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Retouched and Rendered
Retouched and Rendered

Spring 2014 | ArteZine

What comes after the bourgeois entitlement to closure? Would it be more proper to ask, what becomes of the bourgeoisie when it finally gains that sense of closure? We are left muted to negotiate safe passage at checkpoints. In time and distance, our narratives acquire mythical proportions. Meanwhile, residues of panics and anxieties, fear and […]

I am not what you know about me
I am not what you know about me

Spring 2014 | ArteZine

Perceptual blindness is a psychological condition, meaning, if the brain cannot recognize, acknowledge or process something, the eye cannot see it.  The Lebanese were perceptually blind about the imminent “Civil War”, they never called it war, they called it “Al-ahdath or الاحداث” meaning “The events” or “the incidents”. The whole world had agreed to solve […]

Reinventing Fire

Winter 2014 | Gallery

This issue marks the last installment of a six-quarter cycle of the Gallery that spotlights artists from the Maghreb leading up to the 2014 edition of the Marrakech Biennial. Each subsequent gallery will showcase artists who deal with the every day in their work to reveal the conceptual threads and regional connections that underlie the […]

Reinventer Le Feu

Winter 2014 | Gallery

Ils l’ont vu surgir avant de le faire surgir d’eux-mêmes. Ils l’ont observé, ils l’ont interrogé, ils l’ont domestiqué. Les papillons se brûlent les ailes infiniment. Les humains créent perpétuellement. A chacun sa tragédie du feu. C’est quand ils ont maîtrisé le feu que les humains ont inventé l’art. Aujourd’hui et pour la première fois, […]

Nidhal Chemekh
Nidhal Chemekh

Winter 2014 | Gallery

  Nidhal Chemekh’s visual art has often been described as unsettling. His artistic exploration unfolds around complex and fragmented shapes whose meaning is often blurred, almost absent. His designs evolve in accidents, without a predetermined logic that binds one form to another. What we see is an outburst of shapes, cruelly incomplete that reveal the […]

Simohamed Fettaka
Simohamed Fettaka

Winter 2014 | Gallery

The vote, Simohammed Fettaka and Omar Mahfoudi 2009, Morocco, 50 min 24, Video Sd, 4/3, color, stereo. Arabic with French subtitles The artist plays the role of the interviewer, it’s a film about the municipal elections in Tangier, 2009, campaign, discussions, interviews, symbols. Who to vote for and why? The machine can only count in […]

Propaganda, Aesthetics and Ruptures
Propaganda, Aesthetics and Ruptures

Winter 2014 | ArteZine

This publication deals thematically with ruptures in a given artistic practice or within a country’s arts history, with special attention to power dynamics in the art world. As a consequence it also deals with propaganda and the role of the state in shaping certain dynamics of power. HaRaKa operates as a non-profit platform for research […]

Reconstituting Identities: Performing Propaganda 1958-1965
Reconstituting Identities: Performing Propaganda 1958-1965

Winter 2014 | ArteZine

There is a certain weariness among Egyptians living now under the rule of a complicit and corrupt military regime. A survey of recent social media and online platforms reveals that  attempts at “propaganda” are commonly judged to be somewhere between “pitiful” and “disgusting”, and inspire an intense negative emotional and intellectual reaction. Some even went […]

Reda Troupe: Once a Gambler, Always a Backbone
Reda Troupe: Once a Gambler, Always a Backbone

Winter 2014 | ArteZine

The Reda Troupe is an iconic Egyptian dance company that survived six decades of Egyptian political history, and Egyptian dance history. The company produced work that raised questions on contemporaneity and tradition, as well as on what are the references of Arab and Egyptian modernism in dance and performance, and how institutions of dance came […]

Resi[lience]stance
Resi[lience]stance

Winter 2014 | ArteZine

One of the first goals of state power, is in controlling the body by direct engineering of the containing space and time. It is often one of the most common scenes to be performed by the stifling regime. (the term “regime” here does not only refer to the political regime(s) as States and/or governments, but […]

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