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In the wake of the uprisings that swept the Middle East since December 2010, a spotlight has, for better or worse, fallen on artists from the region. In this essay, Egypt-born, UK-based writer and curator Omar Kholeif looks at some of the problems attending this increased interest in art from the region and the pressure on artists to create works that not only respond to revolution but answer to ‘Arab Spring’-themed exhibitions.

More specifically, he discusses the work of artists who had been developing new media and digital art practices before the revolutions, practices that became not only televised but distributed across an array of online platforms and networks. Kholeif also examines the ways in which these artists are channelling their energies into grass-roots, artist-led initiatives that allow them a measure of independence both from the art market and its requirement that they comment on the political situation – and, ultimately, from the political situation itself. Could, Kholeif asks, the relationship between the ‘open source’ ideology in recent new media history and the proliferating ’share’ culture of revolutionary dissidence have created a grey area whereby artists from Egypt, to name but one country, who work with new media as a resource are being asked to comment or subscribe to an artistic interpretation of the Arab uprisings?

This essay is accompanied by an interview by the author with Sarah Rifky, curator at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo.

Read the full essay here

Read the lessons learned here.

Larissa Sansour, The Nation Estate (production still, 2012)

Sketches from Larissa Sansour’s ‘The Nation Estate’ are currently on view at Cornerhouse, Manchester as part of Subversion. Click here for more info.

It has been some months now since the 20th of December 2011, when Larissa Sansour sent out a press release with the subject heading, ‘No Room for Palestinian Art’. At the time, Sansour was shortlisted for a Lacoste-sponsored photography prize by the Swiss Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. Offered a €4,000 production fee, the London-based artist was invited to develop a proposal for judging. She professed to being allowed free reign by the museum staff with whom she was in contact. However, in December, Lacoste made demands that Sansour’s nomination be revoked, deeming Sansour’s work ‘too pro-Palestinian’ to support.

The artist’s dismay continued when the museum asked her to sign an agreement, which asserted that she had chosen to withdraw herself from the competition. Within 24 hours of sending out her own press release, there ensued an outpouring of support for Sansour from around the world, gaining such leverage that – days later – the museum decided to cancel the prize altogether, and to forego its associations with Lacoste. While the ordeal could be interpreted as a depressing indication of our current socio-political condition, not to mention our increasing reliance in Europe on corporate sponsorship, the flipside is arguably reassuring. The way in which Sansour was able to gain momentum from online activists, news outlets and the press may well be evidence that an informal system of checks and balances exists within certain realms of the European cultural sphere.

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Subversion. Featuring work by Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Khaled Hafez, Larissa Sansour, Marwa Arsanios, Sharif Waked, Sherif El-Azma, Tarzan and Arab, and Wafaa Bilal.Curated by Omar Kholeif. Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, UK. 14 April – 5 June 2012, preview/symposium 13 April 2012.

[Omar Kholeif is Curator of Subversion, a large-scale exhibition and public program, which runs until 5 June 2012 at Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. More about Omar Kholeifhere; follow him on Twitter here.]

Anthony Alessandrini (AA): What was the idea behind this show, and what made you decide to curate it?

Omar Kholeif (OK): The spark for Subversion clicked in my head in 2009. I had just come back from a frustrating summer in Egypt trying to find some material in a number of different deteriorating film archives, and when I returned to the UK everyone was buzzing about a show in London that had lots of so-called Middle Eastern (and Arab) artists in it. It was a show entitled Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East at the Saatchi Gallery in London. This triggered all sorts of emotions within me and many of the artists with whom I was working, both from within and from outside of the Arab world. At that point I felt, and I still feel much the same way now, that Western institutions were still talking about artists from particular parts of the world using the same rhetoric that originated from post-colonial writers in the 1990s. In a sense, we had never moved beyond outdated modes of identity politics. Instead, I wanted to talk about what it means to be an individual in a post-internet, post social media human condition.

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Montreal-based artist duo Nicolas Bernier and Martin Messier aka La chambre des machines (The Mechanical Room) are a performance duo fascinated by the relationship between analogue and digital sound production. They use grandiose machines made out of retro-style gears and cranks, such as cogs, levers, with in-built projectors. Their multi-purpose instruments look like a futuristic mash-up made out of the sort of ornate appliances one would find in their grandparents’ attic.

Quebecois designer, Alexandre Laundry, conceives the majority of their physical machines, which the artists manipulate to produce industrial soundscapes that sit at a crossroads between acoustic and electronic resonance. Audiences of the duo’s performances are immersed in an all-encompassing field of noise during shows that take place in both small and large-scale auditoria, as well as in the public realm.

Keep on Reading at Wired.

Carry on Reading at Frieze

PREVIEW: 13th April 2012

A unique group show of new and recent contemporary art that explores and rethinks modern Arab identity.

Curated by Omar Kholeif

Subversion features work from eleven emerging and established artists who use autobiographical narratives amalgamated with fiction, references to popular culture and subversive parody to express the dichotomies they face as they perform multiple roles in a society which is frequently represented and (mis) represented–contorted and mediated to the outside world.

Rather than conforming, the artists approach the various social masks they are expected to wear with a sense of humour – making reference to the duplicitous performances of their everyday lives.

Spanning an array of techniques including installation, video, photography and sculpture, the work illustrates fragments of the distorted imagination that often preoccupies the Arab world.

Highlights include emerging Gaza artists and filmmakers Tarzan and Arab, presenting their award-winning Gazawood project (2010), including short film Colourful Journey and a series of striking cinema poster pastiches of imaginary movies from different genres. Originating from a region that has not had a functioning cinema since the 1980s and heavily relies on satellite TV and illegal DVD copies, the works strongly reflect the twins’ interest in and passion for film.

In A Space Exodus (2009), Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour adapts a segment of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, providing it with new, Middle Eastern context by positing the idea of the first Palestinian in space. Originally developed as part of the A Space Exodus installation, Subversion will also feature Sansour’s Palestinauts (2010) and three preliminary sketches for the Nation Estate project, a sci-fi photo series conceived in the wake of the Palestinian bid for nationhood at the UN.

For more info, please visit here.

Deadline 26 February 2012

FACT Liverpool is looking for submissions from filmmakers from across the Arab world and its diaspora. If you are a filmmaker or producer whose film bears a strong connection to the Arab world you may wish to submit up to two films for consideration

http://www.fact.co.uk/news/latest-news/2012/02/03/arab-film-festival—call-for-submissions