Guest Editor: Christa Salamandra Nostalgia permeates literary and expressive culture in the Arab world. Exile, loss, defeat, rupture find expression in a variety of cultural forms, in song, prose and poetry, on the big and small screen, and in restaurants and cafés. Nostalgia reflects all the paradoxes and contradictions of Arab modernity. It appears […]
ArteEast continues to bring you the best of the Beirut art scene with its fall 2007 Virtual Gallery exhibition featuring the work of painter Flavia Codsi. Codsi redefines realism and modernism by painting classic subjects in ways that shake up typical art historical chronologies and preconceived notions of contemporary Lebanese art. Her paintings of […]
Modernity is often associated with industrialism, technology and the loss of pastoral ways of life. Nostalgia is the sentiment that modernity yields—a structure of feeling characterized by a mourning for the authentic. Serematakis tells us that the word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostalghia, a composite word that corresponds to “a desire or longing with […]
How to make (nice) things happen probes the non-for profit, research based and process oriented initiatives within Beirut’s increasingly layered art scene and infrastructure. The magazine uncovers how these initiatives operate as well as their potential to produce multiple and varied forms of knowledge. The following pages explore the breaks, ruptures and processes of how […]
Before the 1990s, elite Damascenes rarely ventured into the Old City, a place then associated with the backwardness of an embarrassing past. Most wealthy, “old notable” families moved from their Old City neighborhoods decades ago; their children and grandchildren are returning to them now, not to live as their ancestors had, nor to shop like […]
Kirsten Scheid and Jessica Winegar introduce the work of Louay Kayyali, a Syrian artist whose work was well-known in Syria during his life-time but was little known beyond Syria, perhaps due to his socialist commitment and lyrical figurative style. His posthumous entry to the auction market has not been accompanied by awareness of his goals […]
ArteEast is pleased to kick off 2007 with an exhibition of recent digital media works by Hamdi Attia. The works featured here explore different aspects of the relationship between translation and political, social, and economic power. In video essays dealing with aspects of American culture ranging from movies and personal ads to neo-orientalists and corporations, […]
ArteEast introduces the delicately spiritual installations and sculptures of Younes Rahmoun. This selection of works highlights Rahmoun’s ability to incite visceral and humbling reactions from his viewers. Rahmoun engages within an Islamic context but is also intrigued by Sufi thought and practice. This duality results in the reverberation of repetition and meditation throughout his work. […]
‘Irrational’ 2003 ArteEast is pleased to present the work of Jerusalem-based artist Rula Halawani. Halawani’s photographic explorations of life in Palestine have been shown all over the world, most recently at the Sharjah Biennial. This exhibition features four series of works, each exploring different facets of the sensory experience of occupation through a manipulation of […]