Tag: The arts

Links

A list of links to recent interesting things that I’ve just gotten around to reading:

At Words Without Borders, Carol Perkins translates a short story about adultery–“The Masseuse and her Adulterous Husband“–by Syrian writer Salwa Al Neimi. (It has some striking information about adultery laws in Tunisia). 

British playwright David Hare spends time in Israel and the Occupied Territories talking to people about and visiting different points in the wall that now separates the two; he writes a personal, provocative essay in the New York Review of Books. Here’s a passage:

And that’s what I feel in Jerusalem as well. Jerusalem used to be the spiritual capital—after all, that’s what the argument was about. You could feel it, on every street corner, you could feel the history, but now with the hideous wall and the overbuilding and desecration of the landscape—I mean, what is going on? Aren’t they destroying the very quality for which the city was meant to be precious? Aren’t they killing the thing they love? Or is that my problem? Am I just a decadent Westerner who can’t help thinking spirituality must have something to do with beauty? Jerusalem used to be beautiful. Now it isn’t. As far as I’m concerned, Jerusalem is spoiled—How can it not be spoiled? It has a great concrete wall beside it—but then Jerusalem was never intended for me. It was intended for believers.

At The National, George Packer reviews a book about an Iraqi general, his family, and their complicity in Saddam’s regime; Robyn Creswell reviews Adina Hoffman’s biography of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali (he says it is “a triumph of sympathetic imagination, dogged research and impassioned writing” and “the is the first biography of any Palestinian writer in any language”–can that be true?)

And finally, ArteEast has a new issue of their digital magazine up; this one focuses on the Art of Engagement–on the intersection of political activism, political engagement and art, the “limits and possibilities of publicly engaged art and participatory practice in the Middle East.”

Saatchi discovers Middle East art

I’ve been meaning to write about the new exhibition of Middle Eastern artists at the extremely fashionable London Saatchi gallery for some time..

Saatchi is an advertising mogul turned art collector and he’s famous for discovering and promoting the artists featured in his very influential Young British Artists shows in the 90s. More recently, Saatchi has turned his attention to foreign art. I visited the gallery’s exhibition of Chinese art in December and was very impressed. 

But reviews of Saatchi’s Middle Eastern show–which is about 50% Iranian, with some Iraqi and Syrian, and several artists who now live in the West–have been mixed. Here’s a review or two. I can’t help being a little surprised by the British coverage, in which reviewers often talks about this show as the “first” time they’ve experienced modern Middle Eastern art, and make free use of stereotypes. 

But there has been some criticism of the show’s curatorial shallowness. In the Review at the National Kaelen Wilson-Goldie writes that: 

Geography makes for a miserable curatorial conceit. All of these exhibitions start from maps rather than artworks. They propose to introduce regions rather than explore the nuances of an individual artist’s practice. They shoehorn artists into a format that is set in advance (pick the region first, the talent second) rather than letting their works give rise to ideas that could, if given the time and consideration they deserve, structure exhibitions from the inside out. Inevitably, regional shows end up playing at representation, with the artists put in the position not of expressing themselves but of interpreting, packaging and reducing for easy consumption their culture or their country. This elevates biographical over critical interpretations. It flattens complexities and panders to those in search of the exotic, the foreign and the monolithic other. It’s all rather patronising, as if the artists from a given region aren’t good enough, interesting enough, accomplished enough or successful enough to stand on their own. And when it comes to the Middle East, a part of the world that houses so many countries, languages, dialects, religions, sects, socioeconomic classes, educational systems, social customs, traditions, cultures, histories and contemporary political situations, it simply makes no sense. 

(You can read the rest of that review here.)

 And really, couldn’t they think of any better title than the trite “Unveiled”? 

Art patronage in the Emirates

Yesterday I mentioned a censorship controversy at the Dubai Literature Festival and wondered about the problems that art patronage in the Emirates might run into. It turns out that the last issue of ArteEast’s online magazine has the answers to most of my questions. It’s entirely dedicated to the arts in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Christopher K. Brown’s opening article is a good place to start to get a sense of the (incredibly expensive and expansive) art patronage going on in Abu Dhabi. Brown asks:

With so much emphasis placed on appearances and the obvious desire to look impressive, will these cultural initiatives really serve the needs of the public?  

There are also several profiles and interviews with artists from the Emirates.

More Emily Jacir

The New York Times runs a review of Emily Jacir’s show at the Guggenheim (I’ve already discussed their interview with her earlier). 

Dry, cerebral, fragmentary and stylistically derivative, the exhibition is less affecting and less informative than any number of newspaper and magazine articles about the Palestinian situation you might have read over the last 40 years.

I went to the show’s opening and thought it was very affecting. 

Anyway, despite the NYT reviewer’s claims that his problem is with the formal execution of the show–not with its political content–he spends a good deal of time questioning that content.

If one were to judge from Ms. Jacir’s work, Mr. Zuaiter was innocent of any connection to the Munich murders, eliminated rather because he was an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause.

In the wall text that introduces the exhibition, however, there is a curious qualification. It says that Mr. Zuaiter was never “conclusively” linked to the Olympics murders. This introduces the shadow of a doubt. Is there a chance that he was somehow involved? Ms. Jacir’s exhibition can thus be viewed as a brief for the defense, but this is problematic. How can we know if the artist is manipulating her material, leaving out anything that might be suspicious or incriminating? 

Here’s the wiki page on Zuaiter. It seems clear to me that while the Mossad suspected him of being linked to the Munich attacks, no evidence has been made public to prove this–and shouldn’t the burden of proof be on them?

Emily Jacir and her “controversial” art

I haven’t seen any of Emily Jacir’s art in person, but I thought it sounded pretty fantastic when I read this article about her last summer. She’s a young, successful Palestinian artists whose work is conceptually sophisticated yet politically engaged (one of her pieces tackled the assassination of Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter in Rome in 1972; in another piece, “Where We Come From,” she fulfilled the wishes of people in the Occupied Territories who couldn’t get permission themselves to leave). 

So I’ve been pretty excited that an exhibition of her installation about Zuaiter, “Material for a Film,” will be opening at the Guggenheim this Friday (she won the Hugo Boss Prize, given out every year by the Guggenheim). 

Continue reading Emily Jacir and her “controversial” art

Mapping Cairo’s future

Just before I left Cairo, last weekend, I attended this symposium on “Urban Trajectories in Cairo.” It was organized by new entity called Pericenter Projects, and included videos and talks by artists, designers, architects, sociologists. It was very interesting. I particularly enjoyed a new video by Aglaia Konrad, entitled “Desert Cities,” which consists of 58 minutes of footage of (rather forlorn-looking) developments all around the edges of city. And a talk entitled “Legalizing an Urban Tumour” by designer Marwan Fayed, who presented a number of “case studies” of the creative adjustments of Cairo residents to their urban surroundings, as well as  a number of suggested design interventions based on the observed needs of city residents–these included an “expandable” koshk and a bus stop whose roof projected into the street to shade bus passengers waiting scattered in the street. (I’m trying to get the whole presentation online).

There was also a talk by SODIC architect Marcus ElKatscha on the design principles of the new EastTown and WestTown developments (these are up-scale suburban downtowns meant to cater to the residents of 6th of October and Kattameya). ElKatscha’s presentation didn’t go over that well with the mostly young, artsy, lefty crowd (he got a lot of questions like “Don’t you only want to attract a certain kind of people?”). For me, the fact that the planned developments are upscale isn’t necessarily a problem–every city in the world has “fancy” neighborhoods, and our beloved Downtown Cairo used to be one. And the idea of providing the already existing Eastern and Western suburbs of Cairo with some sort of downtown is actually quite intelligent–it’s clearly what’s missing. But the architectural style was quite bland, and what troubles me more is the deployment of the terms “mixed-use.” The new developments will mix commercial and residential space, and ElKatscha seemed to suggest that in of of itself this lent diversity to the proposed neighborhood, whereas I think it’s quite clear that it will be socioeconomically homogenous. ElKatscha also described Downtown, Garden City, Maadi and Helipolis as “mixed use,” something I found very confusing. I live in Garden City and it’s overwhelmingly residential–whereas all of central Cairo (including lower-class, unplanned neighborhoods) strikes me as the essence of “mixed use.” Finally, SODIC’s planners claim their mixed-use downtowns will cut down commuting time and be environmentally responsible–but while the wealthy house-wife who lives there may be able to walk to the mall, I wonder how far all the servers, shop assistants, cleaners and domestic workers will have to commute (I didn’t see that the plan included any low income housing). In any case, it was fascinating to get this glimpse into the future of Cairo’s development, although I hear that in the current economic climate all these developments have slowed if not come to a complete halt. 

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