Realities Of The Arab World
Anyone undertaking the kind of art show now on view at the New Museum has to be uncommonly brave. You might say that the curators of “Here and Elsewhere” are distinctly unlucky in their timing—or the reverse, extremely lucky to alight on a time when there’s potentially a huge interest in the general topic. They have put on a museum-wide exhibition (five floors) of contemporary art “from and about the Arab world” featuring more than 45 artists from more than 15 countries. Kudos to them for doing so, because it turns out to be the most cumulatively illuminating experience you could wish for about a troubled and troubling region.
News headlines to one side, the curators have to contend with controversies attendant on the very idea of such a show. How do you determine typically Arab art, and if you don’t, how do you choose one artist over another? How do you avoid subjects that reinforce stereotypes without seeming to dodge central issues such as war, corruption, mistreatment of women and the like? The curators overcome these dilemmas by adhering closely to the ultracontemporary, increasingly predominant art-world aesthetics of postmodernism, an approach that laymen might ordinarily find too self-referential and involuted. In this case, though, if you’re looking for a window onto how Arab culture feels from within, the approach works surprisingly well because a great deal of what you see consists of highly idiosyncratic photographs and videos.
At the most basic level, you are getting a direct view of the visual landscape Arabs inhabit from North Africa to the Middle East—what their world looks like. But you soon realize that the show is about the images themselves as well as the depicted reality, that the representations are also part of the inhabitants’ daily sensory input: advertising, propaganda, news, pictures of urban spaces, consumer goods, old-fashioned studio photography and much else. Ultimately, you get an intimation of how an intelligent sensibility might react to being surrounded, often besieged, by such images. As one of the show’s co-curators, Natalie Bell, puts it, “we’re trying to focus on representations of national or cultural identity, the history of images in that culture, the relationship between the self and all those images.”
The first exhibit the visitor encounters is actually silhouetted onto the glass front of the museum’s ground floor, a barely discernible outline of palm trees and palisades that offers a clue to what follows. Once you’re inside the lobby, things fall into place. Above the reception desk a giant photo mural shows the gleaming atrium, hallways and staircases of The Palace, a hotel in Abu Dhabi said to be the most expensive ever built. Along the top, a row of portraits of the kind that usually contain the faces of ruling emirs instead frame the artists’ faces, some of whom are women in men’s garb. The overall effect is of ostentatious wealth punctured by kitsch.
Starting from the show’s top floor, you encounter a room full of images in display cases effectively chronicling the history of Arab nationalist propaganda from the 1950s to the 1980s. This stand-alone section is the work of an outside curator, Ala Younis, an Arab woman who lives in Jordan. Independence days, Revolution days, celebrations of industrial achievements, children marching carrying flags, Martyr’s day, a Palestine liberation poster for a North Korean festival of youth, a Palestinian street fighter figurine set, PLO lapel pins produced in Yugoslavia—a pan-Arab pageant of strident promises and sunlit celebrations of strife all adding up, in the end, to lost illusions.
On the fourth floor, you are confronted by a series of panel-size suspended road maps on which are outlined the whirligig of routes taken by several immigrants in their attempts to reach and stay in Europe. Headphones deliver the personal narratives of each aspirant’s crazy journey. You walk away having lived through a kind of Sisyphean multimedia opera-farce. In a little alcove nearby you can watch a hilariously tortuous video about a young actress who is asked to re-create, in a movie, the life of a famous female Algerian freedom fighter. She’s very conflicted. “That was a time when women were allowed to be freedom fighters,” she says. The historical and personal, the playing of roles in society and in movies, the identities required of women, all get aired in a highly complex work by Marwa Arsanios, a highly acclaimed U.S.-born female artist now living in Lebanon.
On the third floor, a modest row of black-and-white posed studio portraits from 1940s Egypt illustrate how self-consciously Westernized the culture was in the past. Two contemporary videos nearby show that the confusions of identity have changed but not diminished. In one, the artist, Wael Shawky from Egypt, walks through endless gaudy supermarket aisles breathlessly reciting the Koran to the camera, sonorous verses about caves, money, produce, with the line “wealth and children are the ornament of the world” recurring. The juxtaposition climbs to such a pitch of absurdity that it becomes impossible not to laugh. In the second video, two Armenians rehearse a nationalistic anthem over and over with each successively bursting into operatic tenor and offering mutual critiques over the words “the Armenian will never go away.” The artist, Mekhitar Garabedian, from Syria but now living in exile in Belgium, achieves a poignant mix of farce and tragedy so finely tuned that, again, the viewer laughs out loud.
In these and other exhibits, the show repeatedly surprises the visitor with its sophisticated levels of comic allusiveness—postmodern irony at its best. But perhaps the strongest entry is the subtlest and most somber in tone: “Execution Squares” by the Syrian-Armenian artist Hrair Sarkissian, who now lives in London. His haunting photographs of empty plazas in three Syrian cities where executions once took place date from 2008, before the current civil war; their emptiness suggests the ineradicable presence of memory and foreboding. The show, too, haunts you with the poetry and drama of its images and the people caught up in them.
The Wall Street Journal
Melik Kaylan