Sharjah Biennal 14 : Leaving the Echo Chamber

This essay reviews the twelfth iteration of the Sharjah Biennial, 2015, a major event in the international art calendar and the most significant fulcrum of cultural and artistic activities in the Middle East and North Africa. I examine how curator Eungie Joo articulated her theme of The Past, the Present, the Possible by looking closely at the exhibits and some of the key issues that framed the conversations during the March Meeting, the ancillary talk shop event that is as important as the various exhibitions. I explore selected works that either mirror the arc of art history from a Middle Eastern perspective or address some of the critical issues that are emblematic of our contemporary world. Finally, I consider how the biennial disrupts and/or affirms the typological structures and narratives that shape our understanding and experience of art biennials—what some scholars have described as the biennialization of contemporary art and of the art world.

In this email conversation, Rasha Salti, co-curator of the 10th Sharjah Biennale/ ‘Plot for a Biennial’, discusses her preoccupations and the direction of her recent work with Nancy Adajania, critic, cultural theorist and Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale. (Published in Take on Art, ISSN 0976-4011. Vol 2, Issue 08, 2012.

The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity, 2013

The digital media-morphosis (Blaukopf, 1996) of the 1980s brought revolutionary changes to music making, allowing musicians and sound artists to find new possibilities for the production and distribution of their works. Further, new software and hardware tools led to new musical aesthetics. Many scholars (Tagg and Clarida, 2003, Grossmann, 2005) argue that the different academic fields that study music have not kept pace with this dramatic development. Music theory - from musicology, to ethnomusicology, to popular music studies - seems overwhelmed by the changes, and the amount of new musical phenomena to study. Ethnomusicology moved away from the production side of music to concentrate on questions of its reception and meaning mainly. This chapter focuses on the music itself, and on discourses around music making. It discusses with musicians and sound artists from Beirut how they create music. Beirut hosts an emerging circle of sound artists and musicians who work in the fields of electro-acoustic music, musique concrète and free improvised music. Many of these artists studied arts, design or film at one of the French or American Universities in Lebanon and are very knowledgeable about the history, philosophy and concepts of the arts in Europe and the US. In their CD-shelves and on their laptops one finds music by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, musique concrète pioneers like Luc Ferrari and Pierre Schaffer, innovators of free jazz and free improvised music like Peter Brötzmann or Evan Parker, and by many more artists from experimental to popular music traditions in Europe and the US, from past and present. The chapter discusses and analyses how exactly these artists from Beirut work within these influential concepts and genres as often defined by European and US-American avant garde artists. The results show that the sound artists from Beirut create their own personal approaches and aesthetics. Their definition of music is broad: it includes the noises and sounds of their closer environment. They rework, re-arrange and/or imitate the sounds of their city and the noises of war with the latest sound software. They move rather freely between experimental and popular music, and between what is often referred to as high-culture and low-culture. They work with the principles of trial and error – not unlike many previous avant garde artists. They organise sound and noise with a certain independency, they mix genres and styles freely. Furthermore, they do not shy away from imperfection, accidents, chaos and failure. Overall, they have a specific knowledge and taste for sounds and textures, and a very fresh, playful and direct approach to music and music making. The contribution suggests that it is no longer enough to look at the references and musical influences alone. We have to analyse how artists combine these influences and what the resulting aesthetics are. To call these artists “Westernized”, as many Lebanese and Non-Lebanese do, is not any longer tenable. To them “locality” and “place” are no longer linked to “Arabic” music, but very much to the sounds and noises of their environment, and to their “sonic memory” - mainly from the Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 1990). These artists from Beirut offer new representations beyond exoticized East-West formulae. Their music, noises and soundscapes reflect the effects of localisation and globalisation on various levels. One could risk saying that their music is an attempt to “create sense out of chaos” as Anthony Storr argues. Storr states that music is not an escape from “real” life, but a way of ordering human experience. (Storr, 1992, pp. 182-183) Together with like-minded contemporaries in worldwide knowledge networks, these Beiruti artists seem to create a new avant garde. They show that the specific contemporary sound of our digitalized and globalized world is not anymore created, merchandized and exploited in Europe and the USA exclusively, but across the globe.

Introduction, 2019

Anthropological Quarterly 87, 4: 977-988., 2014

Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 2017