April 2013 |
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All the Men Died at Sea
by Ghazi Al-Mulaifi
Ghazi Al-Mulaifi's essay on his ancestral relationship to pearl diving in Kuwait and the music that emerges from that tradition.
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The Endurance of the Impalpable and Other Concerns: A Sound Artist’s Story
By Hasan Hujairi
Hasan Hujairi's personal insight into his practice as an experimental sound artist in Bahrain.
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The Morphology of Rhythm: An Examination of Six Works by Morphosis
by Hisham Awad
Hisham Awad's profile of Beirut-based Rabih Beaini, aka DJ Morphosis, which points to the failure of personal narrative to encompass the complexity of his work and his audience's reception.
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By Sophia Al Maria
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Don’t Drink the Sea Water: On Madness and the Mediterranean
by Nida Ghouse
Nida Ghouse takes us beyond the Arab Gulf and crafts a lyrical text that attempts to make meaning of the Mediterranean and its connection to time and memory, delivering a non-linear exposition on madness.
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MICRO-BEIT: a micro-history and invitation
by Nadia Khalaf and Amal Khalaf
An archival artist project by Amal Khalaf and Nadia Khalaf entitled MICRO-BEIT offers a subversive approach to tracing the ways in which national heritage is imbricated with family legacies.
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The Breath Sound of SeaWomen
by Mikhail Karikis
Mikhail Karikis’ sonic and visual study of a community of women divers on a small island in the Pacific bears witness to their insistence on sustainable practices operating outside the trend of industrialization and how they are able to reverse traditional gender and economic roles.
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Tracing (art) histories
by Monira Al Qadiri and Fatima Al Qadiri, with Thuraya Al Baqsami
Fatima Al Qadiri and Monira Al Qadiri model a strategy for young artists to map their own genealogy via testimony and family history through an interview with their mother, renowned Kuwaiti artist Thoraya Al Baqsami.
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A Picasso in Search of a Context
By Charles Esche
Picasso in Palestine was a very material and highly conceptual project undertaken by artist Khaled Hourani with the Van Abbemuseum and a seemingly simple loan request from one organization (International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah) to another (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven). The journey that the work took from the Netherlands to Palestine unlocked the strange and ambiguous legal and cultural status of this eastern part of the traditional Palestinian territory that remains under occupation by Israel. This essay highlights the work’s conceptual intervention, material impact and deep institutional.
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Common Grounds: Artistic Practices, Civil Society, and Secular Determination in Tunisia Today
By Anthony Downey
Taking as his departure point the events surrounding Printemps des Arts in Tunisia this year, Anthony Downey probes the place of art and culture in the realm of the civic. He argues that art is inextricably linked to politics, that it is always already charged, even while it may not overtly contend with politics as its medium or subject matter. The essay explores the role of art in fostering civil society, and hails cultural practitioners to reclaim the rhetoric surrounding their artistic output in the public sphere.
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Contemporary Art Museums, Presumed Ruptures, and Urgent Demands
By Özge Ersoy
At the outset of her article, Ersoy asks three pointed questions of contemporary private museums, and the foremost amongst them is “Are these new institutions merely symbolic capital?” The author begins her analysis by drawing on individual responses to the Guggenehim Abu Dhabi project to address the cultural shifts that institution building can have, and hinges her analysis to her own context as a curator and critic in Istanbul, by looking at the way SALT has attempted to write and rewrite contemporary Turkish art history.
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Gulf Studies
By Murtaza Vali
This careful inquiry into the works Haig Aivazian and Lantian Xie and their relationship to a land that “does not claim them” highlights the affective textures of national belonging and the political positionality of countless expatriates in the Emirates. By drawing on elements of local image economies, these artists offer enact their own displacement, as well as the tenuous bounds that knit together a nation’s cosmology.
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New Forms in Cultural Production
By Zdenka Badovinac
Through an analysis of institutions and their cultural output, in particular exhibitions, Zdenka Badovinac offers up a revised mandate for museums and exhibiting spaces to deeply engage with their submerged histories and uncover dynamic new ways of presenting their works. This essay reveals the way in which politics and culture braid together to operate in shifting global economies of discourse and power. By taking as her sites of inquiry Moderna galerija in Ljubljana and the network L’Internationale, Badovinac traces the historical legacy of the Cold War on cultural output in Eastern Europe, and reveals the potential for a contemporary rewriting of that inherited story.
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On Peculiar Affairs
a conversation with Michael Rakowitz and Ceren Erdem
The Breakup* started as a ten-part radio series originally commissioned by Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem in 2010 for Palestinian station Radio Amwaj in Ramallah. By unfolding the disbanding of The Beatles in 1969 and overlapping it with the history of the Middle East, Rakowitz analyzes canonical negotiations and failures that impacted the future of certain nations and international popular culture. In this process he utilizes his personal collections and memories. Obsessed with The Beatles, Rakowitz also compiles a poem out of the song titles, a playlist that was performed live by the Palestinian band Sabreen on a Jerusalem rooftop and later turned into an LP.
*The Breakup was exhibited on September 6 - October 17, 2012 at Lombard Freid Projects, New York.
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Six-Shooter Lessons: The 12 Clint Eastwoods Project
By Haig Aivazian
Six-Shooter Lessons: The 12 Clint Eastwoods Project is a narrative structure overlaying a brief history of American Olympic basketball teams with a history of American military interventions in Iraq. Dating back to 2008, Aivazian concluded his performance with notes on Barack Obama’s fresh presidency and the Redeem Team’s success at the Beijing Olympics. Four years later, coinciding with the elections and the U.S. basketball team’s new gold medal at the London games, he revisits his performance and adapts his voice into this dynamic publication.
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