Undesire at Apexart, NY

ciudadMULTIPLEcity, Arte>Panamá 2003, Panama city

DisORIENTation, Contemporary Arab Artists from the Middle East at the Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin

Undesire, curated by Vasif Kortun

Undesire, as a title, is definitely an unintended deception. The word misses the anchor that retains meaning. Inspired by "undesirable", it connotes the uneasy feelings one has for that which is unwanted, disliked or rejected. The works exhibited in Undesire evoke tensions often found in a relationship of conflict – especically in this time of war – although perhaps it is a bit romantic to treat an exhibition like a space of representation.

The Kurdish artist, Fikret Atay, lives in a town called Batman, located close to the Iraqi border. Batman is a miserable oil producing town with the highest suicide rate in Turkey. Several weeks ago, Kurdish officials stretched a net across the atrium of the dinky mall to stop people from taking a dive onto the marble floor. Batman is not batman, this is not Gotham city. This is a town that carries the legacy of George Bush Sr.`s 1991 war; the extraordinary security measures, the unspeakable murders perpetrated by the cronies of the State. Fikret will show two low-tech videos: one of a "war dance" and the other of two kids in a kind of strange song and dance unlikely in an ATM booth.

Another Turkish artist, Inci Eviner, digitally imposes images of kids on large wallpaper – a format encountered in an interior space. These innocent-looking figures are shown with explosives rigged to their chest. The work Explosive Heart is docile and domestic except for the fact ! that those live-bomb bodies are inscribed at home.

Baghdad Screentests, a portrait video by Irish artist Phil Collins, was first screened in Tiran, Albania in December 2002. Feeling a bit ashamed about looking people in the eye who cannot look back, the viewer watches the quiet individuals who are trying to fill the gap of silence with their glances. The video is a traveller`s work in the sense that comprehension of a climate comes after the inital perception of a climate. The exhibition will also include a slide show of drawings by Romanian artist, Dan Perjovschi, updated daily to humor us just a little bit.

more info at www.apexart.org

to the top

to the top

Contemporary Arab Representations:

from 9 February to 21 April at BildMuseet, Umeå, Sweden
curated by Catherine David

Participating Artists: Naji Assi, Tony Chakar, Khalil Hanoun, Bilal Khbeiz, Elias Khoury, Saree Makdisi, Gema Martín Muñoz, Rabih Mroué, Walid Raad, Marwan Rechmaoui, Walid Sadek, Ghassan Salhab, Lina Saneh, Mohammed Soueid, Jalal Toufic, Paola Yacoub / Michel Lasserre, Akram Zaatari

The BildMuseet in Umeå, northern Sweden, is the current venue of the project series Contemporary Arab Representations headed by Catherine David. Since 2001, exhibitions, seminars, readings, lectures, performances, and other events have taken place at different venues (see below). Supplemented by publications and focused on specific themes and places, the project depicts the activities of visual artists, architects, writers, poets, filmmakers, and other actors from the intellectual and cultural realm of the Arab world. Rather than using the habitual term of "artwork", Catherine David speaks of "representations" since the heterogeneous, conflictive, and sometimes antagonistic situation of contemporary Arab culture is always in the background of the actual work and since the main concern of the project is the "complex dimensions of aesthetics in relation to social and political situations".

The presentation at BildMuseet is – similarly to former venues – focused on Beirut and the Lebanon. 22 projects from the fields of film, photography, architecture, sculpture, installation, and literature by artists and intellectuals who live there will be shown.
The presentation includes a special media centre where visitors may watch live broadcasts from a total of 17 TV channels of the Arab world.

In Lebanon, Catherine David sees a laboratory that is essential for the understanding of contemporary culture in the age of globalization, in which however, the habitual theoretical patterns of explanation have to date, failed. Although Lebanon is no longer in a position to serve as a model for the Arab world, the efforts made by many Lebanese intellectuals after the war for the development and promotion of an "experimental and critical contemporary Arab culture" rate as being exemplary.

The BildMuseet is not participating in Contemporary Arab Representations with this one show only. Already having exhibited the work of Fazal Sheikh and Ghada Amer in other constellations, it will present a further phase of the project in November 2003.

more at http://www.umu.se/bildmuseet/

to the top

A major touring exhibition and publication organised by inIVA
14 February - 27 April 2003: The New Art Gallery Walsall
5 July - 16 August 2003: Bluecoat Gallery & Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
22 November 2003 - 26 January 2004: Modern Art Oxford

Twenty artists and film-makers address the question of the veil in all its complexities and ambiguities, challenging any single or fixed cultural interpretation. Veil's core is made up of a wide cross-section of international contemporary artists including: Faisal Abdu'Allah, Kourush Adim, AES art group, Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Farah Bajull, Samta Benyahia, Shadafarin Ghadirian, Ghazel, Emily Jacir, Ramesh Kalkur, Majida Khattari, Shirin Neshat, Harold Offeh, Zineb Sedira, Elin Strand and Mitra Tabrizian.

Veil spans the spectrum of contemporary visual arts practices, with an emphasis on lens-based work; on one level, the project is an exploration of the roles of photography, film and video as contemporary tools for addressing notions of the veil. This emphasis is underpinned by the inclusion of historic and contextual work including Gillo Pontecorvo's ground-breaking documentary-style film The Battle of Algiers (1965) alongside the work of lesser known twentieth-century figures such as French psychiatrist and photographer Gavɬ´tan de Clrambault and the French military photographer of the Algerian War Marc Garanger.

One of the many unique qualities of this exhibition is the visual dialogue between newly commissioned works and existing key works. Faisal Abdu'Allah's large-scale photographic diptych The Last Supper has been critically acclaimed for its exploration of religious iconography within the context of the black British body. AES art group is a Moscow-based art collective that produces controversial dystopian images of an urban near future. Shirin Neshat's dramatic series of photographs explores women's dynamic participation in contemporary Iranian culture. Elin Strand has been commissioned to produce a series of site-specific performances fusing together traditional manufacturing techniques in stitching with conceptual ideas around adornment and the body. Ghazel's time-based self-portraits present a humorous spin on the video diary and travelogue. Majida Khattari has been commissioned to stage one of her live art fashion shows that critiques the clothing manufacturing industry, specifically for the newly refurbished Modern Art Oxford.

The exhibition disrupts contemporary notions of the veil but ultimately the project intends to become a starting point for a new international dialogue across cultures within the visual arts arena. Initiated by Zineb Sedira (artist, curator), developed by Jananne Al-Ani (artist, curator) and Sedira, and curated by Al-Ani, David A. Bailey (curator, writer), Sedira and Gilane Tawadros (director, inIVA), Veil is an inIVA touring exhibition.

A major illustrated publication, Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art is published alongside the exhibition, with essays by Jananne Al-Ani, David A. Bailey, Alison Donnell, Hamid Naficy, Zineb Sedira and Gilane Tawadros, with a preface by Reina Lewis and reprinted texts by Leila Ahmed, Frantz Fanon and Ahdaf Soueif. Edited by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros, and published by inIVA in association with Modern Art Oxford.

This project is supported by Arts Council National Touring Programme in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation with additional support from Bernina Sewing Machines.

more at www.iniva.org

to the top

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona presents HAREM FANTASIES AND THE NEW SCHEHERAZADES, an exhibition conceived and directed by the Moroccan writer Fatema Mernissi, author, among other books, of Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems, in which she reflects on the theme of this exhibition.

Mernissi says that what prompted her to write the book was the realisation that Western journalists — men — have an idea about the harem which is very different to the reality. This idea finds its iconographical references in certain Western artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose fascination with the theme of the harem raised it to the category of myth. Eastern artists, meanwhile, had represented the harem according to their own aesthetic canons, creating a very different reality to the one reflected by the West.

The exhibition, produced and organised by the CCCB, brings together Eastern and Western representations of the reality and the myth of the harem, allowing visitors to contrast their different views of beauty and love.

Harem Fantasies and the New Scheherazades brings together 150 works, some of which are regarded as masterpieces of the history of Western art: Delacroix, Ingres, Gerôme, Picasso, Matisse, Fortuny, Constant and Boucher are some of the artists represented in the show.

Alongside them are Eastern miniatures, engravings and books by Persian and Turkish masters and from India’s Mughal dynasty, plus original photographs documenting the life of the inhabitants of the harem.

The show closes with a selection of works by contemporary artists from the Near East and North Africa who challenge the very basis of traditional attitudes to women in these areas. They are the new Scheherazades: Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Samta Benyahia, Shadi Ghadirian, Ghazel, Selma Gürbüz, Susan Hefuna, Malekeh Nayiny, Shirin Neshat, Houria Niati, Raeda Saadeh, Zineb Sedira and Nadine Touma.

The exhibition includes outstanding works on loan from such foremost institutions as the Musée du Louvre and the Musée Guimet, the Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Musée Picasso in Paris; the Museum of Topkapi and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, among others.

Sections in the exhibition

1.- SCHEHERAZADE
2.- VIEWS OF THE HAREM
3.- THE LAST HAREM
4.- THE NEW SCHEHERAZADES

Introduction

The word harem is derived from haram, the illicit, that which religious law forbids, as opposed to halal, that which is allowed. As a family institution it represented a private space with strict codes and rules that had to be observed, and where womenfolk were closed away so that they could be controlled, as they were seen to interfere with and upset masculine emotions and reason. Their confinement turned them into the enemy, as only something that is regarded as a danger is locked up. In Western eyes, conversely, the harem is the projection of a fantasy, of a desire — ultimately, of the imaginary. It is a blank space in which dreams can be projected. In the absence of constrictions and prohibition, the woman who inhabits it becomes an object of sexual pleasure, who appears to be happy and take pleasure in her confinement.

1 – SCHEHERAZADE

Between 1704 and 1717, the first European version was published of The Thousand and One Nights. Jean Antoine Galland, its translator, had no idea that his work would come to be the principal reference in Europe’s fascination with the East, a fascination that was to cross two centuries and give rise to orientalism and turquerie.

However, in the course of his translation, Galland modified part of the contents and style of the Persian manuscripts, adapting them to the spirit of the eighteenth century. Scheherazade, the young Persian woman who, in Eastern tradition, symbolises the intellectual heroine who was able to transform the beliefs, motivations and psychology of her husband to the point of persuading him to give up his idea of killing her was thereby reduced to a superficial, voluptuous image.

In the East, on the other hand, it was not until 1804 that the text of The Thousand and One Nights was first edited in Arabic. Throughout the centuries during which the stories were handed down orally, Scheherazade became the model of a woman who fought for her freedom, in this case opposing the king’s desire to kill her. The stories she told exemplified the desire to be free, as each one showed just how uncontrollable the women of the harem were, and how absurd female obedience was in a space where inequality had been established as law.

Exhibition
This first section brings together Eastern and Western manuscripts and printed texts of The Thousand and One Nights, dating from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, including the well-known versions by Galland, Lane, Burton and Mardrus. It also features Lady Mary Montagu’s famous letters describing the interior of the harem in Istanbul, and travel books by Nicolay, Melling, Ferriol and Guer, among others.

2 – VIEWS OF THE HAREM

Two qualities characterised the women created by the Western imaginary of the harem: nudity and silence. They were presented reclining, placid and calm, as vulnerable images that could be modified according to the desires of each observer, unable to leave the cloister of their rooms until the viewer of the painting saw fit to hand them their clothes. In this way, the harem manifested itself as the projection and the desires of a sexuality that was absent from the place where the work was created. Works by artists such as Gérôme, Fortuny, Boucher, Chassériau, Ingres, Delacroix, Matisse and Picasso, all included in this exhibition, present woman in all of her passivity. Placid, static, the figure of the woman became an object to be apprehended at any moment by Western fantasies.

In the Eastern world, the illustrations that went with the books as of the eighth century, and which became a favourite with collectors of secular painting, represented woman not just as a focus of love, but also as an active partner who could therefore not be forced to yield. A clear example is that of Shirin, the most renowned Persian heroine of painting who symbolised captive woman turned adventurer, hunting wild animals and crossing entire continents astride swift steeds in search of her beloved after escaping from the harem where she had been raised.

Very few men have remained untouched by this fascination with the harem. Drawing near, including themselves, observing, as an active or passive part of the artistic work, their role as actors or mere voyeurs has revealed their relationship with the space of imprisonment. In Eastern images, man is included as an active part of the representation. Unconcerned with the vulnerability of showing his emotions before the woman, he is presented as an unsure, dependent lover.

The Eastern harem was a reality. Even today, a visit to the palace of Topkapi (Istanbul) still includes the halls where favourites, eunuchs and odalisques were shut away. Muslim men dominated women by means of space, excluding them from public life. For the West, however, the harem has only existed as a fantasy. Deprived of its spatial reality, it was represented in temporal terms, dominating the woman and manipulating time and light.

Yet the seraglio also involved other realities. In private space, the women organised their time in relation to pleasure as though it were a sacred priority. The majliss, for example, was a meeting in a garden or on a terrace, where the participants gave themselves up to the art of conversation; mastery of music or chess was an exercise of the intellect, and skill at poetry a female ability that a man had to learn before engaging in an erotic relationship with a woman.

Exhibition
In the section ‘Views of the harem’, the visit includes a dialogue between Eastern miniatures and Western paintings. We find Il ballo dell’Ape by Vicenzo Marinelli beside a Turkish miniature from the late eighteenth century, representing a birth in the harem; a woman in a hamman by Gérôme alongside another painted by the Turkish artist Abdallah Bukhari; the passive, anonymous odalisques of Fortuny, Boucher and Ingres contrast with the Islamic miniatures representing the heroine Shirin. Delacroix, and Picasso’s Algerian women find a counterpoint in the intimacy of love scenes portrayed in Eastern miniatures.

3– THE LAST HAREM

While Matisse was painting his Odalisque à la culotte rouge (1921), showing a young Turkish slave girl in a harem, Kemal Atatürk was proclaiming women’s right to vote. Just twelve years before, in 1909, the Young Turks prohibited the harem, and the Sultan of Turkey was forced to free his slave girls, who then became citizens of the first Republic in the history of Islam. Turkish Civil Code, adopted in 1926, made polygamy illegal and granted husband and wife equal right to divorce, and the same rights to custody of the children. These measures, most of which were adopted as a way to end colonisation, were to make their influence felt throughout the Islamic world, from Morocco to Pakistan.

In this way, then, the series of odalisques painted by Matisse in the twenties corresponded to representations of French women who only existed in his imagination. The painter had spent three months in Morocco in 1912, and another three in 1913, on a journey, practically a rite of initiation, made by many painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, despite his emphasis on what these trips had meant to him (‘la révélation m’est venue de l’Orient’), he produced his series of odalisques away from Turkey, in a Paris whose models dressed up ‘à la turque’ allowed him to retain in his thrall women who, in real life, were pursuing lives in politics.

Exhibition
The painting Odalisque à la culotte rouge (1921) by Henri Matisse heads this section. Alongside it is written and graphic documentation about the changes in the role of women in Turkey at the start of the century: from the closure of the last harem in Topkapi (1909) to images of the first women to occupy public posts. The section closes with an extensive series of images illustrating the orientalist erotic myth in photography and film.

4- THE NEW SCHEHERAZADES

Scheherazade is above all an artist: a woman with imagination, inspiration, originality and talent. When she risks her life to save other women, she mobilises all of her resources — a formidable confidence in herself, intelligence, beauty, interpretative ability and literary skill — to enthral a husband who is prepared to kill her as soon as he loses interest. She takes on the lord of her destiny by captivating him with the ingenious arabesques of her tales. Thanks to her creativity, she manages to save herself and possible future victims by overcoming her lover’s mistrust of women.

‘The New Scheherazades’ explores the ways in which Eastern women today enrich contemporary society by using a personal visual language to challenge the very basis of traditional attitudes to women in the Near East and North Africa. This part of the exhibition not only reverses the telescope, it also explores the contradictions and paradoxes of our societies by questioning our perception of ‘others’ and of ourselves as regards gender, race and culture. They are not ethnographic artists, they are artists who are interested in the sources of their culture, whose work contributes to expanding its aesthetic horizons and encouraging a greater understanding of it.

Exhibition
The final section of the exhibition, ‘The New Scheherazades’, comprises a selection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, tapestries, photographs and audiovisual installations by the contemporary artists Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Samta Benyahia, Shadi Gadirian, Ghazel, Selma Gurbuz, Susan Hefuna, Malekeh Nayini, Shirin Neshat, Houria Niati, Raeda Saadeh, Zineb Sedira and Nadine Touma.

to the top

The DisORIENTation exhibit calls into question old and current orientalisms and images of the Orient which have recently gained currency.
13 Arab artists from different Middle Eastern and European countries seek individual answers to the attempt at collective definition from outside. They see themselves neither as representatives of a "national art" - heavily cultivated in their countries - nor do they let their Western audience thrust them into the ethnic ghetto of exoticism and otherness. They confront the desires and prejudices of political voyeurism with a radicalness that makes all conventional categories obsolete. They also take a critical view of their own participation in the project: "Is there such a thing as contemporary Arab art? What does 'Arab' mean, anyway - for Arabs, on the one hand, and for Europeans on the other? And finally: how to explain the international art market's interest - or disinterest - in contemporary Arab positions?" What unites these works in all their singularity is the determination "to resist and fight stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things", as Jack Persekian writes; the curator of the exhibit, he lives in East Jerusalem.
A number of in-situ works will be created for the exhibit. They will also reflect the conditions under which images from the so-called "Arab world" are transmitted and perceived. The artistic positions will be discussed in workshops and co-productions with various Berlin-based partners, and the process character of the project will be illuminated. Furthermore, various artist lectures on March 23, from 2-7 p.m., will involve viewers in a direct confrontation with the works shown and encourage discussion with the artists.

With works by Jumana Emil Abboud (Jerusalem), Jananne Al-Ani (London), Lara Baladi (Cairo), Roza El-Hassan (Budapest), Susan Hefuna (Düsseldorf/Cairo), Ali Jabri (Amman), Lamia Joreige (Beirut), Moataz Nasr (Cairo), Walid Raad (Beirut/New York), Khalil Rabah (Ramallah), Salah Saouli (Berlin/Beirut), Ahlam Shibli (Haifa), Akram Zaatari (Beirut).

more at http://www.hkw.de

to the top