July 2012
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Body of Work
Guest Editor: Barrak Alzaid
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, real or virtual – 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 on 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 contributors who follow 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. For artists Joe Shahadi and Mary Tuma the genealogies their own bodies are tied to, as well as the presence (and absence) of corporeal form in their work, are rife points of discussion. 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 are 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
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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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"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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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