Quarterly

Notes on Risk

Spring 2012 | ArteZine

Censorship is rarely as simple or straightforward as it seems. For one thing, it is rarely done by a person whose job title is actually that of the censor (and in case you haven’t seen Babak Afrassiabi’s five-channel video installation “Conversing the Cut,” from 2004, about censorship in the world of Egyptian cinema, the people […]

Body of Work

Summer 2012 | ArteZine

When the Arab or Middle Eastern or Muslim body enters critical art discourses it is often cast as an overdetermined site that must bear responsibility for conveying social, political and identitarian issues. Bodies are inscribed within rigid expectations and norms by social dynamics and proscribed cultural values, and subsequently occupy and navigate physical space (be […]

The Adventures of SuperSohrab

Spring 2012 | ArteZine

Heroism & Patronage – The Summit [issuu width=420 height=325 backgroundColor=%23222222 documentId=120311225026-987de43ad5f04751aed32d1ed71e1bcf name=supersohrab-heroismandpatronagethesummit username=sohrabmk tag=dubai unit=px v=2]

A, A¹ versus Chapter A, B, C, D – Installation versus Cinema

Summer 2012 | ArteZine

Harun Farocki’s films Comparison via a Third (2007) and In Comparison (2009) begin with identical footage, minus In Comparison’s prefacing this footage with a still diagram of a white orthographic image of a brick on a black background. While both Comparison via a Third (2007) and In Comparison (2009) document various contemporary technologies of brick […]

It Went Green and Then It Went Red

Spring 2012 | ArteZine

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 […]

“Beirut is back and it’s beautiful”

Summer 2012 | ArteZine

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 […]

Slavs and Tatars

Spring 2012 | ArteZine

Embrace Your Antithesis The spreads from the preceding pages are taken from Molla Nasreddin, a weekly political satire that ran from 1906 thru 1930, first in Tbilisi, briefly in Tabriz in northern Iran, before settling down in Baku. One of the most important periodicals of the Muslim world in the 20th century, Molla Nasreddin was […]

Figuration and the Body

Summer 2012 | ArteZine

Dina Ibrahim: Generally speaking, contemporary art has deemed figuration obsolete in representing such abstract notions as identity and sexuality, yet your work manages to seamlessly integrate the two to rather confronting yet highly aesthetic effects. Why figuration (and precisely the human figure)? And what role does it play in your overall oeuvre? Hayv Kahramian: I’ve […]

Stories for the Disembodied: Artists in Conversation

Summer 2012 | ArteZine

In the spring of 2006 I had a residency that allowed me access to studio space—a precious commodity in New York City. The long trek from my Brooklyn apartment to the studio, which was on the western-most edge of Chelsea, brought me past the Bridge Gallery, a temporary space designed to house the New York […]

Being There

Summer 2012 | ArteZine

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). […]

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