In a recent New York Times interview with the artist Emily Jacir about her installation “Material for a Film” (now on display at the Guggenheim), she was asked how she “distinguish[es] between her political activity and her art.” Jacir’s work draws on personal experience as a Palestinian living and working in the West Bank and the US, and addresses–either directly or obliquely–the themes of collective loss, political exile, and Israeli military occupation, eliciting criticism that it maligns Israel. The subsequent exchange is doubly revealing. If there is something too easy, too glibly reflexive, in the interviewer’s assumption that the work of a Palestinian artist is primarily an extension of her politics, Jacir rather protests too much in her insistence on a hard-and-fast separation between the two: “They are two completely different things”–This while discussing an exhibit commemorating the 1972 assassination of a Palestinian intellectual by Israeli intelligence. Then asked whether she thought the exhibition would attract controversy, Jacir responded “Unfortunately I am afraid it might.” Yet controversy that provokes debate and raises questions is no bad thing, and Jacir’s defensiveness on this point tells us much about the status of political activism within the institutional culture of the art world. While Jacir understandably would not want her work to be read through the lens of identity politics, or reduced to political sound bites about the suffering and injustice experienced by Palestinians, the exchange raises questions about the role politics can and should play in art. It also underscores the way in which institutional recognition can circumscribe the space of opposition, in effect co-opting and neutralizing it.
In the wake of 9/11 and the US occupation of Iraq, there has been a growing awareness of the need for political engagement within the art world and academia. The cost of decades of unconditional US support for Israel – the crucible in which American policy in the Middle East has been forged since 1967 – was starkly revealed during the recent assault on Gaza, and is a reminder, for many artists and intellectuals, of the need to step into the fray and assume positions of public critique. Given the crucial role that culture plays in the construction of public sentiment, the political fallout from 9/11 created a political context that has brought artists, curators and critics together in “expanded networks of activist counter-publicity.”(1) This resurgent interest in an art of engagement – particularly in the context of American policy in the Middle East – can be seen in the work of curators like Nato Thompson, or in works by artists like Paul Chan, Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, David Thorne, Julia Meltzer, Jacir and others. Cultural publications like Artforum, Bidoun and Journal of Aesthetics and Protest have also given greater visibility to the cultural activism sparked by anti-war opposition. It reveals an impulse to extend and bend the boundaries of an increasingly privatized and professionalized art world to create space for political debate. Politically committed art –especially work that raises awareness about communities or political issues that are traditionally marginal in mainstream arts and media–has begun to flourish in this climate. And yet the underlying tension exposed in the interview with Jacir remains unresolved: how does one reconcile the elitist and rarefied culture of the art world with the populist goals of activism?
This issue of ArteEast Quarterly explores the limits and possibilities of engaged art and participatory practice in or about the Middle East from a variety of perspectives. It brings together the work of practice-based artists working in film, photography and video installation with that of architects, media activists, and museum curators. While Jacir and Chan are among the more celebrated artists currently addressing the conjuncture of art and politics in official circuits of the international art world, this issue seeks to highlight lesser-known figures who have sought to bridge the fields of visual culture and politics in more localized settings.
Eric Gottesman has organized a number of participatory photographic projects in Ethiopia and Lebanon. “Flights” is a meditation on the experiences of Metasibiya, one of Gottesman’s students from Addis Ababa, who traveled to Beirut to work as a live-in housemaid. Taking a video camera with her, Metasibiya documents her fraught, ambiguous relationship with her employer’s family. Her stay in Lebanon is short-lived, however, and circumstances force her return to Adis. Reflecting on these images and the relationships that inform them – including his own longstanding friendship with Metasibiya – Gottesman explores the role these images play in her unfolding narrative. In “Learning from Anarchists”, Israeli filmmaker Eyal Eithcowich describes what motivated him to make Israeli Generals Speak Out, in which a number of senior Israeli generals came out in support of the candidacy of Barack Obama. The film, which was released online in the run-up to the US elections and widely circulated in activist networks, generated huge media interest in Israel and the US. Eithcowich’s intervention challenged the widespread assumption that an American political hawk in the White House would enhance Israeli security.
Miriam Shatanawi’s “The Art of being Apolitical” analyses the complex curatorial politics involved in putting on an exhibition in Amsterdam commemorating the sixty-year anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba. Shatanawi, who is curator for the Middle East and North Africa galleries at the Tropenmuseum (a prominent cultural institution in the Netherlands) chose to memorialize the events of 1948 exclusively through the personal narratives of Palestinians, a perspective that has traditionally occupied a marginal position in Dutch politics and media. In my capacity as the co-director of the Nakba Archive, a grassroots testimonial initiative that has been recording interviews with first generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, I was invited to help prepare exhibits for the show. The twelve video installations Shatanawi discusses, (forming the core of the exhibition) were edited from interviews taken from the Nakba Archive. She describes the political pressures that informed her curatorial decisions in “Palestine 1948”, and examines the public debate that it generated, which culminated in a lawsuit brought against the museum last August.
Azra Aksamija is an Austrian artist who has worked on a number of projects exploring mosque architecture, primarily in the context of post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the US. Focusing on her series Wearable Mosques, Aksamija describes how these portable prayer spaces were conceived as a means of participating in debates about religious pluralism in the US, and about the place of Islam more generally within American culture since 9/11. She discusses the dramatic differences in how her work was received and interpreted by audiences in different political and cultural contexts, and reflects more generally on the ‘publics’ that are generated by interactive art projects. Video artist Oraib Toukan also examines the shifting notion of what constitutes the ‘public’ in ‘public art’ in Jordan by focusing on the ways in which surveillance constantly blurs the boundaries between public and private. With reference to her recent project Can you see me: Monologues in the Air, an intervention she staged on rooftops of downtown Amman to protest the use of Jordanian airspace by the US military, Toukan invites us to reconsider where the space of public engagement might be.
The theme of urban space is explored in a rather different way by architect and critic Sadia Shirazi. Taking the Aga Khan’s development of Al Azhar Park in Cairo as her case study, Shirazi explores how the celebrated civic nature of this project conceals a far more complex spatial politics at work. The changing relationship between the Park and its surroundings in the wake of this ambitious redevelopment project reveals how architectural interventions can remap social and political space, often consolidating hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. Shirazi critiques the application of a modernist master plan in this context, and proposes a more organic urbanism through the designs she produced for “Dwell,” a housing project in Darb al-Ahmar.
Since 2001 Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, a German-Lebanese photographer, has worked with a group of youths in Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Tyre in south Lebanon. Her essay examines the sustainability of such collaborative projects, as well as their impact on the lives of participants. While such initiatives are often heralded as a means by which disenfranchised communities can gain access to arenas of cultural production, or raise awareness about issues affecting their communities, the conflation of agency with cultural expression can elide the very real gap that separates theory and practice;the hard fact is that in many such grassroots art projects the work ends up in the hands of organizers rather than participants. For Eid-Sabbagh the primary goal of establishing an atelier in the camp was less political than aesthetic; the focus has always been on developing the skills needed to make and read images, rather than promoting advocacy per se. And yet in the eight years of pursuing this goal, Eid-Sabbagh has managed to realize a model of collaborative practice rarely seen: a model in which participants have final control of their work, and final say over how it is disseminated.
Notes:
(1) Mckee, Yates. October 123 (Winter 2008), p110.
