July 2012 |
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"Beirut is back and it's beautiful"
Stéphanie Dadour
Randa Mirza’s work discloses preexisting representations and identity-based issues in the urban fabric of Beirut. Through notions related to representations of sex and gender, Mirza aims to explore the Lebanese postwar conditions of identity constructions. Representations are to be understood as systems of production that convey meanings, depending on symbolic categories and having the possibility of manipulating and altering perceptions and significance.
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A Vast Expanse of Desert Transforms Into a Green Field:
Rayyane Tabet's Home on Neutral Ground
Haig Aivazian
Artist and curator Haig Aivazian delves into two of artist Rayyane Tabet's works (Home on Neutral Ground and 1989) to address the relationship between memory and space. While Tabet's work is grounded in certain historical realities, including the invasions of Afghanistan, the end of the Cold War and the Civil War in Lebanon, his work reconfigures space through aesthetics and storytelling to effectively imbue the viewer with an unhinged sense of time and an ungrounded sense of place.
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A, A¹ versus Chapter A, B, C, D – Installation versus Cinema
Sadia Shirazi
Drawing on her training as an architect and her curatorial practice, Sadia Shirazi considers Harun Farocki’s films Comparison via a Third (2007) and In Comparison (2009) as not just separated by the two years between them and the additional footage that was filmed, but also in response to their respective formal structures and particular time-space-subject conditions. Farocki’s films begin with near-identical footage and, while each documents various contemporary technologies of brick production, Farocki uses distinct techniques of formal structure and filmic montage in response to each work’s respective temporality, audience and space of display.
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Being There
A conversation on 'A Call,' with Ava Ansari, Wafaa Bilal, Molly Kleiman, and Nazila Noebashari
On Friday, September 23rd 2011, Wafaa Bilal’s A Call was performed in Aaran Gallery, Tehran, and live-streamed on the walls of White Box, New York. The work—which included over eighty Iranian performers, an empty swimming pool, and five cameras—was an embodied memorial to the dead, the living, and the forgotten of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Bilal, blocked from visiting Iran, developed the performance collaboratively and viewed it remotely. A Call enacted the dislocations, delays, and ruptures that war breeds. The New York-based curators of A Call, Molly Kleiman and Ava Ansari, co-directors of The Back Room, spoke with Wafaa Bilal and Aaran Gallery’s director Nazila Noebashari about the body as a trigger, the dispersion of authorship, and the transmission of a performance, pixel by pixel.
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Figuration and the Body
Dina Ibrahim with Hayv Kahraman
In this conversation between Dina Ibrahim (curator, ArteEast online Gallery) and artist Hayv Kahraman, the two discuss the challenges and aesthetic potential of using figuration to delve into abstract themes such as socio-political issues, gender and sexuality. Kahraman reflects on her use of digital technologies to map her own body and turn it into art, as well as the use of corporeal matter, such as human hair, in her latest works. This interview offers readers unique insight into the formal choices and historiographic inspirations that shape and inform Kahraman's work.
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On Behazin
Mirak Jamal
Mirak Jamal presents a new piece entitled On Behazin (2012). Composed of twelve discrete panels, On Behazin was created through a process of alternating between hand drawn images and a xeroxed copy of each successive image, all based on an original inkjet print, issued forth and realized materially from an original photo of the figure sent from mother to son, desktop to desktop.
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Singular Lives, Strange Poems
An Interview with Bouchra Khalili
Working primarily with images and video, artist Bouchra Khalili creates installation pieces which take on issues of individual subjectivity in relation to a geographic context. Her work opens up narratives onto the flat topography of maps. Placed in the context of the gallery, the works invite the viewer to engage with these projected spaces through their own understanding of, and relation to place.
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Stories for the Disembodied: Artists in Conversation
Joseph Shahdadi with Mary Tuma
In Spring 2006, interdisciplinary artist and scholar Joe Shahadi encountered a series of works in the Made in Palestine show. But it was one piece in particular that haunted him, Mary Tuma’s Homes for the Disembodied (2000, 2003), a massive installation composed of five dress-forms made from a single, continuous piece of fabric, 50 meters long, hung high from the ceiling. In this conversation, the artists engage each other's works and discuss themes that resonate across one another's ouvre, sharing stories and insights on the impact that geographic displacement, Palestine and Arab-American identity have on their respective visual art and installation works.
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Sulfur in the Morning…
Reflections on Occupying the American Art Curriculum
Ernesto Pujol
At once deeply personal and highly theoretical, this piece by artist and teacher Ernesto Pujol reads as a manifesto for the emerging generation of art students who hail from the MENASA region but study in North America. The text collects Pujol's own experiences as an educator alongside narratives of students from his extensive teaching career in a manner that breathes life into often tired tropes that center on the body and its representation in art. In addition, the work is an injunction against staid teacherly pedagogies and celebrates the students' capacity to form and document a new discourse and method for contextualizing their work.
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Allah-O-Akhbar
Negar Mottahedeh
In this essay film and media scholar Negar Mottahedeh delineates between insurrection, religious revival, and technology to capture the "Islamic Cyborg" and subsequently reveals the shifting register of imagery in Iranian cinema, in every day life and within the digital realm.
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Group Think
Nicholas Cullinan On The Collaborative Art Of Slavs And Tartars And Chto Delat?
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Interview by Ingrid Chu
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It Went Green and Then It Went Red
A Conversation between Sohrab Mahdavi and Media Farzin on TehranAvenue.com
TehranAvenue.com (TA) was one of the earliest websites to devote itself to writing about the city of Tehran. Sohrab Mahdavi, whom I draw into a conversation here, was one of the co-founders and in many ways its driving force. The website gathered a group of writers—including, in the years 2003-04, myself—who were mostly based in Tehran. The group included veteran journalists as well as first-time writers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.
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Notes on Risk
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
In this clarion call for risk taking in culture, journalist and writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie presents Critical Reflections: A Macro Perspective on Cultural Risk-Taking, How It Looks on the Ground, reflections from a talk presented at the Art & Patronage Summit in London.
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Ongoing – Time We Stopped: a Correspondence with Barbad Golshiri
SANDRA SKURVIDA: I propose a conversational shift from a stereotypical/allegorical/exilical romanticism to a political domesticism — I have in mind the younger generation of artists in Iran who exhibit in their works and their life choices an unconditional will to remain in their country, as you have declared in 2009, “we have chosen to breathe hatred, tear and pepper gas, instead of hanging onto nostalgia and the myths of exile and of “the innocent artist.” (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/for-they-know-what-they-do-know/) There is little “innocence” to be found in the situation where resistance is neither a romantic dream nor an academic discourse but rather everyday negotiation. This determinate domesticism calls for artworks that are socially engaged and specific to their site of emergence(y), that care for their audiences, and don’t give a damn what Europe or the US have to say about them. In 2009, you have spoken resolutely about self-definition and self-determination of an artist in Iran; how would you address this position today, two years later, in a context as saturated with intensifying political catalysis as it was then? If you were to write an amendment to the e-flux essay today, what would it be?
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