Motorhome odyssey brings Arab art to US backwaters
NEW YORK – From the outside, it resembles the all-American road vehicles that cruise freeways from coast to coast. But inside, rich red fabrics and Arabian rugs tell a different story about life inside this nine-metre motorhome.
The six-wheeler – known by its occupants as “Gulf Stream” – has become an on-the-road home for Middle Eastern artists travelling between US art shows, universities and into the boondocks in a three-year mission to bridge East-West divisions.
So far, more than 25 artists have travelled from the Middle East to climb aboard, collaborate on artworks and meet with dealers, students and everyday Americans from the skyscrapers of New York to the backwaters of Alabama.
The unlikely odyssey is arranged by Edge of Arabia and Art Jameel. It will see more than 100 creatives take cross-continental trips by the time it wraps up in 2017.
“We wanted to connect two great centres of ideology and powerhouses of history-making: the Islamic World, centred on Saudi Arabia, and the consumer capitalism of America,” Edge of Arabia’s co-founder Stephen Stapleton told Middle East Eye (MEE).
“For us, artists are story-tellers, and this is a format that allows them to travel between each other’s worlds and bring fresh perspectives. Without this, we are saturated with conventional journalistic story-telling, with its focus on violence, religious extremism and so-called clashes of civilisation.”
One of the participants, Palestinian artist Yazan Khalili, will visit three US towns called Palestine – in Michigan, Ohio and Texas. Another, Bahrain-based artist Faisal Samra, will examine why tribesmen on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota eschew state housing projects.
Visitors to the Armory Show, an annual modern art fair held in New York in March, watched in amusement at the traditionally-dressed Iranian-American artist Darvish Fakhr “gliding” on his flying carpet – a Persian rug atop a motorized skateboard.
In the other direction, US artist Matthew Mazzotta is in Jeddah, working to revive more than a dozen buildings in the coastal Saudi city’s old town – a crumbling, cosmopolitan warren of alleys, spice stalls and hookah bars that is reminiscent of the Arabian Nights saga.
Palestinian filmmaker Husam Al-Sayed, who was born and raised in Saudi, has also gained from the scheme. Back in Jeddah, he helps run the satirical online video network Telfaz11. In Manhattan, the skyline has re-kindled his creativity.
“New York is very generous for filmmakers,” the shaven-headed 30-year-old told MEE. “I’m a street photographer, I thrive on street life, and it’s challenging to do that back in Saudi Arabia. It’s my passion, and I’ve found it here.”
Once in New York, al-Sayed met Brian Zegeer and made a documentary about the American artist’s Arab roots and efforts to save the remnants of “Little Syria” – an area of lower Manhattan that was home to Levantine immigrants from the 1880s to the 1940s.
Source: www.middleeasteye.net