Recent!
Please visit
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2008/amca
for an interview with Nada Shabout.
New!
Pirated Politics: Contemporary art, artists, and the postproduction of the Middle East
Chairs: Anneka Lenssen and Rhonda Saad
Discussant: Nada Shabout
In this panel, we take up the concept of "postproduction" to reframe a critical discussion of one category of signs - those of global media including viral video, televised news networks like Al-Jazeera and CNN, and others - as they are redeployed by artists with ties to the Middle East. "Postproduction" is a technical term in television, film, and video that refers to the set of operations performed on recorded material - montage, subtitling, voice-overs, special effects and other applications. In the art world, it is a term that critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud introduced to describe artistic practices he saw emerging in the 1990s in a climate characterized by the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise an international circuit of biennial art exhibitions. Common among these practices was to take appropriation strategies as a starting point to create novel intuition, feelings, or social groupings, so collapsing the historically distinct zones of production and consumption, and challenging, in part, traditional models of artistic authenticity and originality. In this mode, art participates in a postmodern culture of sampling but intervenes in it, taking control of particular 'signs' in conjunction with their social function and manipulating the two together as uniquely contemporary works.
Producing art in or about a region that is typically understood to passively receive or purchase non-indigenous forms (from 'democracy' to Ivy-league curricula), the artists to be discussed in this panel have adopted the attitude of postproduction and pushed its permutations in various ways. By their "postproduction," we assess this descriptive category as a model for investigating contemporary work that emerges from and/or about the Middle East. Questions to be raised include: How do artists identified as Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern participate in international biennial culture while grappling with more situated obligations to their nation, inherited Socialist causes of progress and consciousness-raising, or other personal mores? In exploring the significance of their work, can we acknowledge the pitfalls of global identity politics while also recognizing sources for the distinctiveness of this art apart from linear development narratives based on the Pioneers paradigm? What factors have made possible the emergence of these artists on the international scene, and what factors will sustain them there?
Anneka Lenssen, Making Nothing from Something: Historicized Satire in Adel Abidin's Welcome to Baghdad (2006)
Rhonda Saad, (Mis)consuming Reality in Omer Fast’s The Casting (2007)
Elizabeth Rauh, Street Art in Post-Revolutionary Iran
Kathy Zarur, Mediated Reality In and Out of Palestine
Between Public Memory and National Narrative: The Visual Document and History in the Middle East
Chairs: Mitra Abbaspour and Alex Seggerman
Discussant: Kishwar Rizvi
National memory is often less about its subject and more about the frame that surrounds and presents it, formed more by its retelling, by the fraction of a scene captured in a photograph, or the bolded terms in a school textbook than an actual recollection of events. However, as the basis for historical truth, collective memory remains one of the most deeply contested terrains of modern politics and culture. National governments and elderly citizens, maps and diaries, news images and internet blogs all contend with one another to control the ways in which memory and thus history are produced, given authority, and transformed over time. In the Middle East, where many nations have relatively recently come to independently control their own national narrative these issues are at the forefront of governmental and scholarly discourse and art – whether formal or vernacular – is essential to these debates.
This panel will address the ways in which historical narratives are both institutionalized and challenged through four contexts: the museum, the urban landscape, the photographic archive and the traveling exhibition. Specifically, this panel includes studies of the Beirut National Museum rebuilt following the wars, government sponsored public art sites in the heart of Cairo, art works of contemporary Lebanese artists in the international market, and an American artist’s portrayal of ancient Egyptian objects, which provide four perspectives on the formation of collective memory in or about the Middle East.
Conceptually, these four sites are all mediated by time and space; thus, the public’s perception exists as a set of continually shifting meanings rather than a singular, fixed interpretation. From the violent divide of the Lebanese ‘green line’ to the traffic medians of wust al-balad in Cairo, interactions with the public sphere are circumscribed by the changing particularities of their locations. While in the case of archives and exhibitions, meaning shifts depending on each curatorial intervention with the collections and the purview of their international circuit. Through the juxtaposition of these various sites, the panel will strive to promote discussion of the distinctions offered by time and place in Lebanon, Egypt, and the international and national art markets with the common pursuit of institutionalizing collective memory.
JOANNE NUCHO, ORDERING HISTORY IN TIME: THE BEIRUT NATIONAL MUSEUM
KATIE PFOHL, JOSEPH LINDON SMITH’S PAINTED EXCAVATIONS OF EGYPT
Alexandra Dika Seggerman, THE STREET AND THE ROAD: PUBLIC ART IN CAIRO
Mitra M. Abbaspour, COLLECTING TRUTHS: STRATEGIES OF THE PHOTO ARCHIVE IN CONTEMPORARY LEBANESE ART
**AMCA will also be holding its first members’ meeting at MESA 2009 in Boston and we hope to see you all there. In order to participate in elections, you must be a current member of AMCA so sign up or renew your membership today! Details on elections to follow.
**AMCA is now on FACEBOOK—join in, invite friends, network, and participate in related discussions.
Welcome to AMCA. An affilliate organization of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), AMCA aims to advance the study of modern and contemporary art throughout the Arab world, Iran and Turkey.