Middle East

Asia | Transnational Histories and Non-aligned Networks

post Presents: Unsettled Dust—Archives, Epistemologies, Images

These presentations and panel discussion at MoMA brought together four filmmakers and artists who work in expanded documentary modes, using existing footage, archival research, interviews, and scripted narratives to produce imaginative accounts of transnational struggles, solidarities, and interventions. Using moving images, some of these practitioners interrogate the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the mid-late 20th…

Jerónimo Atehortúa, Jihan El Tahri, Naeem Mohaiemen, Mila Turajlić, Rattanamol Singh Johal and Stuart Comer

Middle East | Art and the Political: 1960s and 1970s

From the Body of Ruin to the Ruin of Body: On Materiality and the Iranian New Wave Cinema, 1960–1979

In the middle of debris and ruin, the Seville Oranges (naranj) were shining from behind dusty leaves. And again it was pickaxes that would come down on the rooftops, and the mud brick and dirt that would fall. —Ebrahim Golestan, From the Days Gone Narrate The wind is blowing through the street, the beginning of…

Farbod Honarpisheh

Asia | Transnational Histories and Non-aligned Networks

The Built Archives of Popular Islam in Singapore and Cape Town

Historian Sumit Mandal initiates a comparison of the architecture, surrounding landscapes, and histories of two keramat, or Muslim gravesite-shrines—Habib Noh in Singapore and Tuan Guru in Cape Town.

Sumit Mandal

Africa | Art and the Political: 1960s and 1970s

Safia Farhat’s Hybrid Creatures in Civic Spaces

As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Safia Farhat (Tunisian, 1924–2004), contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic space during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. Jessica Gerschultz introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition for Tunisian modernists.

Jessica Gerschultz

Asia | One Work, Many Voices

Mediality and Memory: Akram Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot

What is historicized, how is it recorded, and who determines and controls these seemingly unyielding criteria? Invoking multiple media apparatuses and deriving its title from a rumor, Akram Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) undercuts the hegemonic and umbilical ties of media and history.

Rattanamol Singh Johal

Africa | Contemporary Crisis and Dissent

The Planetary: the Globes of Globalization and Global Warming

Is the globe of globalization the same as the globe of global warming?

Sarah Lookofsky, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ann Stoler, Jumana Manna and Joseph P. Masco

Asia | Contemporary Crisis and Dissent

Objects in Circulation

The panel examines historical cases of the migration of images and knowledge across cultures and temporalities.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Cécile Fromont and Prajna Desai

Africa | Contemporary Crisis and Dissent

Incommensurability and Untranslatability

The move to diversify art historical narratives is often accompanied by a search for commonalities. Instead addressing a need to acknowledge radical difference and untranslatability, each presenter in this panel approached the question of the incommensurable, interrogating tensions between a global approach and site-specific study.

Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Timea Junghaus, Harsha Ram and Meghan Forbes

Middle East | Contemporary Crisis and Dissent

Documenting Migration in Contemporary Art: Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project

How to raise awareness of the most recent refugee crisis in the Mediterranean in a way that does not spectacularize human suffering? Beginning with Bouchra Khalili’sThe Mapping Journey Project, this essay addresses how the present crisis has manifested as image and has made its way, across a variety of methodological and ethical approaches, into works of…

Argyro Nicolaou

Middle East | Contemporary Crisis and Dissent

Tea Is Coffee, Coffee Is Tea: Freedom in a Closed Room

In this sardonic text, acclaimed Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed bitingly describes the conditions of filmmaking under the Ba’athist regime in Syria. Under strict control of the National Film Association that was founded in 1963, only one film was produced every year in the country.

Ossama Mohammed

Middle East

Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents – Art and Arab Life, a Questionnaire

“Where do our arts stand with regard to the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation?” This question was posed in 1956 in a questionnaire on “Art and Arab Life” that was circulated to artists in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria in a special issue devoted to the arts of the Arab world of the Beirut-based, pan-Arab journal al-Adab, which was established in 1953 as an outlet for politically engaged thought and cultural analysis.

Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Lookofsky, Sarah Rogers and Nada Shabout

Middle East

Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents – On the Concept of Painting and the Plastic Language

In Morocco in the mid-1960s, the National School of Fine Arts in Casablanca offered a new cohort of avant-garde thinkers—including artists Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi—a platform for developing new models of decolonized, integrated artistic practice. Such an agenda is set forth in this position statement written by Chebaa on the occasion of the three-person Belkahia, Chebaa, and Melehi exhibition at the Mohammed V Theatre gallery in Rabat.

Mohammed Chebaa, Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Lookofsky, Sarah Rogers and Nada Shabout

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