ArteEast's Gallery aims to create an on-line presence for emerging as well as established artists operating within and outside the Middle East and North Africa. The Gallery is curated by Dina Ibrahim, and guest curators are invited periodically to showcase their curatorial story.
|
|
« 1 2 3 4 5 » |
|
|
|
ArteEast introduces the delicately spiritual installations and sculptures of Younes Rahmoun. This selection of works highlights Rahmoun’s ability to incite visceral and humbling reactions from his viewers. Rahmoun engages within an Islamic context but is also intrigued by Sufi thought and practice. This duality results in the reverberation of repetition and meditation throughout his work. Rahmoun uses his imagination, a space he says is informed by religion, to create what he describes as “visually inconceivable dimensions.” Just as these works serve as a conduit to the universe and its Creator for Rahmoun, they also summon viewers to make the connection, even if for a brief moment. Younes Rahmoun lives and works in Tétouan, Morocco. Accompanying the exhibition are essays by Maymanah Farhat, Florence Renault and an interview by Abdellah Karroum.
Guest Edited by Wassan Al-Khudhairi
Read about Younes Rahmoun
View Younes Rahmoun's work
|
|
|
|
|
ArteEast is pleased to kick off 2007 with an exhibition of recent digital media works by Hamdi Attia. The works featured here explore different aspects of the relationship between translation and political, social, and economic power. In video essays dealing with aspects of American culture ranging from movies and personal ads to neo-orientalists and corporations, the artist probes how ideologies, commodities, language, cultural difference, and selves are continually produced through acts of translation. A video work juxtaposing the American pundit Thomas Friedman and the Egyptian television preacher Amr Khaled examines the “performances” of professional translators of cultures, religions, and worldviews. And a digital mapping project further reveals the artist’s proposal that translation is never a benign process whereby a “reality” is successfully communicated to someone else, but rather it always starts with something that has already been created by certain interests. Attia shows us that power lies in the misperception that there is always a “correct” translation. Originally from Egypt, Attia lives and works between Cairo and New York. Accompanying the exhibition are original essays by Waiel Ashry, Abdellah Karroum, and Lucy Lippard.
Read about Hamdi Attia
View Hamdi Attia's work
|
|
|
|
|
ArteEast is pleased to feature recent works by Annabel Daou in ink and pencil on paper. These works explore the relationships between language, meaning, landscape, and politics with an eye to the productive misunderstandings that emerge in processes of translation. Through the intense scrawling of texts in both Arabic and English -- including historical literary and political texts, and texts transcribed from their original language – the artist challenges us to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of knowing and not knowing different histories and cultures. Political dimensions to the work are suggested by the arrangement of texts in landscape forms, and by titles such as in lebanon we have no bomb shelters, give me liberty or give me death, and America. But the complicated personal and linguistic process of translation refuses any easy interpretations. It forces us to look for clarity not in stock phrases or representations of any one culture or history, but rather in the “space between meaning and non-meaning,” as the artist says. Daou, originally from Lebanon, lives and works in New York.
Read about Annabel Daou
View Annabel Daou's work
|
|
|
|
|
ArteEast is excited to present the premiere of new work by renowned photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti. Sanguinetti’s color photographs of places and people in Palestine are unique and compelling because they highlight liminality – of childhood, of old age, of living between what is staged and what is spontaneous, of living locked in an uprooted existence. In an original essay accompanying this exhibition, Lori Allen suggests that Sanguinetti captures a “tragic magical realism” in Palestine and does not replace the liminal uncertainty there with “message, hope, symbolism or sentiment.” Unlike journalistic photography, these creative works deal with individuals as subjects, not as objects in a grand political narrative. Sanguinetti, who divides her time between New York and Buenos Aires, gives us fresh perspectives on life in one part of the Middle East that is too often portrayed in set ways. These images refuse to portray, and therefore they break apart the image of Palestine, of the Middle East
Read about Alessandra Sanguinetti
View Alessandra Sanguinetti's work
|
|
|
|
|
ArteEast introduces the drawings and photography of Ali Kaaf, which are explorations of black itself -- as a color, a material and formal presence, and a set of possibilities and foreclosures. More broadly, Kaaf’s works are visual discussions of the contrasts of light and form and their material possibilities. These discussions draw on, but are not limited to, different international histories of modernism. Critics have also highlighted a Sufi element to his work. And they have welcomed its concern with artistic questions unrelated to the political, in contrast to much of the art from the Middle East featured in Western arts institutions. Indeed, Kaaf’s work reflects an intense interest with materiality among many artists working in the Middle East, but so rarely acknowledged elsewhere. It reminds us of the necessary freedom of all artists to engage formal and material questions, and the truly international history of that process. Born in Algeria of Syrian descent, Kaaf graduated from the Lebanese University and later trained at the Universitat der Kunste in Berlin. His bright future was recently recognized when he was awarded Germany’s prestigious Daad Prize. Since 1999, he has exhibited in Amman, Beirut, and Berlin. He is currently an artist in residence with Solidere’s Beirut reconstruction program, and this exhibition features new work that is simultaneously showing at an exhibition at Beirut Central in Lebanon.
Read about Ali Kaaf
View Ali Kaaf's work
|
|
|
« 1 2 3 4 5 » |
