DOVA

As a curator who works at the intersection of film and "Media Art" or "New Media," and like anyone who works in a specific area for a period of time, I regularly come to question what lured me to the field. Medium has always been of interest to me, but I also believe that I came to this generic turf (oft considered a subfield of the visual arts) because of a certain sense of exile I felt when operating within the broader schema. By exile I refer to the sense of being an outsider. Coming from a film and visual arts background, I was not schooled within the conventional mold of an art historical discourse (although this has changed through self-education). Indeed, influential media art curators from Steve Dietz to Sarah Cook, a colleague who co-runs the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss (CRUMB) email list-have observed that new media is like visual art, but with noted differences. The emphasis on processes and networks has been considered divergent or separate from the museological objecthood often theorized in art historical discourse. As culture continues to subsume dividends, there evolves a narrative that equally encompasses the travails of a Paris Hilton sex tape and the work of famous YouTube artists such as Marisa Olson and Ryan Trecartin (who directly critique that narrative). Bearing this in mind, I find myself scratching my head at the continued historical subdivisions of so-called "Media Art." My experience at international symposia suggests that the construct of media art history in academic discourse has been arced around an obsession with reconciling the relationship between art and technology for an audience with so-called "high art" concerns. To the younger generation of curators: media art seems to speak from a position of lack. I refer to lack in the postcolonial sense of the word-a discourse I believe I am well versed in. It is a lack that is built on an Orientalist politics of outright exclusion, based on a very didactic and diametric fear of the "Other." For so-called contemporary new media artists and curators, this apparent lack seems all but "imagined." We are in control of our fate. Our destiny. What was once our exile is now our source of empowerment. Not tied to binding contracts with private gallery owners, the world as manifest through virtual and cross-embedded screens is our platform, our all-embracing oyster. Why do we need an inherent predisposition that continues to define a narrative of struggle for artists with media-led practices? A narrative that continues to propagate the notion that medium-led practices are held in a separate light from the broader canon of the visual arts and culture? Isn't it anachronistic? The past three decades have materialized in significant ways. We have witnessed the birth of electronic and media art departments within universities, as well as international conference series on the subject. They have proliferated in tandem with global capital. But, when culture becomes remixed and hyperlinked, labels become contestable. The capitalization of the words "Media Arts" and "Electronic Art," for instance, are by their very nature framing devices initiated and applied by an outdated historical movement, whose vernacular has since become especially directed toward a "select" group of self-subscribing individuals. I would like to take this opportunity to be as polemical as possible. I would like to provoke the thought that these terms and constructs (for example, "Media Art Histories," "Electronic Art," "New Media") are self-constricting and exiled formations or spaces. These strictures must be shifted to encompass and enable a more fluid formation for the creation of a broader schema. This may be a written or unwritten history, but whatever the case, it must enable a more malleable and "open" frame for the appropriation of media-based technology and its relationship to visual culture. I know that I, and the many artists I work with, would like to stop living in self-fulfilling exile and self-marginalization. …

I have tried, as much as possible, to limit the use of Arabic transcription throughout. However, in those rare instances where it is necessary, the format I use is a simplified version of the commonly cited transcription found in the Encyclopedia of Islam (Bosworth, 1960). Moreover, Arabic names, places and titles are not always strictly transcribed, but referred to as most commonly referenced. It is worth noting that they may appear differently in other published materials.

The relationship between politics, media and the visual arts for cultural practitioners living in the 'Arab world' has never been as urgent a topic for debate as it has been since the advent of the political turmoil, which begun the Arab Uprisings in December 2010. At the time of writing, there is still a rampant desire by cultural brokers to create unsophisticated forums for discussion of the so-called 'Arab Spring', a term which so many have come to completely disavow. Arguably, the rudimentary 'debate', which seeks to bludgeon art with the brunt of realist day-today politics, is forming a one-dimensional history that is being written by groups, who, it has been argued, are either completely naïve or attempting to capitalize on market and cultural interest in the cultural practitioners of the Arab world. Writers, curators and editors have attempted to capture, for better or for worse, the genesis of 'post-revolutionary art' within the region. Critics and curators have achieved this by dubbing any art produced after the Arab Uprisings as 'postrevolutionary'. Examples of this include private institutions such as Mona Said's gallery in Cairo, the entire curatorial framework around the first Shubbak festival in London 2011 and, of course, the numerous international film festivals from Cannes to Berlin whose curatorial programming included large film seasons around the theme of the 'Arab Spring' such as International Film Festival Rotterdam's Power Cut Middle East, to name just one example. 1 If these thematic frameworks suggest anything, it is that artists and curators who hold an 'Arab' identity are expected to engage directly with the socio-political events that inform their 'local' context, whether that context is directly influencing their artwork or not. Naturally this scenario is not unique to the present moment. The Egyptian-born artist Basim Magdy once informed me, for example, that he was rejected from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands because the selection panel were disappointed that his work 'did not directly reflect his social reality' [1]. The relationship between the politics of everyday life and a culturally 'located' canon of art is, of course, complex. This polemic seeks to explore the social impulse generated by the interplay of politics, media, and the visual arts in the contemporary Arab world, with a particular focus on Egypt from 2011 to 2013. In particular, my aim is to discuss how technology's socializing qualities might be able to shift generalizing cultural forms of categorization, such as those noted above, as it continues to advance, and to map inter-disciplinary fields of art education into motion. 1 Moreover, regularly, artists and filmmakers contact me to ask me whether they should accept their invitation to be a part of a 'post Arab spring' themed programme-from Hamburg to Nottingham, the examples are numerous. Likewise, the ills of 'revolutionary' framing can be attributed to projects independent of such a narrative. For instance, in 2012, I curated an exhibition entitled, Subversion at Cornerhouse, Manchester, which sought to reconsider Arab modernisms. Yet despite the fact that all of the artworks were produced pre-'Arab Spring', the British press continued to associate the content of the exhibition with the day the day reality of the Arab Uprisings.

Best known for his dreamlike, surrealist films such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and TV show Twin Peaks, many of us are already familiar with Lynch's on-screen vision, but in fact he originally trained as a painter, or a visual artist more broadly speaking. Since his early studies at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he has produced a prolific body of work across painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, drawing, installation, music, and film. In his work, which collectively unfolds the inner workings of everyday life, the mundane provides an opportunity for dark, quirky inner exploration. Lynch's surfaces, which are scratched, charred and three-dimensional in form, are like windows into the soul. My Head Is Disconnected is the first major UK exhibition of visual art by David Lynch, showcasing an accomplished artist oeuvre in a career that has developed over five decades. The first chapter of the exhibition is titled City on Fire, and explores extreme, dystopian landscapes and how they affect the people that inhabit them. Nothing Here looks at the human psyche and the fragility of the mind through a set of broad characters. Industrial Empire presents drawings on the themes of labour, industry and the environment. The final chapter of the exhibition, Bedtime Stories, features new works by Lynch that fold his dark narratives and characters together in their own universe. Alongside My Head Is Disconnected, David Lynch at HOME will also feature specially curated music events, talks and tours and a film programme.

Far and Wide: Nam June Paik is an edited collection that seeks to explore the legacy of the artist Nam June Paik in contemporary media culture. This particular project grew out of a collaborationbetween FACT, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, and the Tate Liverpool, who in late 2010-2011 staged the largest retrospective the artist’s work in the UK. The first since his death, it also showcased the premiere of Paik’s laser work in Europe. The project, staged across both sites, also included a rich public programme. Of these, two think tank events, The Future is Now: Media Arts, Performance and Identity after Nam June Paik and The Electronic Superhighway: Art after Nam June Paik, brought together a forum of leading artists, performers and thinkers in the cross-cultural field together to explore and dissect the significance of Paik within broader culture

The journey to Making New Time was as much about the instant-now
as it was about taking inventory of the urgencies of the now. In turn,
the exhibition became both a call and a response to artists. Artists who became friends. Artists who spoke different languages, whose work created ruptures, fissures, holes through an echo chamber – a space with multiple surfaces, contortions and resonances.

How do we re-think the way objects of art are looked at and understood? Unsettled Objects brings together the work of over 30 artists from across the globe whose art helps us consider this question while provoking a re-imagining of the ways in which history is narrated and explored.

Drawn from: The Other Side of Silence, the first monograph of the artist Hrair Sarkissian—one of the leading figures working with photography globally today. This cerebral book of multi-disciplinary essays and images explores histories of disappearance, the architecture of violence, and the potential of the medium of photography itself. While encompassing the moving image, sculpture, sound, and installation, Sarkissian’s practice is rooted in his photographs. His lifelong use of a large-format camera relates to the artist’s interest in the role that chance plays in capturing hidden narratives of conflict, trauma, and displacement. Acting as an archaeologist and a storyteller, the artist draws upon personal and collective memory to reveal stories that official records cannot tell. The viewer is invited to consider the formal aspects of the image, to breathe in its silence and to interrogate what might live beneath its surface. This monograph accompanies Hrair Sarkissian’s eponymous touring exhibition organized by Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; the Bonnefanten, Maastricht; and Sharjah Art Foundation.

In early 2021, in light of the density of internet use in both the personal and professional realm due to the limited mobility imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, we invited author, curator and cultural historian, Dr. Omar Kholeif to revisit their publication You Are Here: Art After the Internet. Here, they revisit the potential impact and relationship of the internet to artistic practices and art’s infrastructures.

OMAR KHOLEIF To say that Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents is a boon to the research of any historian looking into art of the Arab world is an understatement. I only wish such a field guide had been available to me when I was pursuing my doctoral studies. Actual "primary" material on modern Arab art in English has for years been virtually impossible to find (and thus unavailable to my supervisors who, unable to read Arabic, had trouble independently assessing much of my research). Modern Art in the Arab World is something of an unusual introduction to the limited market of books on Arab art. It might function as an introduction, but this is also a textured and layered work that will offer textual gems and open up entirely new routes of thinking for even the most studied researcher. Ussama Makdisi, professor at Rice University, contributes a fine, short discussion of the formation of the "Arab world" and the "Arab imagination," a term encountered repeatedly throughout the book. One wonders what this "world" is and how it came to be. A shared consciousness created by language, religion, and conflict? What this book posits through its multiplicity of voices is the heterogeneity of the region, the contradictory politics that framed its art, and the often-confused ideology that emerged from the region after the Ottoman Period through to the 1980s. In an early text in the book, a Muslim cleric discusses the ills of "representational art," while seemingly still somehow admiring its qualities. Did this religious context frame the abstraction of the early modernist period or was abstraction a form of political resistance? How do we differentiate resistance from pure representational art? How do we understand-indeed, unfold-a genealogy of modern Arab art? This selection of primary documents does not draw a clear genealogical timelinesomething urgently needed, but beyond the scope of the present investigation. Rather, what this book offers us is a deep snapshot of the ideology that constituted the so-called modernist period of the Arab world. I say "so-called" in that many of the artists featured or discussed in the book oscillate between the modern and the contemporary periods of time as we know it. Certainly, clear delineations between these periods do not truly exist in the popular Arab imagination as I understand it. This is a book to relish and dig into time and time again. Each article takes on a different meaning on further reading. As an Arabic reader, I would have loved to see the original translated texts side by side with the English; however, that would have made for an unwieldy book, and after all, as many of us are aware, these books function in large part to capture the imagination of Western researchers who have for far too long marginalized Arab art histories in the broader canon of art as we know it. The rationale behind the choice of images used to illustrate this period is unclear and may have been determined by the ability to obtain rights of reproduction. But this is not a book of images. It is a collective text that opens a door for further debate, research, and love-for it is love that we need most in the Arab world. This book inspires a love for Arabic art history and should encourage further historical and contextual illustration that will illustrate the subject and render it more accessible. OMAR KHOLEIF is a writer, curator, editor, and broadcaster based in London. Current and forthcoming curatorial projects include the 14th Sharjah Biennial, the VAC Pavilion at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale, Abu Dhabi Art, and a major project for the Manchester International Festival. He is also currently at work on two contemporary art monographs.

The Pavilion of Northern Macedonia was presented by Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski and curated by Basak Senova at the 56th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in 2015. We are all in this alone by Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski addresses the notion of faith in today's concurrent and multiple socio-political conditions. The We are all in this alone project is accompanied by a book, edited by Basak Senova. The book analyzes, reads and records the venture of the project with texts by the editor, Maja Nedelkoska Brzanova, Elke Krasny and Sebastian Cichocki, including a conversation between the artists and the curator. The contributions of Anne Barlow, Ksenija Cockova, Slavcho Dimitrov, Branko Franceschi, Omar Kholeif, Anders Kreuger, November Paynter, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Dirk Teuber, Jalal Toufic and Eyal Wiezman embody different perspectives on faith and are accompanied by drawings from the artists. The book was designed by Erhan Muratoglu and publish...

How does one make visible the stories that exist outside of the human field of vision? Can rendering and imagining the frequencies, simulations and stimulations of sound reveal narratives concealed from history? Artist and ‘Private Ear’ Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s projects express how the experience of listening—the nuances of a cyclic stutter or how the incongruence of an anxious murmur can reveal intricate details of the contested social, political and economic spheres in which we live. In the multi-sensory exhibition, The Sonic Image, the Turner Prize winning artist Abu Hamdan presents various studies of splintered aural leaks. Through research and analysis, the artist crafts a new form of image-making—a new aesthetic politics. ‘What does it mean to sonify images?’, asks Abu Hamdan. Here, the artist perceives of an image that behaves akin to sound itself—a picture that fluctuates between the ear and the eye—that may only exist through the accumulation of both senses.

Tracing the contours of immaterial forms of surveillance and control, The Sonic Image presents a distinctive form of visual expression that explores concepts of ‘atmospheric violence’ and the politics of listening. In the exhibition, the artist maps out an aesthetic atlas for how we see sound—that leaking of substances, which cannot be held by the membrane of either state or person; body or apparatus.

In the Heart of Another Country explores the concept of home – of longing and belonging by artists who hail from multiple diasporas. The exhibition ­and  book explores the ways that physical ­movement – how mobility across geographies, has shaped and contoured the frame of global art today. The artists, herein, have traversed ­migratory routes from South and West Asia, through Africa, and the Caribbean. Many now live in dispersed sites, far from where they first believed that they belonged. Drawing on art from the international collection of Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, In the Heart of Another ­Country, showcases the work of more than 60 artists through over 150 artworks in all media, many of which have rarely, if ever, been seen outside of their original context. Recently restored installations are present­ed ­alongside contemporary acquisitions, which narrate a communal story of kinship amongst artists – one often developed against a backdrop of political turmoil and social unrest. In the Heart of Another Country embodies the Sharjah Art Foundation ­Collection’s goal to present art that posits East-East and South-South alliances, forging a meeting point ­– a connective tissue that nurtures a polyphonous and inclusive art history.

Waste Not Want Not: The Life of Everyday Material
What would it look like for a piece of writing to embody the spirit, the very essence of a form of artmaking, a process anchored around the act of perpetual assembly? Or the act of disassembly? To produce words that resemble Lego blocks coming undone? Prose that conjures fastened buttons and strung rope; materials stitched and threaded. Or rather, decomposing – hanging by a thread, perhaps? In-between these pages, jute, cardboard, and acrylic – smeared and stained on handmade paper – sit alongside aluminium coil, wound and looped up to infinity, ascending and descending from parallel edges.