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 it public or private) according to these norms. Likewise, bodies can be transported and manipulated to serve neoliberal agendas in the West, and are rendered legible only if they are oppressed, tortured or veiled. Art has the potential to reconfigure these relationships between space and the body, and between the body and meaning, by creating porous boundaries and new points of contact between bodies and the geographies they encounter.
This edition of ArteZine looks at the work of MENA artists who adopt innovative approaches to the body; whether it be the body as a subject in their work, the viewer’s body and its encounter with art, or situating their own body within their art practice. These contributions offer us alternative strategies for interpreting art centered around place, identity and subjectivity that moves beyond mere signification. We use the body’s encounter with place; be it a gallery, the site of a performance, or the online realm as the departure point for a new discourse of the body in MENA art.
In the first set of contributions the writers reflect on the geographic specificity of particular art works, to contend with the social bodies and community histories that inhabits these spaces. Sadia Shirazi’s analysis of Harun Farocki’s work reminds readers that even highly mechanized processes such as brick-making can cite human gesture to reveal complex social dynamics. Similarly, architect Stephanie Dadour meditates on La Mirza’s photographs of facades for urban “renewal” projects in Beirut to expose the blurred boundaries between actual and constructed individual/collective identities.
The next series of contributions address the dynamics of viewership; artists create charged encounters with audiences that shapes the aesthetics of the work itself. A conversation with artist Bouchra Khalili reveals how installation draws individual audiences into intimate encounters with immigrant stories, while Ava Ansari, Molly Kleiman, and Nazila Noebashari address Wafaa Bilal’s A Call to highlight the monumental loss suffered in the Iran-Iraq War across both physical and virtual space.
In the contributions that follow the artist’s own body finds its place in art, and the politics of representation, as well as the genealogies that these bodies are tied to are rife points of discussion for artists Joe Shahadi and Mary Tuma variety of forms. Meanwhile, Dina Ibrahim and Hayv Kahraman discuss figuration and how such formal qualities can reflect or subvert subjectivity. In the final selection of essays, the contributors lend their insight into how knowledge and discourse is produced through the body. Haig Aivazian shares Rayyane Tabet’s use of story telling to thwart the stability of national borders and boundaries and takes us from a cricket stadium in Sharjah that redefines country borders, to an amorphous Beirut bedroom staged at the New Museum triennial. Ernesto Pujol’s manifesto on pedagogy hails young students to subvert the orientalized approaches of studio-based art education. Finally, Mirak Jamal’s project exposes a portrait of an Iranian literary figure (the artist’s grandfather) to exacting repetition and renders the body an uncertain terrain for recovering a personal history.
The bodies discussed in each of these contributions inhabit a variety of terrain, both physical and psychic, as each artist carves out a context for their work, and subsequently reconfigures the discourse surrounding the body, embodiment and corporeality in art.
Image Credit: Hayv Kahraman, Leveled Leisure, 2010, Oil on wooden panel, 204cm x153cm
Special thanks to Sarah Dwider and Dalal Ani
