly or progressive, beautiful and regressive.

They keep returning to this starting point – ironically it is also the finishing line.

Artists from this region are contemporary history in motion. So keep a close eye, and learn everything about them because in every single one you’ll find a rebel.

Aida Eltorie is an independent curator and the director of a newfound organisation, Al Musawar Magazine Cairo, 21 October, 1927 Volume 4, Issue 158

Finding Projects (findingprojects.org).

She is based in Cairo.

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‘Western’ expression about the ‘East’, that the duality of ‘West/East’ has indeed

Maymanah Farhat

Mounir Fatmi

When initially presented with the task of summing up the nearly two-dozen nations that are lumped together under this peculiar acronym, my immediate impulse was to emphasize that it is impossible to describe such a vast region in less than 200 words.

Even the few commonalities that do exist among these modern states are not so easily compartmentalised. The era of colonialism, the Arabic language, the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam â&#x20AC;&#x201C; each narrative is significant and synonymous with the region, but what then of the legacy of the Umayyad Empire, Farsi, and lesser-known but equally important religious communities such as the Druze? Essentially, the list of possible details is endless. With the existence of continuous civilisation for millennia, what basic information can possibly do justice to such histories?

As I write this, North Africa and the Middle East are amidst revolution, steeped in the pursuit of finally breaking free from the autocrats who will become just that â&#x20AC;&#x201C; history.

Perhaps what can be said about MENA is that culture has been essential to these longsimmering struggles. Artists, intellectuals, literary figures and cultural practitioners have all actively pursued the free societies that their nations are now so close to

Maymanah Farhat is an art historian specialising in modern and contemporary Arab art. She is based in New York.

Mounir Fatmi Place Mehdi Ben Barka, 2008 Photograph courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hussenot, Paris

Mounir Fatmi is an artist. He lives and works in Paris and Tangier.

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collectively obtaining.

Talinn Grigor

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

Shedding our enduring Orientalist fears and phobia, I believe that we must come to

In Lebanon, we live surrounded by dead people looking at us. Since the beginning of the

terms with the fact that ordinary people in MENA are as (post)modern as we are. They

civil wars, posters have covered the walls of the city.

have always been. In their campaign for the presidential candidate Mir Hosayn Musavi

They are images of men, martyrs who died tragically while fighting or on mission, or who

in June 2009, the masses showed a keen awareness of both the street art of Iran’s own

were political figures and were murdered.

revolutionary past and of iconic images in the history of (Western) art. A homemade poster depicts what seemed to refer to Michelangelo’s fresco, The Creation of Adam,

For years, we have been photographing the posters of martyrs belonging to different

in the Sistine Chapel (1508-12). Subverting gender representations, the hands of God

parties, religions or creeds in various regions of the country, from south to north. But

and Adam are substituted with female hands that carry a green band on their wrist. The

we only select posters greatly deteriorated by time.

green calligraphy reads, ‘Youth, come aboard / Mir Hosayn Musavi’.

The features of those represented have been progressively erased by time and wear.

This masterful cross-border appeal to divine beauty is embedded in and informed by

We photographed those images at various stages of their progressive disappearance.

multiple narratives, both theological and art historical; from the Quranic reference

Then, with the help of a graphic designer and various draftsmen, we attempted to

to God’s love of beauty, to the Christian depiction of divine beauty in the Sistine

recover certain features, to accentuate others, to bring back a lasting image by

Chapel ceiling, to the modern practice of voting. The combination of the green-

drawing a face, a trace, matter.

stained fingertips of the election banner held by a campaigner with her meticulously French-manicured nails speaks to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s claim that ‘visual culture does

Can the image come back?

not depend on pictures themselves but the modern tendency to picture or visualize existence’. In Iran’s case – as well as in 130

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the case of all those who have risen in resistance – it is not just about visualizing one’s own culture and history, but about appropriating others as a postmodern act of differentiation, deferral and belonging.

Talinn Grigor is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architecture in the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University, Waltham, USA.

Election campaign banner stating ‘Youth, come aboard/Mir Hosayn Musavi’ 8 June 2009, Vali Asr Avenue, Tehran.

Photograph courtesy of Talinn Grigor

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige Faces, 2009 Digital prints, photographic and drawing works Courtesy of the artists

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige are artists and filmmakers based between Paris and Beirut.

Samah Hijawi

Yazan Khalili

This ongoing research project is concerned with different aspects that have

Almost a Joke

influenced the development of visual art practices in Jordan over the last 60 years. It uses multi-media practices as tools by which various ideas and elements are dissected.

01: An old woman gets into a taxi and asks the driver to take her somewhere. The driver hits the accelerator and takes off. As they arrive at a traffic light, the driver hits the gas and speeds across the red light. The old lady panics and screams; ‘Why did

The experimental videos and text-based works realised so far incorporate archives,

you do this, we could get killed!’ Calmly, the driver replies; ‘Don’t worry, my dear, I’m

interviews and other documents piecing together a set of propositions and

the king of the road.’ Then as they approach another traffic light, again he speeds

incidences that become starting points for a historical narrative. They focus on the

across the red light. The old lady shouts hysterically; ‘Please, my son, I’m scared!’

connections between Jordan, Iraq and Palestine and suggest different areas through

But the driver, cool as a cucumber, replies; ‘Don’t worry, dear, I’m the king of the

which the aesthetics and subjects dealt with in Jordanian visual art from 1950 to

road.’ They keep driving until they get to yet another traffic light – only now it shows

2000 can be contemplated.

‘green’. Suddenly, the driver hits the breaks and the car stops. The old lady is flabbergasted. ‘Drive, drive, it is green, can’t you see?’ ‘I see, ma’am,’ answers the These works also seek

driver, ‘But another “king of the road” might be coming from the other direction.’

to question the art 02: The 1995 Oslo interim agreement split the West Bank into three Areas A, B and C,

author/authority in formal

with different security and administrative arrangements and authorities. The land

art historical writing by

area controlled by the Palestinians (Area A corresponding to all major population

voicing different agents in

centres and Area B encompassing most rural centres) is fragmented into a

narrating this history.

multitude of enclaves, with a regime of movement restrictions between them. These enclaves are surrounded by Area C, which covers the entire remaining area and is

Samah Hijawi is a cross-

the only contiguous area of the West Bank. Area C is under full control of the Israeli

disciplinary visual artist

military for both security and civilian affairs related to territory, including land

based in Amman, Jordan.

administration and planning. It is sparsely populated and underutilised (except by Israeli settlements and reserves), and holds the majority of the land (approximately 59%). East Jerusalem was not classified as Area A, B or C in the Oslo interim agreement and its status was to be resolved in final status negotiations.

03: O nce upon a time, around the year 1998, the Palestinian minister of public works went to visit the German minister of public works. Upon arrival, the German minister invited the Palestinian minister to his house. The Palestinian was astonished by the

Samah Hijawi Documents for A Narrative of Art History of Jordan Ongoing multi-media project since 2010 Video excerpt 1’40” Courtesy of the artist

place and was wondering how the German minister could have afforded to build it in the first place. To explain, the German minister opened a window and said: ‘You see that bridge?’ ‘You mean that small bridge over there?’ asked the Palestinian minister. ‘Yes,’ replied the German minister. ‘It cost us 10 million euros to build: nine for the bridge and one for this house.’

A year later, the Palestinian minister invited the German minister to his house in Palestine. Upon arrival, the German minister was astonished by the amazing mansion the Palestinian minister was residing in. Naturally, he was curious to know how this was possible. To answer, the Palestinian minister opened a window and said: ‘See that bridge over there?’ Confused, the German minister asked: ‘Where? I can’t see any bridge.’ ‘Well,’ replied the Palestinian minister, ‘That’s because it cost us 10 million to build this house alone!’

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historian’s position as the

Lina Khatib

04: In the emergency spending bill that lawmakers completed late on Tuesday, the White

The Middle East today is witnessing a clash of visual narratives. Images of aging

House had sought $200 million ‘to support Palestinian political, economic, and

dictators clinging on to their youth, clash with those of fresh-faced protestors. Scenes

security reforms,’ as the President said in his February State of the Union address.

of medieval methods of curbing freedom of expression – as seen in the thugs on camel

But the fine print of the document gives $50 million of that money directly to Israel

and horseback in Tahrir Square in Cairo – clash with those of peaceful demonstrators

to build terminals for people and goods at checkpoints surrounding Palestinian

fighting for their rights with their bare hands. The delusions of grandeur of regimes

areas. Another $2 million for Palestinian health care will be provided to Hadassah,

that refuse to face reality, and which are ‘immortalised’ in banners, billboards and

the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, while the allocation of the rest of the

statues all over the region, clash with the steadfastness of those risking their lives to

money is tightly prescribed.

start a new page in history, as they tear down, burn and destroy those symbols of a dormant near-past.

The Middle East is awakening, and the world is watching. There has never been a moment in the life of the region where visual narratives have been as prominent as they are now. Political struggle in the region is conducted on the world stage as a spectacle that shocks and awes. The Middle East is inviting us to gaze, but also to recognise the power of the gaze as a wakeup call and a means to tell others that yes, you can do it too.

Lina Khatib is Programme Manager for the Programme on Good Governance and

Yazan Khalili The Image 2009 Project: Regarding Distance Courtesy of the artist Yazan Khalili The Landscape 2009 Project: Regarding Distance Courtesy of the artist

Yazan Khalili is an architect, photographer and writer who lives and works in and out of Palestine.

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Political Reform in the Arab World at Stanford University.

Nadira Laggoune

Elizabeth Markevitch and Dorothea Schöne

One needs to be careful with the concept of regions as geographical entities. Such an

The question ‘What do we need to know about the MENA region today?’ poses an

understanding is only valuable if it takes into account the way these regions relate to

important and challenging demand on the respondents. With regards to the art,

their neighbours, as frontiers are still too often frontiers of misunderstanding.

you can easily point at world heritage: art came from the MENA region and spread throughout the world. But we shall go further, dig deeper into the matter.

The Middle East, like North Africa or the so-called ‘Arab World’, is a crucible for Mediterranean, Eastern and African influences. It’s a place of crossroads where

Artists from the MENA region today have shown an increasing use of global network

Arab, Berber and Islamic heritages mingle and interact through various migratory

technology, spreading their work through numerous channels. Yet the non-MENA

movements. Yet these territories – where so many nations, languages and writings are

countries have still to prove their awareness of the rich, multi-faceted and complex

favourable to exchanges – do not constitute a single block. Problems vary from one

art forms within this region, which sometimes lacks appropriate exhibition spaces or

country to the next, from one culture to the next, depending on the specifics of their

international media coverage. There is still much to be discovered and unearthed: from

histories and civilisations.

old masters, which provide us with all the meaning of heritage, to contemporary art works illustrating so well the various forms of political statements, cultural diversity,

Cultures in the Islamic world are not only Muslim cultures; there are also Christian,

ethnic self-awareness and such.

Jewish, Berber, African, ancient and pre-historical cultures, all linked to cultures elsewhere in the world.

What we need to know about the MENA region today is that despite the fact that there is for some the uniting element of language, it is a very diverse and rich culture yet to be

Thus one shouldn’t consider Islam as a specificity, but focus instead on these other

acknowledged fully.

unchanged for thousands of years.

Last – and in respect to the most recent political events most importantly – art is both a vehicle as well as a reflection of its socio-political environment. Thus, a virtual,

When approaching an understanding of these regions through their traditions, Europe

borderless art platform is one way to hear the unofficial, often unwanted voices

must take into consideration the fact that these are in constant evolution due to the

against the state of being.

globalisation that mixes men, religions, languages and ideas. Traditions must not be considered in terms of nationalisms but in terms of belonging.

It is also important to pay attention to the new generations of artists who, for years, have been building a new culture: a cross-fertilisation of the East and the West that is the best protection against tensions related to identity. One has to know that identities are to do with being, but also with becoming. Today, those artists live in Algiers, in Cairo or in Beirut as well as in Paris, London or New York.

They belong to countries that have overcome post-colonialism through a double source of knowledge, both Eastern and Western and the contributions of European, African and American artists. The Middle East and North Africa represent an enormous movement of contemporary artistic creation, where hundreds of cultural events enrich the life of local and European art centres.

Nadira Laggoune is an art critic and art historian based in Algiers.

Sama Alshaibi Sweep 2010 Courtesy of Selma Feriani Gallery, London and on air on ikono TV

Elizabeth Markevitch is the Founder of ikono TV. Dorothea Schöne is ikono TV’s Head of Content.

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dimensions: Mediterranean, African, European, and on everyday activities sometimes

Mehran Mohajer

Yasmina Reggad

‘People only ever have the degree of freedom that their audacity wins from fear.’

‘Les peuples n’ont jamais que le degré de liberté que leur audace conquiert sur la peur.’

Stendhal Yasmina Reggad is an independent photography curator based in the UK. She is the

Mehran Mohajer Tehran, undated 2009 Digital prints scanned from 6 × 6 negatives 76 × 76cm (each) Courtesy of the artist

For this project I have used a pinhole square-format camera to take urban pictures of a metropolis. From the start, this device produced a paradox. The long exposure times and the low quality of the images it takes do not fit with the documentary genre.

Intentionally I have used the apparatus to sweep out the crowd, to show a deserted city and to create an apocalyptic atmosphere. In my mind, these images evoke the actual situation we are/were living in. These photos were taken two years ago and now we are experiencing a totally different history in our city. In another way I tried to pay homage to the great early twentieth-century photographer, Eugène Atget. The colours of these photographs are gloomier than the greys in Atget’s images.

Mehran Mohajer is an artist based in Tehran.

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Founding Director of Photo-Festivals.

Ghalya Saadawi

Behrang Samadzadegan

What do we need to know about (your

I believe that recent events and revolutions in the Middle East prove that getting

interest in) the MENA region today?

acquainted with the region is more complicated than has been conveyed on the global scene until now. Behind a curtain of traditions, Middle Eastern people are dealing with the passion of globalisation.

What can I say

Not, not with.

In order to be vigilant?

With the hole of an O like

Where religion has always been a pretext for

How do I organize pessimism

Outside.

Into surviving fireflies?

But we are out of time,

What and where are these images,

Not as in anachronism,

A curtain which is seductive enough to motivate

Like germs germinating,

As in particles in parallel lines

Orientalists, while being suspicious enough for

Gestating in the belly of some vowel

Sewing the last threads

That lingers after all horizons are

As we sit on a boat in the direction

Gone?

Of a firefly sunset that is bound to fall,

Knock on an O and you get anachrOnism

And us with it.

And a stOrm.

But trace, mark and tease

Step into the O and you get

Stay behind

An eye

For posterity like eternity, but real,

Not for an eye,

Like a loop around my neck,

But for an O.

They stay because the dead’s

The O not of nOvelty or of nO

Word is the last.

But of nOise.

Or the first.

Interfere with it and you sabotage

Like the O in surprise

Information

In redeem, in listen.

Step in front of it and you get a

There is no O in listen

TempO

There isn’t an O in sight

Not like a meter reading,

I mean in sight.

Like a contemporary.

There is no O in nod

Not the other one,

Only emptiness spiralled out

Since you decide to be a citizen of the global village, you’ll

With time,

By too much nodding.

have to pretend to be interesting to the world! You’ll have

fundamentalism, to win the power in order to build up a curtain by combining traditions, custom and politics.

politicians to be involved with it for decades.

What is always left in our cares is the reality behind this curtain: people that just want to live normal lives and don’t want to be what others want them to be.

To live with their own dreams, goals and legends instead of accommodating their dreams to institutions and unwritten laws.

Here you’ll be encouraged not to be yourself.

Since you are abandoned by yourself, there are governors who tell you how to talk, where to walk, what to eat, who to meet!

to cover yourself within the same curtain of locality and Ghalya Saadawi is an independent writer and editor who lives between Beirut

ethnicity!

and London.

In the end, it is hard to have your heroes kept from the past and only a horizon before you.

Behrang Samadzadegan is an artist and university lecturer based in Tehran.

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Two-Hundred and Thirty Three

Hrair Sarkissian

Saskia Sassen

Cities in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s global modernity: a novel assemblage of territory, authority, and rights. Cities have long been sites for conflict, from war and the oppressions of dictators to racisms and religious hatreds. And yet, where national states have historically responded by militarizing conflict, cities have tended to triage conflict through commerce and civic activity. Often the overcoming of urban conflicts became the source for an expanded civic-ness: this happened in Cairo in February 2011. But in Benghazi it took a very different form: full possession of the territory of the city. And in Gaza it is yet another trajectory: one which shows us the limits of superior military force â&#x20AC;&#x201C; no matter how powerful an army Israel has, it cannot unleash its full force onto Gaza. In its diversity these three cases signal that the city functions as a sort of weak regime: it cannot overcome superior military force but it can obstruct it. People versus machines in an open field is a different condition from people in a dense urban setting versus the same machines.

The repositioning of the city after centuries of gradual subordination to the nation-state is part of a larger disassembling of existing organisational logics. This disassembling is also unsettling the logic that assembled territory, authority and rights into the dominant organisational format of our times â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the nation-state. These 142

geopolitical landscape and the material organisation of territory. But beneath this continuity of the national-state of our early modernity, are the shifting grounds leading to novel assemblages of territory, authority and rights.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology and co-chairs The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com).

Hrair Sarkissian Untitled No.1, 2010 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries, Athens - Thessaloniki Hrair Sarkissian Untitled No.2, 2010 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries, Athens - Thessaloniki Hrair Sarkissian Untitled No.3, 2010 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries, Athens - Thessaloniki Hrair Sarkissian Untitled No.4, 2010 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries, Athens - Thessaloniki

Hrair Sarkissian is an artist. He lives and works in Amsterdam, Damascus and Istanbul.

Hrair Sarkissian Untitled No.5, 2010 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries, Athens - Thessaloniki

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shifts are happening even as national states continue to be major markers of the

Simon Sheikh

Tina Sherwell

There are two things we need to know. Firstly, we need to know what we know, that

One of the important developments required in the region is the expansion of a critical

is, how much or how little? Secondly, we need to know who ‘we’ are in this context.

discourse on local artistic practices. It is crucial to gain an in-depth understanding of

Obviously, there is a different ‘we’ at stake, whether inside or outside the region, as

the various generations of art practitioners, through detailed studies of their work

well as many differences within the region. So, from the outside we need to know which

in relation to the relevant contexts and debates. Research grants and publication

forms of ‘we’ are working in the region, and how they see themselves, their histories and

opportunities would benefit this field, in which work is currently being done but which

possible futures: what are their horizons of expectation?

requires greater support structures.

The question takes on an added urgency in the light of recent political events in the

Supporting research would provide an academic understanding of local art production

Middle East, and how they are, perhaps mistakenly, perceived by the outside, the

outside the art market, which currently dominates the way art is made and understood

West, as completely unexpected. Should we have known, and thus expected, more?

in the region. MENA would also greatly benefit from an increased number of research

Additionally, what shall the constitution of ‘we’ as the people in the region expect – of

grants for artists which would support the production of their work, as well as the

themselves, their projects, and the world beyond? Surely, the surprised ‘we’ of the West

development of their practices – and these grants need to be available to artists from

needs, now more than ever, to ‘unknow’ itself in order to not only know themselves as a

all generations and at whatever stage of their careers.

‘we’ anew, but also to know more – something, anything – about the unexpected political subjects of the region, and to ask ourselves what we can do?’

Dr Tina Sherwell is the Director of the International Academy of Art, Palestine.

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Simon Sheikh is a curator and theorist based in Berlin.

Ahlam Shibli

Zahia Smail Salhi

For so many decades the region of MENA has been synonymous with religious extremism, oppression of women, dictatorial regimes and, at varying levels, high rates of illiteracy and backwardness.

In the last decade of the twentieth century the region has seen various political tumults including Islamic terrorism and its war against civilians in Algeria, civil war in Sudan, the continued Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the resulting intifadas, the Gulf wars followed by the occupation of Iraqâ&#x20AC;Śthe list is rather long.

The 9/11 events brought MENA central stage as the bastion of terrorism that became a lingering threat to the safety of millions of citizens across the globe. This essentialist etiquette left many MENA citizens rather bitter about a situation for which their region should not take all the blame. Intellectuals from the region insist that the West, as much as MENA, contributed to its making and therefore shares the consequences.

The twenty-first century has seen radical shifts in the landscape of MENA. People are rising to remove dictatorial regimes and make new revolutions that, it is hoped, would lead to democratic states. It is of paramount importance to note, however, that without 146

be no democracy.

Zahia Smail Salhi is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leeds.

Peace and Love (Untitled no. 1-4), Palestine 2000 C-type prints 57.7 Ă&#x2014; 38cm Courtesy of the artist

Ahlam Shibli is an artist based in Palestine.

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gender equality and the full participation of women in democratic processes there will

Anna Somers Cocks

Annabelle Sreberny

When did the major museums of the West start taking contemporary Middle Eastern

Richard Sennett calls ‘we’ a weasel word. Which ‘we’ is hailed in this project? Let’s say

art into consideration? After 2006, with the first successful sale of Middle Eastern

that this ‘we’ is in the West, and that it doesn’t include politicians and policy-makers but

contemporary art by Christie’s in Dubai, and the announcement shortly afterwards

ordinary people.

that Abu Dhabi was going to invest billions in museum creation. Of course, the ground for this interest had been prepared by 9/11, which made the US in particular look more

My answer to this question is certainly different than it would have been six months

closely at this part of the world. But it has been the market that has put the petrol in

ago. Then, I might have said that ‘we’ do not understand the youthful populations of

this tank. Since 2006, the platforms, round tables, workshops, artists’ residencies,

the MENA region well, that we don’t understand what their expectations, sources of

prizes and biennial pavilions have proliferated. So why does this art scene still feel so

inspiration and creativity are, since their voices are rarely heard both within their

fragile, so obsessed with questions of identity?

own countries and on Western media. But since the start of 2011, ‘we’ have watched transnational television screens – especially Al Jazeera English – which have brought

Is it because the identity question is pervasive anyway, or is it because the market

images of the insurrectionary movements in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond into ‘our’ living

is disconnected from the origins of most artists? For example, the Egyptian market

rooms. We have been fascinated, exhilarated, terrified – perhaps the same movement

is negligible; to become rich and famous an Egyptian artist would have to make it in

of emotion that pushed the UN Security Council to finally vote on 18 March for a no-fly

New York or, less probably, in Dubai where, in turn, very little of the art on sale is

zone over Libya.

home grown. Is the West therefore calling the shots when it comes to deciding what will be ‘important’? Not always; think how well Iranian artists have done, selling

Now ‘we’ want to know what kind of democracy they want to build. What will be the role

largely to the diaspora.

of women and minorities in these new social formations? How will the arts, music, film fostered there? Can popular political insurrection be followed by real social change?

platforms, round tables etc. knows that an interest in art is limited to a minuscule

Perhaps ‘we’ and they can learn that there is much in common.

proportion of Middle Easterners: it has not become the surrogate religion it became for Westerners around a century ago – religion is clearly not moribund here. And

Annabelle Sreberny is Professor of Global Media and the Director of the Centre for

most people do not feel a need for art in their homes. There are, quite simply, more

Iranian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

important things to worry about, such as how to make a tolerable living and get a government that does not exact bribes, collects the rubbish and allows you the basic freedoms of speech. Middle Eastern contemporary art has not yet grown deep roots and is ideologically and aesthetically uncertain due to its dependence still on Western definitions of what is or is not good art.

Anna Somers Cocks is the Founding Editor of The Art Newspaper and Chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund.

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148

flourish in a more open environment? What contributions to world science can now be A more likely explanation for the general sense of insecurity is that everyone at these

Aslı Sungu

‘If we try to solve society’s problems without overcoming the confusion and aggression in our own state of mind, then our efforts will only contribute to the basic problems, instead of solving them.’

Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior (1984)

Jinoos Taghizadeh

The Middle East is not a safe place. It is either the source of news, or the witness of strange incidents. Its streets and cities are under the threat of suicidal terrorists and of tribal religious wars. The Middle East is unpredictable: its aging dictators fall overnight, its borders have turned into trade and smuggling hot spots – and its art scene is not a safe place either.

In the Middle East – at least in the part where I live, Iran – everything can change suddenly. This is why definitions keep changing every decade. This place is not safe because artists are not free to express their thoughts and yet there are no beliefs, taboos or traditions that they wouldn’t deal with.

Newcomers to the art scenes have their hands everywhere. In the land of age-old legends and strict religious beliefs, they tackle anything and everything that tries to

Aslı Sungu is an artist based in Berlin.

inhibit change. At the risk of being labelled raw and unvarnished, Middle Eastern artists do not rely on experience. They are tired of being measured by a world community looking for signs of traditional art and seeking One Thousand and One Nights-type

Middle Eastern artists do not need heroes. They are tired of sacred portraits and they actively tear them down. They despise halos of sacredness be it based on religious, historical or political ideologies – even if they are based on traditional or modern artistic concepts. Middle Eastern artists are their own heroes. They are heroes who constantly depose heroes, starting with themselves. This is why their faces are continually changing with every passing decade, or every five years or even every year.

This is why it’s not easy to pass judgment on them, whether one is merely expressing opinions or analysing them as the art market does. To achieve this feat, one must take their pulses daily and read the papers every day.

In the Middle East Jinoos Taghizadeh From the series Museum of Natural–National Heritage 2010-2011 Fibreglass 25 × 25 × 45cm Courtesy of the artist and Aaran Gallery, Tehran

everyone, including artists, is tired of overnight revolutions and longing for lasting security.

Arash Fayez Against Hermeneutic 2010-11 Digital photographic prints Courtesy of the artist and Aaran Gallery, Tehran

These artworks were shown in the exhibition My Super Hero curated by Nazila Noebashari and presented at the Aaran Gallery, Tehran and the Morono Kiang Gallery, Los Angeles in March-April 2011.

Jinoos Taghizadeh is an artist based in Tehran.

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exoticism in their gruelling lives.

Stephen Wright

Was there a conceptual art in the MENA? The project stems from an observation and an attendant question: there is clearly a thriving, politically motivated, post-conceptual art in the MENA area (Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, Decolonizing Palestine, Khalil Rabah, Djamel Kokene, Yto Barrada, Lasserre and Yacoub and so on) which, given its relationship to the territory of art and that of other forms of knowledge production, operates through what might best be described as ‘extraterritorial reciprocity’. This begs the following, unanswered and even unposed question: Was there a conceptual art in the MENA? We begin from the hypothesis that indeed there was, though it remains unknown to itself and unmapped. For otherwise, one would have to conclude that current practices are a pure product of importation from America and Europe – and even in that case, we would want to ask: in what suitcase? With whom? When? Via what stopover? The project will unearth and performatively document and map the trajectories of these avuncular precursors alongside the exhibition of post-conceptual works whose conditions of

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possibility they guaranteed.

Stephen Wright is a Paris-based art writer and professor of art theory and history at the European School of Visual Arts (www.eesi.eu). In 2010 he co-organised the weekly discussion platform Plausible Artworlds (www.plausibleartworlds.org) and is a founding user of lecollege (www.lecollege.info).

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Nadia Kaabi-Linke â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Tunisia, 1978

Butcher Bliss (detail) 2010

â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Photography: Bernhard Link, 2010 Courtesy of the artist

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Butcher Bliss (detail) 2010

â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Photography: Bernhard Link, 2010 Courtesy of the artist

Impressions of Cairo (detail) 2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist

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Impressions of Cairo 2010

Associated material during production of Flying Carpets

– Courtesy of the artist

Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2011 (overleaf)

Flying Carpets Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2011 (p.126) – Photography: Tom Brown

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Emily Jacir – Saudi Arabia, 1970

embrace 2005 – Courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Alexander and Bonin, New York

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Stazione (Ca'D'oro) 2009

Stazione (S. Toma') 2009

– Courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Alexander and Bonin, New York

– Courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Alexander and Bonin, New York

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Abdelkader Benchamma â&#x20AC;&#x201C; France, 1975

One and One, installation view at Memory Time, Le Printemps de Septembre 2009 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Photography: Arnaud Fourrier Courtesy of the artist

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Sculpture # 5 2010

Sculpture # 9 2011

Sculpture # 4 2010

– Photography: Renaud Sevaud Courtesy of the artist and ADN Gallery, Barcelona

– Courtesy of the artist and Galerie du Jour Agnès B, Paris

– Courtesy of the artist and ADN Gallery, Barcelona

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Ahmed Mater – Saudi Arabia, 1979

The Cowboy Code 2011

The artist with Antenna (white) 2010

– Courtesy of Prognosis Art

– Courtesy of the artist and Edge of Arabia Private Collection

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Ayman Yossri Daydban – Palestine, 1966

1967/1948 Flag 2010 – Courtesy of the artist

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Ra’I 2011 – Courtesy of Athr Gallery, Jeddah

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Mona Hatoum â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Lebanon, 1952

Drowning Sorrows (Gran Centenario), (detail) 2002 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist and Meessen de Clercq, Brussels

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Grater Divide 2002

Cage-à-deux 2002

– Photography: Iain Dickens Courtesy of White Cube, London

– Photography: Hugo Glendinning Courtesy of White Cube, London

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Abdulnasser Gharem â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Saudi Arabia, 1973

Message/Messenger 2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist and Edge of Arabia

Concrete Block (from the series Restored Behavior) 2009 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist and Edge of Arabia

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Concrete II (from the series Restored Behavior) 2008 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist and Edge of Arabia

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Driss Ouadahi – Morocco, 1959

Fences 1 2008

Fences, Hole 2 2011

– Photograph: David Stroud Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery, New York & San Francisco

– Photography: Amir Ouadahi Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery, New York & San Francisco

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Fayçal Baghriche – Algeria, 1972

Souvenir, 2009 and Épuration elective, 2004-09, installation view at La force de l’art, Le Grand Palais, Paris (2009) – Photography: Didier Plowy/CNAP Courtesy of the artist

Enveloppements 2010 – Courtesy of Collection Nadour

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Mounir Fatmi – Morocco, 1970

Save Manhattan 01 2004

Al Jazeera 2004-07

The Lost Springs 2011

– Photography: JP Senn Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hussenot, Paris

– Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hussenot, Paris

– Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hussenot, Paris

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Yto Barrada â&#x20AC;&#x201C; France, 1971

The Magician, film still 2003 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut and Polaris

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Container 1. Rust holes in the top of a shipping container (A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project) 2003 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut and Polaris

Wallpaper (A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project) 2001 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut and Polaris

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Ziad Abillama – Lebanon, 1969

Where are the Arabs, St Balesh Antelias installation detail 1992 – Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery, Beirut

Untitled (Arabes) 2011 – Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery, Beirut

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Yazan Khalili â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Palestine, 1981

Colour Correction (from the Camp series) 2007-10 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Courtesy of the artist and Newertown|Art

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Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Statements

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Ziad Abillama

Untitled (Arabes) (2011) stages the collapse of the dialectic between Self and Other, at the latest stage of Western imperialism. It is not a historical moment, but a crisis in philosophy, beyond the political.

The piece certainly witnesses the appearance of a nasty ‘other’, but it has less to do with ‘real Arabs’ per se as sovereign subjects, than with an ongoing meditation on the anxiety of Western science when dealing with the Arab world as an object of study.

Jananne Al-Ani

Shadow Sites II is a film that takes the form of an aerial journey. It is made up of images of a landscape bearing traces of natural and manmade activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures. Seen from above, the landscape appears abstracted, its buildings flattened and its inhabitants invisible to the human eye.

Only when the sun is at its lowest, do the features on the ground, the archaeological sites and settlements come to light. Such ‘shadow sites’ when seen from the air, map the latent images held by the landscape’s surface.

Much like a photographic plate, the landscape itself holds the potential to be exposed, thereby revealing the memory of its past. Historically, representations of the Middle Eastern landscape, from William Holman Hunt’s 1854 painting The Scapegoat to media images from the 1991 Desert Storm campaign have depicted the region as uninhabited and without sign of civilisation.

In response to the military’s use of digital technology and satellite navigation, Shadow Sites II recreates the aerial vantage point of such missions while taking an altogether different viewpoint of the land it surveys. The film burrows into the landscape as one image slowly dissolves into another, like a mineshaft tunnelling deep into a substrate of memories preserved over time.

Statement by Sharmini Pereira in collaboration with the artist

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Ahmed Alsoudani

These turbulent paintings depict a disfigured tableau of war and atrocity. Although the content of the paintings draw on my own experiences of recent wars in Iraq, the imagery of devastation and violence – occasionally laced with a morbid and barbed humour – evoke a universal experience of conflict and human suffering.

Deformed figures, some almost indistinguishable and verging on the bestial, intertwine and distort in vivid, surreal landscapes. Figures are often depicted at a moment of transition – through fear or agony – from human to grotesque.

Ziad Antar

In the year 2000, I purchased ten roles of expired black and white film from Studio Al Madani in Saida, South Lebanon. These films not only expired in 1976, but they were also poorly preserved, subjected to floods, humidity and fire damage.

It is the ruinous condition of the films that interested me as a medium for my work. As a result, the images are sometimes void of pigment, often damaged, blackened or blurred.

To add to the experiment, I was also using an old camera – a 1948 Kodak Reflex II – and I had to work through the constraints of these expired films, trying to play with light in order to create an image.

The outcome was always unpredictable and uncertain. The whole experiment lies in the idea that even I did not know the result before the images were printed. And when the images were printed, a blurry limit was created in what the spectator sees and what he believes.

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Ayman Baalbaki

My work is linked to the content of socio-politics, referencing images and symbols of local popular production and examining their broader international significance. Its focus is connected to the numerous troubles concerning the Middle East today and my visual language takes its cue from the familiar journalistic approach and aesthetic that has become symptomatic of these problems and their frequently violent iconography in the media.

Artistic domains are becoming vitally wide open; art is less Eurocentric, and has been set free from the categorisation of artistic schools and movements. I believe that my artwork can be identified using the contemporary artistic term ‘glocal’ – i.e. seeking meaning and inspiration within local visual culture, and expressing it through a plastic global language.

Empty Words is a project that combines images and texts: patterned images as represented by the ‘cretonne’ fabric, widely spread in the Levant area, perforated with embroidered, cutout texts borrowed from flirtatious frivolous poems/messages sent by lovers through SMS on Arabic satellite televisions – the new forums of exchange and free expression for the young generations, filling screens from Morocco to Iraq. The dichotomy lies in the shorthand superficiality of those shallow, insignificant texts devoid of meaning, as compared to the historical value of language in the Arab consciousness as the ultimate purveyor of culture, identity and pride.

Kalam Faregh, or Empty Words, is an art installation shedding light on the decadence facing actual discourse in the Arab world, and the necessity to stimulate critical thought in order to bring back to words the worth and respect they had in a civilisation in urgent need to revisit itself, its identity and its values.

Fayçal Baghriche

Primarily working with performance, photography and sculpture, my work explores the artist’s place in the social arena and the collective consciousness of symbols.

My work is marked by a unique approach to everyday existence and the forms of behaviour it induces. I employ semantic discrepancies and mises-en-scène to create breaches in how reality functions. He transforms the public realm into a venue for startling transgressions, absurd scenarios, and minimalist actions tinged with humour. Through recourse to the poetic I have shaped an artistic practice that embodies a distinctive state of mind and triggers thoughtful critical reaction.

The works Souvenir and Epuration élective employ different materials, but echo one another in a number of ways. The former is a luminous terrestrial globe, which turns so fast that it is impossible to distinguish continents or the demarcations that separate them from the oceans. For the latter work, I have vastly enlarged a page from a dictionary representing all the flags of the world and erased everything except the stars.

The installation evokes a simple, childlike decor: the Earth and the sky, or the universe and our planet. However, both works involve the deliberate blurring or erasing of specific elements which disrupts our perception of familiar images and national symbols. The terrestrial globe spins at such high speed that it blurs continental outlines and the geographical space of individual countries. The starry canvas is the result of a diligent exercise of erasure. National identities are done away with by distorting one of the most significant symbols of statehood – the national flag. The works invite us to look beyond superficial appearances and re-apprehend the reality they conceal.

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Lara Baladi

Ritual is a tender anchor. Through repetition we find comfort in an otherwise uncertain reality. It is this essence of ritual that is explored in Diary of the Future, an ensemble work, which emerged from the time preceding the death of my father.

The Arab tradition of reading the future from the residue left after drinking Turkish coffee was a perfect vehicle to record this period. My father’s visitors unwittingly became part of an elaborate ceremony. I documented and archived this process chronologically. This inventory graces Rose, the large scale digital montage, central to Diary of the Future; a diary of individual lives running parallel yet interlaced, crossing each other and echoed in the deltas and rivulets fixed within the cups.

Our past, present and future are entwined. Just as the formations in the cups would differ from one day to the next, so our futures are defined by a constantly shifting present.

Diary of the Future points to an intangible yearning we feel in the face of mortality. The cups, ex-votos (out of a promise), hint at a desire for something eternal. But change is our only certainty.

Yto Barrada

‘The hands of the magician are faster than the eyes of the spectator.’ Abdelouahid El Hamri, aka Sinbad of the Straits In The Magician (2003), a private display of illusions is presented in the courtyard of Mr El Hamri’s house in Tangier, including the apparition of pingpong balls and white doves, swallowing razor blades, and an attempt to reproduce his difficult trick ‘How to Make a Chicken Go to Sleep (El sueno de un gallo)’.

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Taysir Batniji

The title of GH0809 is an abbreviation of ‘Gaza Houses 2008-2009’; its letters and numbers resembling an illusory real estate company.

The project was conceived after the army of the Israeli occupation launched a war on Gaza in 2008-09. This war claimed the lives of many Palestinian civilians, most of them children, caused by the widespread destruction of houses and facilities.

A large percentage of Gaza’s inhabitants live below the poverty line. To build a house takes someone’s entire family’s savings; it is likely the most important achievement of their lives.

From the beginning, the Israeli occupation has deliberately used the destruction of homes as a means of collective punishment for Palestinians, thus destroying the inhabitants’ memories, and causing displacement and massive upheaval.

As I have been denied access into Gaza since 2006, I delegated the task of photographing the houses to the journalist Sami al-Ajrami.

In a documentary or ‘neutral’ way, we gathered specific data on these houses to accompany the pictures, presenting each just as in the window of a real estate office. We were able to gather more than 150 images, and facts about 33 houses, some of which had been completely destroyed, and some damaged.

What concerns me here is the treatment of the topic, as is always the case in my works that take on the situation in Palestine.

I use a visual frame derived from daily life by evoking commercial advertising, but with altered content. In this contradiction between form and content is an invitation to contemplate a reality far from the familiar, and beyond the scope of a journalistic report.

My works are perhaps less concerned with a specific topic or situation, and moreover an inquiry into representation itself, testing new forms and techniques, or reappropriating existing forms, in an attempt to go challenge familiarity, whether the image in question is journalistic, documentary or ‘artistic’.

Manal Al-Dowayan

Suspended Together is an installation that gives the impression of movement and freedom.

However, a closer look at the 200 doves brings the realisation that the doves are actually frozen and suspended, with no hope of flight. An even closer look shows that each dove carries on its body the permission document that allows a Saudi woman to travel. Notwithstanding their circumstances, all Saudi women are required to have this document, issued by their appointed male guardian.

The artist reached out to a large group of leading female figures from Saudi Arabia to donate their permission documents for inclusion in this artwork. Suspended Together carries the documents of award-winning scientists, educators, journalists, engineers, artists and leaders with groundbreaking achievements that contributed to society. The youngest contributor is six months old and the oldest is 60 years old. In the artist’s words, ‘regardless of age and achievement, when it comes to travel, all these women are treated like a flock of suspended doves’.

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Abdelkader Benchamma

My current practice links drawing, writing and installation. In the group show Draw at the Galerie du Jour in 2004, and in my solo show at the same gallery in 2007, a multifarious form of drawing started to emerge, which references landscape painting as much as fresco and minimalist drawing.

The drawing One and One, was realised in situ, drawn directly onto the ceiling of an art centre. It is conceived as an installation. One and One gathers two ideas regarding the origin of the universe, conjuring up a vision borrowed from religious iconographic codes alongside an enormous explosion of transforming matter – a primary big bang. These two representations of the world could look at first dramatically different, but they are linked by their shared uncertainty, their mysterious signs and their ability to provoke contemplation and wonder.

Questions of transformations, flux and dynamism are at the heart of the my concerns.

The Sculpture series, started in 2009, investigates other possibilities. The drawing is more minimalist, formed by a specific technique which brings to mind the aesthetic of a scanner or of an unlikely sort of modelling.

Mounir Fatmi

Spring Cleaning! by Franck Hermann Ekra (winner of 2010 AICA Incentive Prize for Young Critics)

The Lost Springs, Mounir Fatmi’s minimal installation, displays the 22 flags of the states of the Arab League at half mast. In the Tunisian and Egyptian pavilions, two brooms refer to the upheavals that led to the fall of President Ben Ali in Tunisia and President Mubarak in Egypt. This evocative, subtle and trenchant work of art has been inspired by the current protests against neo-patriarchal powers in the Maghreb, the Mashriq and the Arabian Peninsula.

In the anthropology of the state, the flag is a symbol rich in identity and attribution. It is part of a secular liturgy which establishes a holy space for the politically sacred. Mounir Fatmi seems to have captured this with his intuition of an iconic device halfway between the altar and the universalizing official dramaturgy.

He gets to the core of the democratic representation, to the capacity to metaphorically catalyse the civil link. There is a touch of the domestic in this contemporary heraldry.

The necessary cleansing that Mounir Fatmi suggests does not concern the community but rather the dictators who dream themselves as demiurges. It calls for action-creation. The brooms ironically point to some dynamic process and stimulating imitation effect. Who’s next? What else should be dusted? Where has the rubbish been hidden?

Through the aesthetics of sweeping, the artist testifies to some timeless spring. A standard bearer of the pan-Arabic revolutionary revivalism and its enchanting utopia, he breaks away from the prevailing monotony of always disenchanted tomorrows, irreverently using the devices of complicity through self-sufficient references, and blurring the familiar novel and popular romance. Giving his work an essential and symbolic function, he dematerialises it, as if to repeat over and over again that symbols are food for thought.

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Abdulnasser Gharem

My relationship with the urban environment is reciprocal; streets and the cities inspire a particularly critical reaction.

As a socially engaged artist, I need to take back to the people, to the city, to the built environment.

In previous works I have related the story of social environments marked for destruction, regardless of the fate of the people who live in it, or of disaster arising from a misplaced trust in the security of concrete. With the current work, I turn my attention to the false promise of the manufactured modern city.

Viewing 3-D models for the future cities springing up across the Gulf, focuses attention on the disjunction between the apparent utopia of the future they appear to offer and the daily, complex and problematic reality of our actual urban lives.

These cities can be a distraction, a vehicle exploited by bureaucracies who wish to divert the attention of a sophisticated population away from a reality which is not model. Through the use of stamps, I underline the inevitable stultifying and complicating effect the bureaucracy will have, even as it works to build its vision for a better society.

Why do we look to a utopian future when we have social issues we need to address now? I am not opposed to this brave new world but I want to see governments engage with the streets and cities, and the problems of their people, as they are now. Why build new cities when there are poor people we need to look after? This is a distraction: we should not be afraid of change.

Raafat Ishak

A formal request to immigrate was sent to 194 governments, 97 of whom provided a response. The responses varied from congratulatory notes to outright suspicious interrogations of motive. What was evident from the responses was that inherent laws and regulations, particular to each state, were in fact a conglomeration of sameness.

Race, language and religion as well as economic and professional qualifications were key criteria. What was not surprising is that 97 states chose not to respond at all.

Responses to an immigration request from one hundred and ninety four governments (2006â&#x20AC;&#x201C;09) constitutes 194 painted panels, depicting the faded flag of each state superimposed with a summary of each response, or no response, in stylised and phonetic Arabic text. The panels are arranged alphabetically to induce an underlying sameness, and to de-aestheticise the command of one state over another. Flags are inherent, abstract representations of nation states, further obscured and compounded by Arabic text and its relational significance to the word, as form and meaning intertwine.

Late capitalist societies are characterised by their willful engagement in restricted and mandated versions of a global and open world. This phenomenon is essentially subversive in that it appropriates good governance and the future of promise for covert motivations. What on the surface seems like an unprecedented opportunity to reclaim the world by self and citizen is obstructed by an inherent lack of freedom, in particular the freedom to cross borders and migrate from one distinct place to another. Often it is barriers such as race, language and religion, to name a few, that hinder this process in a time of presumed great hopes and opportunities.

Responses to an immigration request from one hundred and ninety four governments constitutes a polemic veneration towards otherness whilst engaging in a reconsideration of self and citizen as a contrivance of nation states mired in economic, social, political and historical relevance.

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Emily Jacir

embrace is a circular, motorised sculpture fabricated to look like an empty luggage conveyor system found in airports. It remains perfectly still and quiet, but when a viewer comes near the sculpture their presence activates the work; it turns on and starts moving. The work’s diameter refers to the height of the artist. The work symbolises, amongst many things, waiting and the etymology of the word ‘embrace’.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke

The Flying Carpet is an Oriental fairytale, a dream of instantaneous and boundless travel, but when I visited Venice I saw that illegal immigrants use carpets to fly the coop. They sell counterfeit goods in order to make some money for living. If they are caught by the police they risk expulsion.

There was a butcher in Tunis who wanted to honour Ben Ali. His idea was to call his shop ‘Butcher shop of the 7th November’, the day when Ben Ali assumed the Presidency in a ‘medical’ coup d'état from then President Habib Bourguiba. After he did so, he disappeared without a trace.

In winter 2010, I visited Cairo, a city which has more citizens than the country where I was born. This metropolis is characterised by strong contradictions: tradition and modernism, culture and illiteracy, poverty and wealth, bureaucracy and spirituality. All voices fade through the noisy hustle of this melting pot, but if you risk a closer look on the walls you will find the whisper of the people carved into stone.

The three works document the crossing of borders: traversing the European border leads to problems of being an EU-citizen or not; the wide line between insult and homage was transgressed through the unspoken proximity of slaughter and governance of the former Tunisian regime; and the longing for freedom in the police state of Cairo was already written into the whispering walls of the city.

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Yazan Khalili

The ‘Colour Correction’ series is about losing lifestyle, mobility, freedom of choice and even the ability to dream of a brighter tomorrow. According to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, these losses lead to a permanent state of emergency, where the possibility of thinking and living in the present becomes impossible. Particularly drawing from the urban realities prevalent in Palestine, this photographic project focuses on refugee camps and on the trauma they have embodied since 1948. It is not an objective representation, but by all practical means, suggestive. It is a re-production of space, achieved by redeploying the same architectural elements involved in ensuing the continuation of the trauma – the waves of concrete mass, the connoted poverty, the clusters of inconclusive structures – to create a space that produces the possibility for hope.

This specific image shows Al-Amari Refugee Camp, located inside/beside/outside Ramallah City. The form of the camp does not represent its economic status, but rather its loss and trauma as a political manifestation that persists due to the continuous emergence of ephemeral homes, contradictory ways of living and unbearably unstable relationships between Palestinians and their surrounding landscape. Altering the refugee camp’s colours is a symbolic act. It aims to fill the loss – in the way a child fills the blanks in colouring books – and thus reignite the possibility of hope. Here I am attempting to appropriate an urban landscape that reminds us of the tragedy – of their existence and our disappearance – in order to subvert memory into a desired future.

Ahmed Mater

Antenna is a symbol and a metaphor for growing up in Saudi Arabia. As children, we used to climb up to the roofs of our houses and hold these television antennas up to the sky.

We were trying to catch a signal from beyond the nearby border with Yemen or Sudan; searching – like so many of my generation in Saudi – for music, for poetry, for a glimpse of a different kind of life. I think this work can symbolise the whole Arab World right now… searching for a different kind of life through other stories and other voices. This story says a lot about my life and my art; I catch art from the story of my life, I don’t know any other way.

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Driss Ouadahi

Over the past seven years I have been painting urban landscapes collaged from elements such as high-rise housing blocks, streets and parking lots, playgrounds and small green spaces – all to be found in metropolitan suburbs worldwide. The suburban place – ‘Dans Cité’ – bears a direct relation to and is reflected by the ‘Densité’, the density of the work. Through my paintings I express my interest in developing a universally readable visual language from the light and atmosphere of the urban landscape. More recently I have been focusing on two types of urban elements – one is tiled passageways as often found in subway systems, conveying the claustrophic and scary atmosphere of blocked escape routes. The second type is spatial demarcations, depictions of chainlinked fences, such as those in The Future of a Promise, which are both minimalist abstractions and signifiers of separation.

Ayman Yossri Daydban

Ihramat is a concept born of a defining tradition and custom adopted during the holy Hajj pilgrimage. This series uses authentic ihramat, the customary white cloth worn by pilgrims to Makkah, stretched onto wooden frames and presented in multiple variations. Traditionally, every man performing his pilgrimage is required to wear the white cloth. It erases any distinguishing features between himself and his neighbour and presents them as one, stripped down to their purest form, equal and united under the same faithful brotherhood.

Ra’i, from the Arabic language meaning guardian, is made up of six panels, each stretched with the authentic white cotton ihram and presented as an inverted pyramid.

This piece represents the ultimate promise of a social ideal. This is a challenge to the conventional idea of a hierarchy; the most powerful dominate and rule at the top, over the masses at the bottom. By inverting this pyramid, the work highlights a ruler’s duty and responsibility to serve the people.

At a distance, the ihram seem identical, but as you approach distinct patterns begin to appear.

Parallels can be drawn with social ideals; each panel represents a building block in society. Various groups share differences and similarities in their patterning, yet work together under a greater umbrella to flow in peace and harmony.

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*Indicates inclusion in The Future of a Promise exhibition *Raafat Ishak, Responses to an immigration request from one hundred and ninety four governments, 2006-09, oil and gesso on MDF, 194 panels: 30 × 21cm each. Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Lara Baladi, Turkish coffee cups and labels, samples from the photographic documentation for the Diary of the Future project, 2007-08. Courtesy of the artist.

List of Artworks

*Lara Baladi, Rose, 2010, digital collage and archival print on gesso, 410 × 410cm, Edition of 8 (5 on somerset paper, 3 on gesso). Courtesy of the artist, Gallery Isabelle van de Eynde, Dubai and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis.

Taysir Batniji, The Sky Over Gaza, 2001-04, lambda print on paper, 100 × 72cm each. Courtesy of the artist and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis. *Taysir Batniji, GH0809, 2010, 103 digital colour prints on A4 paper, with Plexiglas and retro lighting, each print 35 × 27cm, Edition of 7 + 2 AP. Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut.

Taysir Batniji, Watchtowers, 2008, series of 26 photographs, black and white digital prints, 40 × 50cm each, Edition of 8 + 2 AP. Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut. *Jananne Al-Ani, Shadow Sites II, production stills Aerial I, III, IV, II (shown in catalogue), 2011, single channel digital video. Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2011, and courtesy of the artist. *Ayman Baalbaki, Al Maw3oud, 2011, oil on canvas and printed fabric, 300 × 200cm. Private collection.

Ayman Baalbaki, Wake up Sisyphus, 2008, acrylic on printed fabric mounted on canvas, neon, installation, 270 × 200cm. Private collection.

Ayman Baalbaki, I Built My Home, 2008, mixed media and neon, 192 × 149 × 80cm. Private collection. *Ayman Baalbaki, Kalam Faregh (Empty Words), 2011, embroidered cut-outs on printed fabric, 300 × 300 × 300cm. Private collection. *Ziad Antar, Burj Khalifa, Dubai 2010, black and white silver print, 125 × 125cm, Edition 2/5. Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, and courtesy of the artist and Selma Feriani Gallery, London. Private collection. *Ziad Antar, UAE Coast 3, 2010, black and white silver print, 125 × 125cm, Edition 1/3. Courtesy of the artist and Selma Feriani Gallery, London. Private collection. *Ziad Antar, Cairo, February 2005, black and white silver print, 125 × 125cm, Edition 1/3. Courtesy of the artist and Selma Feriani Gallery, London.

Private collection. *Kader Attia, La Colonne Sans Fin, 2010, megaphone: 34 × 24 × 24cm, Edition 2/3.

Courtesy of Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

Kader Attia, History of a Myth: The Small Dome of the Rock, 2010, multimedia installation. Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2010 and courtesy of the artist and the Kader Attia studio. *Manal Al-Dowayan, Suspended Together, 2011, fibreglass with laminate coating.

Courtesy of the artist and Cuadro Fine Art Gallery, Dubai. *Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 350 × 305cm. Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison, New York & London. Private collection. *Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 305 × 400cm. Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison, New York & London and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis.

Ahmed Alsoudani, Baghdad 1, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 210 × 370cm.

Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison, New York & London.

Private collection, London. *Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Butcher Bliss, 2010, porcelain prints of four ruminant stomachs (Abomasum, Omasum, Reticulum, Rumen), chrome-plated stainless steel meat hooks, metallic bar, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. *Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Impressions of Cairo, 2010, paper and light, 15 parts: 36 × 51cm each, total dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. *Nadia Kaabi Linke, Flying Carpets, 2011, chrome plated aluminium, stainless steel and threads, 1300 × 340 × 420cm. Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2011.

Abdelkader Benchamma, One and One, 2009, installation view at Memory Time, Le Printemps de Septembre (2009), felt pen on ceiling, 800 × 450cm.

Courtesy of the artist. *Abdelkader Benchamma, Sculpture #5, 2010, felt pen and ink on paper, 180 × 130cm. Courtesy of ADN Gallery, Barcelona. *Abdelkader Benchamma, Sculpture #9, 2011, black ink on paper, 180 × 130cm.

Courtesy of Galerie du Jour Agnès B, Paris. *Abdelkader Benchamma, Sculpture #4, 2010, pen and ink on paper, 180 × 130cm.

Courtesy of ADN Gallery, Barcelona.

Ahmed Mater, The Cowboy Code, 2011, 3000 plastic cap gun discs, 312 × 600cm.

Courtesy of Prognosis Art. Private collection.

*Ahmed Mater, Antenna, 2010, neon tube, 150 × 150 × 50cm, Edition of 2 + 1.

Courtesy of the artist and Edge of Arabia. Private collection.

Ayman Yossri Daydban, 1967/1948 Flag, 2010, stainless steel sheets 116 × 49 × 26cm. Courtesy of the artist. *Ayman Yossri Daydban, Ra’I, 2011, stretched Ihramat fabric, 240 × 480cm.

Courtesy of Athr Gallery, Jeddah. *Mona Hatoum, Drowning Sorrows (Gran Centenario), 2002, glass, 14.5 × 300cm, Edition 2/3. Courtesy of the artist. Private collection.

Mona Hatoum, Grater Divide, 2002, mild steel, 204 × 3.5cm (variable width).

Courtesy of White Cube, London.

Mona Hatoum, Cage-à-deux, 2002, mild steel and painted MDF, 201.5 × 315 × 199.5cm. Courtesy of White Cube, London and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis.

Abdulnasser Gharem, Message/Messenger, 2010, installation.

Courtesy of the artist and Edge of Arabia. Private collection.

Abdulnasser Gharem, Concrete Block, 2009, from the series Restored Behaviour, industrial lacquer paint on rubber stamps on 9mm wooden sculpture, 95 × 95 × 50cm. Courtesy of the artist and Edge of Arabia.

Abdulnasser Gharem, Concrete II, 2008, from the series Restored Behaviour, industrial lacquer paint on rubber stamps on 9mm plywood, 110 × 210cm.

Courtesy of the artist and Edge of Arabia. *Abnulnasser Gharem, Hajar al Asas (2011) in production at the time this publication went to press. *Driss Ouadahi, Fences 1, 2008, oil on canvas, 170 × 180cm. Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery, New York & San Francisco. *Driss Ouadahi, Fences, Hole 2, 2011, oil on linen, 170 × 180cm. Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery, New York & San Francisco. *Fayçal Baghriche, Souvenir, 2009, terrestrial globe and motor, 180 × 120cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

Fayçal Baghriche, Épuration elective, 2004-09, wallpainting, 600 × 900cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

Fayçal Baghriche, Enveloppements, 2010, 28 flags of different countries, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Collection Nadour.

Mounir Fatmi, Save Manhattan 01, 2004, table, books published after 11 September 2001, strings, spotlight, approximately 150 × 90cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hussenot, Paris and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis.

Mounir Fatmi, Al Jazeera, 2004-07, sculpture sequence ‘bas relief’: coaxial antenna cable on wood panel with staples, 160 × 130cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hussenot, Paris. *Mounir Fatmi, The Lost Springs, 2011, 2 brooms of 3 metres, 22 flags of the Arab League. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hussenot, Paris. *Yto Barrada, The Magician, 2003, video, sound, 18’. Directed and filmed by Yto Barrada with Abdelouahid El Hamri, aka Sinbad of the Straits. Edited by Benoît Rossel. Produced by Yto Barrada with the support of Galerie Polaris. Courtesy of the artist and Studio Yto. Yto Barrada, Container 1. Rust holes in the top of a shipping container (A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project), Tangier 2003, c-print, 60 × 60cm. Courtesy Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut.

Yto Barrada, Wallpaper (A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project), Tangier 2001, c-print, 60 × 60cm. Courtesy Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut. *Emily Jacir, embrace, 2005, rubber, stainless steel, aluminium, motor and motion sensors, 50 × 179cm diam. Courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Emily Jacir, Stazione, 2009, an unrealised public intervention, digital c-print on aluminium, 46.4 × 60.3cm each, Edition of 11. Courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Ziad Abillama, Where are the Arabs, St Balesh Antelias installation detail, 1992 Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery, Beirut. *Ziad Abillama, Untitled (Arabes), 2011, painted aluminium, 350cm high.

Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery, Beirut. *Yazan Khalili, Colour Correction 2 (from the Camp series), 2007-10, digital lambda c-type print, 100 × 66cm, Edition of 6 + 1AP. Courtesy of the artist and Newertown|Art.

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Books Ahmed, Akbar S., Hastings Donnan, eds., Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1994)

Further Reading

Amirsadeghi, Hossein, Maryam Homayoun Eisler, eds., Art & Patronage: The Middle East (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010) Amirsadeghi, Hossein, Hamid Keshmirshekan, Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009) Amirsadeghi, Hossein, Salwa Mikdadi, Nada M. Shabout, eds., New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (London: TransGlobe Publishing Ltd, 2009) Clement, Henry M., Robert Springborg, Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Cooke, Miriam, Dissident Syria: making oppositional arts official (London, Durham, UK: Duke University Press, 2007) Eigner, Saeb, Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran (London: Merrell Publishers Ltd, 2010) Farjam, Lisa, Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2009) Gibbons, Joan, Contemporary Art and Memory (London: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2007) Guazzone, Laura, Daniela Pioppi, eds., The Arab State and Neo-Liberal Globalization: The Restructuring of State Power in the Middle East (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2009) King, Diane E., Middle Eastern Belongings (London: Routledge, 2010) Lloyd, Fran, ed., Contemporary Arab Women’s Art: Dialogues of the Present (London, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 1999) Lloyd, Fran, ed., Displacement and difference: contemporary Arab visual culture in the Diaspora (London: Saffron Books, 2001) Schulze, Kirsten E., Martin Stokes, Colm Campbell eds., Nationalism, Minorities and Diasporas: identities and rights in the Middle East (London: I.B. Taurus, 1996) Sloman, Paul, ed., Contemporary in the Middle East (London: Black Dog Publishing Ltd, 2009)

Shabout, Nada M., Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Florida, US: University Press of Florida, 2007) Sloman, Paul, ed., Contemporary Art in the Middle East (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2009) Toufec, Jalal, ed., Review of Photographic Memory, (Beirut: Arab Image Foundation, 2004) Watenpaugh, Keith David, Being Modern in the Middle East (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Selected Essays & Articles Araeen, Rasheed, ‘Preliminary notes for the understanding of the historical significance of geometry in Arab / Islamic thought, and its suppressed role in the genealogy of world history’, in Third Text: Critical perspectives on contemporary art and culture, 24 (2010), pp. 509–519 Downey, Anthony, ‘What Do Artists and Institutions Know: The Production of Cultural Knowledge in the Middle East Today’, in Art & Patronage in the Far and Middle East, ed. by Hossein Amirsadeghi and Maryam Homayoun Eisler (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010) Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘Infrastructure and Ideas: Contemporary Art in the Middle East’, Art Monthly, 324 (2009), p. 40 Leticia Cordero Vega, ‘Arab art: a space in today’s culture’, Atlántica, 21 (1998), pp.

51–52 Pablo Lafuente, ‘Art and the foreigner’s gaze: a report on Contemporary Arab Representations’, Afterall, Spring/Summer (2007), pp. 12–23

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Online

Exhibition Catalogues

Chakar, Tony, ‘The Present Postponed’ (2005) <http://www.arteleku.net/publications/ publishing/zehar/51-resistance-and-creation/ the-present-postponed.-tony-chakar> [accessed 19 April 2011]

Behkalam, Kaya, Paula Bugni, Beatrice Catanzaro, et al. eds., Damascus: Tourists, Artists, Secret Agents, for Reloading Images: Damascus/Work in Progress 2008, Damascus, Syria

Shabout, Nada M., ‘Are Images Global?’,Tate Papers (2009) <http://www.tate.org.uk/ research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/ shabout.shtm> [accessed 18 April 2011]

Daftari, Fereshteh, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, New York: Museum Of Modern Art, 2006

Tawadros, Gilane, ‘Reading (and Curating) from Right to Left’, Tate Papers (2009) <http:// www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/ tatepapers/09autumn/tawadros.shtm> [accessed 19 April 2011] Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen, ‘On the Politics of Art and Space in Beirut’, Tate Papers (2009) <http://www.tate.org.uk/research/ tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/wilson_ goldie.shtm> [accessed 19 April 2011]

Khbeiz, Bilal, Globalization and the manufacture of transient events, Beirut: Ashkal Alwan–The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, 2003 Modern Art Oxford, Out of Beirut, Oxford, UK: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 2006 O’Brian, David, Davis Porchaska, eds., Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists, Illinois, US: Krannert Art Museum– University of Illinois, 2004 Pakistan National Council for the Arts, Living Traditions: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, Islamabad, Pakistan: National Art Gallery, 2009 Persekian, Jack, DisORIENTation: Contemporary Arab artists from the Middle East, Berlin: House of World Cultures, 2003 Porter, Venetia, Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East, London: The British Museum, 2006 Tohme Christine, Mona Abu Rayyan, eds., Home Works: A forum on cultural practices in the region Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, Beirut: Ashkal Alwan– The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, 2002 Tohme, Christine, ed., Home Works II: A forum on cultural practices, Beirut: Ashkal Alwan–The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, 2003 Tohme, Christine, ed., Home Works III: A forum on cultural practices, Beirut: Ashkal Alwan–The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, 2005 Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon, Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002

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Ziad Abillama

Biographies

Ziad Abillama was born in 1969 in Lebanon. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Amherst College, USA. The artist states that he was reborn in the US during the first Gulf War in 1991, and later returned to Lebanon where he now lives and works.

Jananne Al-Ani Jananne Al-Ani was born in Kirkuk, Iraq in 1966. Working with photography, film and video, Al-Ani has a longstanding interest in the power of testimony and the documentary tradition, be it through intimate recollections of absence and loss or the exploration of more official accounts of historic events. Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at Darat al Funu, Amman (2010); Art Now, Tate Britain (2005) and the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (1999). Recent group exhibitions include Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum, London (2011); Closer, Beirut Art Centre (2009); The Screen-Eye or the New Image: 100 videos to rethink the world, Casino Luxembourg (2007); Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006) and The World is a Stage: Stories Behind Pictures, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2005). Al-Ani has also co-curated touring exhibitions including Veil (2003-04) and Fair Play (2001-02). Recipient of the East International Award and the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award, her work can be found in public collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Modern, London; the Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC and Darat al Funun, Amman. AlAniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photographic work is represented by Rose Issa Projects, London.

Manal Al-Dowayan Manal Al-Dowayan was born and raised in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the British Councilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Common Ground project (2006), the Saudi-Italian artist exchange, Nawafith (2007-09), and various Edge of Arabia exhibitions (200811). In 2009 she was a resident artist at the Delfina Foundation in London and attended the Clore Leadership programme. In 2010 she was a resident artist at Cuadro Fine Art Gallery in Dubai, and she is currently part of the British Council International Cultural Leaders programme. Manal has also exhibited extensively regionally as well as internationally, notably at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), the 2010 Berlin Biennial and Contemporary Istanbul.

Her artworks are part of the permanent collections of the British Museum, the Jordan National Museum of Fine Art, the Abdul Latif Jamil Foundation, the Delfina Foundation in London, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), the Nadour Foundation in Germany, and the Barjeel Foundation in Sharjah. Manal is represented by Cuadro Fine Art Gallery in Dubai.

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Ahmed Alsoudani Born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1975, Ahmed Alsoudani graduated from the Yale School of Art 2008 and currently lives and works in New York. His work has been included in museum exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2011), The Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar (2011) and the Saatchi Gallery’s Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East(2009).

A monograph of his work has recently been published by Hatje Cantz (2009) and he has been profiled in Der Spiegel, Art + Auctionand Canvas Magazine. His work has been critically reviewed in The Sunday Timesand The Independent, Artnetand other publications. Alsoudani’s work is held in the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, the Pinault Foundation collection, the Qatar Museum and private collections around the world. His work will be featured in the Iraq Pavilion at the 2011 54th Venice Biennale and also shown in the Pinault Foundation at Palazzo Grassi. Alsoudani is represented by Haunch of Venison Gallery, London.

Ziad Antar Ziad Antar was born in 1978 in Saida, Lebanon. He obtained a degree in Agricultural Engineering in 2001 and has been working with video and photography since 2002. Antar’s work is held in a number of international institutions including the Pompidou Centre, Paris and the FRAC Centre (Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain). His work has been exhibited around the world, most recently at the Sharjah Biennial (2011) and as part of Live Cinema/In the Round: Contemporary Art from the East Mediterraneanat the Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA. Ziad Antar is represented by Selma Feriani Gallery, London.

Kader Attia Born in Dugny, France in 1970, Kader Attia spent his childhood between France and Algeria, between the Christian Occident and the Islamic Maghreb. The more he grew up, the more he felt being ‘in between’ as a root of his identities. His work explores the impact of Western cultural and political capitalism on the Middle East and North Africa, as well as how this residual strain of struggle and resistance to colonisation impacts Arab youth, particularly in the banlieues(suburbs) of France where Attia lived. While each new series employs different materials, symbols and scale, Attia’s practice continually returns to a sustained look at the poetic dimensions and complexities of contemporary life. Recent awards include the Cairo Biennial Prize (2008) and the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2010). Attia’s work has been widely exhibited at major international institutions including the ICA, Boston, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Saatchi Gallery, London.

Attia is represented by Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin and Cologne, and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna.

Ayman Baalbaki Ayman Baalbaki was born in 1975 in Odeissé, Lebanon. He studied Fine Arts in Beirut and at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

He has exhibited extensively in Beirut and Paris, and in a solo show at Rosa Issa, London in 2009. He lives and works in Beirut and is represented by Agial Gallery, Beirut.

Fayçal Baghriche Born in 1972 in Skikda, Algeria, Fayçal Baghriche studied at the Villa Arson, Nice before moving to Paris to help create an artist’s residence (La Villa du Lavoir) and a curatorial structure (Le Comissariat). His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in France and internationally; among the most recent, As the Land Expands at Al Riwaq Art Space, Barhain in 2010, La force de l’art at the Grand Palais, Paris in 2009, and Architecture of Survival at Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2008. Most recently, Le Quartier in Quimper presented an important solo show of his work entitled Quelque chose plutôt que rien.

Lara Baladi Egyptian-Lebanese artist Lara Baladi was born in Beirut, raised in Paris and educated in London. She has lived and worked in Cairo since 1997.

The amalgamation of her experiences – production manager in advertising photography, radio animator, photojournalist, archival researcher as a member of the Arab Image Foundation, magazine editorial director, and curator for exhibitions and artist residencies – has carried over into her art practice. Her work ranges from photography, video, prints, visual montages, installations and architectural constructions to tapestries and perfume.

In 2011, with a group of activists, she launched radiota7rir.com, the first free speech Egyptian radio. Baladi’s work has been widely published and exhibited, and is held in public and private collections around the world. She was awarded the Grand Nile prize at the Cairo Biennial 2008/09. Baladi is represented by the Townhouse Gallery, Brancolini & Grimaldi Gallery and Gallery ISVDE. Yto Barrada Yto Barrada grew up between Paris and Tangier, Morocco. She studied history and political science at the Sorbonne, and photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Recent exhibitions include the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Since 2006, Barrada has been the director and co-founder of the Cinémathèque de Tanger in Morocco. Her 2011 exhibitions – of photography, film, publications, prints and sculptures – include her artist-of-the-year show at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, and the Venice Biennale.

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Taysir Batniji Born in Gaza in 1966, Taysir Batniji studied art at Al-Najah University in Nablus, on the West Bank. At the end of 1994, he obtained fellowship to study at the School of Fine Arts in Bourges. Since then, he has been dividing his time between France and Palestine. During this period spent between two countries and two cultures, he has developed a multi-media practice, focusing on photographic or video images since 2001. Batniji has participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe and internationally, including This is Not Cinema!at Fresnoy (2002), the 50th Venice Bienniale (2003), Contemporary Arab Representations, Heterotopias(Thessaloniki Biennial Festival) in Greece and the Sharjah Biennial (UAE) in 2007, as well as other personal and group exhibitions around the world. Taysir Batniji is represented by Sfeir Semler Gallery in Hamburg and in Beirut.

Abdelkader Benchamma Abdelkader Benchamma was born in 1975 in France to Algerian parents.

He graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in 2003.

Benchamma was part of the 2009 Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, curated by Christian Bernard, and Told Untold Retold at the Mathaf Museum, Qatar. In April 2011, his solo show, Dark Matter, was held at the Galerie du Jour.

Mounir Fatmi Mounir Fatmi was born in 1970 in Tangier, Morocco and now lives and works in Paris, France. His work explores ideas of desecration and deconstruction and the end of dogmas and ideologies. Constructing visual spaces and symbolic games that aim to free the viewer from their preconceptions, Fatmi’s multi-media practice encompassing video, installation, drawing, painting and sculpture brings to light doubts, fears and desires and directly addresses current events. His work has been exhibited at major international institutions such as the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London. He has participated in several biennials including Venice, Seville and Sharjah. In 2010 he was awarded the Cairo Biennial Prize.

Abdulnasser Gharem Born in 1973 in Khamis Mushait where he lives and works today, Abdulnasser Gharem is both a practising conceptual artist and a lieutenant colonel in the Saudi Arabian Army. In 1992 Gharem graduated from the King Abdulaziz Academy before attending The Leader Institute in Riyadh. In 2003 he studied at the Al-Miftaha Arts Village in Abha and in 2004 they staged a group exhibition, Shattah, which was a significant step in the recent history of contemporary art in Saudi Arabia. His work now features in important collections such as that of the British Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, positioning him as a pioneer of conceptual art.

Mona Hatoum Mona Hatoum was born in 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon. She studied at Beirut University College (1970-72) and settled in London in 1975, attending the Byam Shaw School of Art (1975-79) and the Slade School of Art (1979-81).

Hatoum has held teaching positions in London, Maastricht, Cardiff, and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include Bourj at Alexander and Bonin, New York (2011), Bunker at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London (2011), and Witness at the Beirut Art Center (2010).

Raafat Ishak Raafat Ishak was born in Cairo in 1967 and emigrated to live and work in Melbourne, Australia in 1982. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, and recent solo shows include Raafat Ishak: Work in Progressat The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne. His work is held in important public and private collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, RACV, Melbourne and the State Government of Victoria.

Ishak lives and works in Melbourne, Australia and is represented by Sutton Gallery, Fitzroy.

Emily Jaci Emily Jacir was born in 1970 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and now lives and works in Ramallah and New York. Solo exhibitions include the Beirut Art Center (2010), Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009) and the Kunstmuseum, St Gallen (2008). Jacir participated in the 51st (2005), 52nd (2007), and 53rd (2009) Venice Biennale, the 15th Sydney Biennial (2006), Sharjah Biennial 7 (2005) and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003). She received the Hugo Boss Prize (2008), the Prince Claus Award (2007) and a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2007). She is Professor and member of the Academic Board at the International Academy of Art Palestine (2006-11), and Resident Professor at Home Workspace Program, Beirut (2011-12).

Nadia Kaabi-Linke Nadia Kaabi-Linke was born in 1978 in Tunis to a Russian mother and Tunisian father. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Tunis (1999) before receiving a PhD from the Sorbonne University in Paris (2008). Her installations, objects and pictorial works are embedded in urban contexts, intertwined with memory and geographically and politically constructed identities. She held her first solo show, Archives des banalités tunisoises at gallery El Marsa, Tunis (2008) and her major solo show in Europe, Tatort at Gallery Christian Hosp, Berlin (2010). She has participated in several international group exhibitions that include Drawn from Life, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendall, UK (2011), Different Abstractions at Green Cardamom, London (2011), Split at Darb 1718 Contemporary, Cairo (2010); Aftermath, the 25th Alexandria Biennial (2009); Provisions for the Future, the 9th Sharjah Biennial (2009); Africaines, 2nd Pan-African Culture Festival,

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Algiers (2009) and the 30th Pontevedra Art Biennial (2008). In 2009 she was awarded the Jury Prize by the Alexandria Biennial, and in 2011 she won the Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Kaabi-Linke is represented by Green Cardamom in London and the Gallery Christian Hosp in Berlin.

Yazan Khalili Yazan Khalili was born in 1981 in Syria, and he lives and works in and out of Palestine. Khalili received a degree in architecture from Birzeit University in 2003 and in 2010 graduated with a Masters degree from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London. He was one of the founding members of Zan Design Studio (2005) and a finalist in the AM Qattan Foundation’s Young Artists Award (2006), as well as an artistin-residence at the Delfina Foundation in London (2008) and Production Coordinator for the 9th and 10th Sharjah Biennials.

Solo shows include Landscape of Darknessat Transit Gallery, Belgium (2010) and Urban Impressionat the French Cultural Centre in Palestine (2007/08).

He has contributed work to numerous group shows internationally, and was one of the participants in Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti’s project Ramallah Syndrome in the Palestine c/o Venice Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). In 2008 and 2009, he was nominated for the KLM Paul Huf Award, and his work is held in the collections of the British Museum. In 2009, alongside Lara Khaldi, Khalili co-curated We Were Never Heroesas part of the Jerusalem Show, and Independent Filmin Palestine, at the Arab Shorts Festival presented by the Goethe Institute, in Cairo.

Ahmed Mater Born in 1979, Ahmed Mater grew up in a rural community in the mountainous Aseer region of Saudi Arabia. Aged 18, he moved to the regional capital and became a founding member of the influential AlMiftaha Arts Village, while simultaneously studying medicine in the local hospital. In 2003 he co-founded the Edge of Arabia project which supports Saudi artists in reaching international audiences and in 2005 was included in the landmark Word into Art exhibition at the British Museum. In 2010, his work was obtained by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and he had his first major solo show at the Vinyl Factory in London. Mater’s artistic practice is informed by his education and life as a medical doctor, as well as by his traditional upbringing in south-western Saudi Arabia. His work, which encompasses photography, calligraphy, painting, installation, performance and video, explores the narratives and aesthetics of Islamic culture in an era of globalisation, consumerism and dramatic flux. A monograph on his life and work was published internationally by BoothClibborn Editions in 2010.

Driss Ouadahi Born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1959 to Algerian parents, Driss Ouadahi spent his formative years in Kabilyia and Algiers. He studied architecture in Algiers as well as studying at the Ecole Nationale Supéieure des BeauxArts Algiers. He went on to earn a degree at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Ouadahi has had numerous solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally in Algeria, Morocco, France, and Germany as well as in the US. He was the recipient of the 2003 Centre d’Art Contemporain award and his work resides in major public and private collections around the world.

Driss Ouadahi currently lives and works in Düsseldorf and is represented by Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco and New York.

Ayman Yossri Daydban Multi-media artist Ayman Yossri Daydban was born in 1966 in Palestine with Jordanian nationality. He now lives and works in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

He has participated in solo and group exhibitions across the Arab world since 1992. In 2008, Daydban participated in Edge of Arabia’s exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS in London and has subsequently exhibited in their shows during the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), Berlin 2010, Istanbul 2010 and Dubai 2011. His work has since featured in the group show Balla-Dramaat Paradise Row in London and Athr Gallery exhibitions at Art Dubai 2009, 2010 and 2011. In September 2010, the artist participated in Nabattat the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. In January 2011, Ayman’s first solo show in London was held at the Selma Feriani Gallery.