Summer 2012
Barrak Alzaid
By Barrak Alzaid Summer 2012 | ArteZine When the Arab or Middle Eastern or Muslim body enters critical art discourses it is often cast as an overdetermined site that must bear responsibility for conveying social, political and identitarian issues. Bodies are inscribed within rigid expectations and norms by social dynamics and proscribed cultural values, and subsequently…
Sadia Shirazi
By Sadia Shirazi Summer 2012 | ArteZine Harun Farocki’s films Comparison via a Third (2007) and In Comparison (2009) begin with identical footage, minus In Comparison’s prefacing this footage with a still diagram of a white orthographic image of a brick on a black background. While both Comparison via a Third (2007) and In Comparison (2009) document various contemporary technologies of brick production and even…
Stéphanie Dadour
By Stephanie Dadou Summer 2012 | ArteZine Randa Mirza’s work discloses preexisting representations and identity-based issues in the urban fabric of Beirut. Through notions related to representations of sex and gender, Mirza aims to explore the Lebanese postwar conditions of identity constructions. Representations are to be understood as systems of production that convey meanings, depending on…
Dina Ibrahim
By Dina Ibrahim Summer 2012 | ArteZine Dina Ibrahim: Generally speaking, contemporary art has deemed figuration obsolete in representing such abstract notions as identity and sexuality, yet your work manages to seamlessly integrate the two to rather confronting yet highly aesthetic effects. Why figuration (and precisely the human figure)? And what role does it play in your…
Joseph Shahadi
By Joseph Shahdadi Summer 2012 | ArteZine In the spring of 2006 I had a residency that allowed me access to studio space—a precious commodity in New York City. The long trek from my Brooklyn apartment to the studio, which was on the western-most edge of Chelsea, brought me past the Bridge Gallery, a temporary space…
Ava Ansari
By Ava Ansari Summer 2012 | ArteZine On Friday, September 23rd 2011, Wafaa Bilal’s A Call was performed in Aaran Gallery, Tehran, and live-streamed on the walls of White Box, New York. The work—which included over eighty Iranian performers, an empty swimming pool, and five cameras—was an embodied memorial to the dead, the living, and the forgotten of the Iran-Iraq War…
By Barrak Alzaid Summer 2012 | ArteZine Working primarily with images and video, artist Bouchra Khalili creates installation pieces which take on issues of individual subjectivity in relation to a geographic context. Her work opens up narratives onto the flat topography of maps. Placed in the context of the gallery, the works invite the viewer to engage with…
Ernesto Pujol
By Ernest Pujol Summer 2012 | ArteZine 1. Memoir(s) At this moment, the only desert storms I can recall are blowing through my heart. So I find that the more I analyze, understand and narrate them as a writer, and perform them solo or with groups as a social choreographer, the more I gather mastery of…
Spring 2012
Sandra Skurvida, Barbad Golshiri
By Barbad Golshiri and Sandra Skurvida Spring 2012 | ArteZine February 7, 2012 10:18:38 AM EST SANDRA SKURVIDA: I propose a conversational shift from a stereotypical/allegorical/exilical romanticism to a political domesticism — I have in mind the younger generation of artists in Iran who exhibit in their works and their life choices an unconditional will to remain in…
Anahita Razmi
By Anahita Razmi Spring 2012 | ArteZine By erasing 27 seconds from Anahita Razmi’s video camera, the Iranian National Guard collaborated on a beautiful soundscape set against the wall of the National Guard headquarters.
