This exhibition presents, in its entirety, Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), a series of videos that details the stories of eight individuals who have been forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally and whose covert journeys have taken them throughout the Mediterranean basin.
Aiming at radically stimulating one’s creative side through mental games and tactics, overcoming the difficulties of working as a collective, challenging the egocentric mind, and unveiling the adventurous side of the creative approach, this workshop is fully experiential and we are not expecting any definitive forms or results (just like life).The workshop is an attempt at redefining/breaking and reshuffling the classic/academic norms and definitions of art, beauty, aesthetics, and approach, and discovering what’s beyond through intensive exercises, readings and reversed psychology based schemes.
"Its strengths are verbal and vocal. Even through the distortion of heavy reverb, the four women (Mona Gamil, Alaa Abdellateef, Salma Abdel Salam and Charlene Ibrahim) do pitch-perfect imitations of politicians and diplomats. In its parody of political speech, the script can be clever, with multi-sided ironies. The globe-spanning imperial titles of the new world order (“Her Majesty the Queen of Liberia and the American West Coast”) sound as absurd, and dangerous, as those of the old. The names of participants in a “cabaret for the colonies” scroll in an amusing list: Scarlett O’Sahara, Guantánamo Babe."
"It was quite a challenge to bring together a study of these places that are so complex so I wanted to be driven by ideas as my organizing principle," she said, “I didn't go country by country…. With the exception of Iran and Turkey, all of the countries featured here have gone through some form of colonial treatment in recent centuries so that is an important theme." The exhibition explores narratives of origin, ideologies of architecture and—most timely—the politics of migration."
ArteEast, in partnership with Art Omi International, is pleased to announce Bassem Yousri and Lara Tabet as the two recipients of the 2016 ArteEast Artists Residency at the Art Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, NY. This joint residency initiative began in 2011 supporting MENA artists in order to encourage and bolster a global arts exchange.
"Zig Zig opens with five women sitting behind desks in a row at the back of the stage. One plays the violin, another reads an archival document that sets the scene, and the others mime leafing through documents. I liked this set-up. They move around and return to the desks, combining dance, song and acting. Each play different roles at different moments, reading from the archives, reflecting on them, acting as the military, the native prosecution or the women themselves giving testimony and answering harsh questions in the British military court."
“I don’t really understand what ambition means. I take things one piece at a time. I’m excited about working on something, that’s all. I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and I still don’t. I don’t know if I think in terms of a career. I don’t have a strategy. It’s just the next show. I used to say to my father: ‘I’m lucky: I got this, or that.’ And he would say: ‘No, no, you deserve it. You’ve been working hard.’ But I was determined: ‘No, it’s all luck.’ I feel things happen accidentally.”
An administrative court has annulled a ministerial decision to grant powers of arrest to the musicians and actors syndicates, according to the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR). Last September, then-Minister of Justice Ahmed al-Zend issued a decree granting six council members of the Actors Syndicate – including the syndicate’s president and secretary general – judicial police powers, to be used in instances where the laws regulating the syndicate, its memberships or artistic production have been violated.
Continued neglect for the heritage of the Egyptian Surrealist movement, despite a resurgence in interest abroad, raises questions about the politics of culture in Egypt.
“They’re not there to talk about gender, but obviously it stems from a feminine and feminist perspective,” said Hafez. And, as there is a prevalent American media depiction of Middle Eastern women as disempowered, audience members who entered the venue drunk on that spiked Kool-Aid were likely to leave sobered up by the diversity and evident power of the performers. Said choreographer and NYLA artistic director Bill T. Jones, who conceived the festival with Kriegsmann, “We think [women from the MENA region] are oppressed or deluded. Then we see these women expressing themselves as individuals. That’s important for us to see.”
