[-empyre-] Mirene-reponse

Sat Feb 19 17:28:05 EST 2011

Thank you for the invitation to participate in this discussion.  Sorry for
my silence in the last weeks, I have been following the interesting ideas
that have come up so far. Rather than a formal introduction of my work, I
will try to introduce my ideas and practice by commenting/responding to the
ideas that have emerged from the discussions so far.

I was intrigued by Nat and Mayssa’s conversation about what constitutes ‘new
media’ generally and what that means particularly in the Middle East.
Personally I don’t describe myself as a ‘new media artist’ because I work
with a lot of different mediums that can range from handwriting to video.  As
an artist my practice is really based in an interest in publishing be it
online, book format, magazines etc. and as a cultural organizer (if is in
fact the right description for what I do- I really don’t know!) I aim to
create environments for critical discussions.

I have worked on different online projects either through my personal work
or through other kinds of projects. My attraction to the Internet is mostly
driven through a certain mode of publishing and connectivity.

Across Borders was one of the first online projects that I worked on
2004/2005 (and just to clarify Across Borders is not an art project). The
project aimed at connecting Palestinian refugee camps across the region via
virtual space- setting up a page for each camp where they can publish their
daily news and try to connect with relatives in other countries. It was a
pre-facebook/twitter project which today sounds much easier to accomplish,
but back then,

the project had a certain set of technological challenges as well as social
and political ones.

The Internet became more important to me after completing my studies abroad.
Returning to Palestine and trying to develop an art practice of some sort
was initially challenging.  The challenges of mobility within Palestine
(checkpoints between cities and villages) and the difficulties of travel
within the region, emphasized both mental and physical isolation. The
Internet became an important outlet and a way of maintaining a relationship
with the region and the rest of the world.  This is in fact the main
inspiration for ArtTerritories- an online platform that I co-founded with
Ursula Biemann.  http://www.artterritories.net/

ArtTerritories generates interviews on a regular basis through interview
sequences that we call Trails- whereby an artist/ practitioner interviews
another artist/practitioner of their choice, and so on.  The Trail format is
a slow process of visualizing a network of individuals that operate in
different artistic communities across/within/outside the region. As such the
gaol of ArtTerritories is to strengthen the artist’s voice within the Middle
East and Arab region but also to instigate a dialogue that mobilizes a sense
of community and connectivity in the region.

I will leave it at here for now, and hope to post more thoughts later on.

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:51 AM, mirene arsanios
<mirenearsanios at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Hello
>
> Thank you Renata and Tim for this invitation, and to all the guests for
> contributing to this discussion with such thought-provoking posts.
>
> A brief introduction on me: I have moved to Beirut 3 years ago, where I
> have set up with my cousin and partner Marwa Arsanios the artist
> organization 98weeks research project. Our ambition was to create a
> discursive platform addressed to our generation of artists where to discuss
> specific issues collectively and through cross-disciplinary approaches.  Our
> first research topic was “spatial practices”. 98weeks corresponds to the
> time dedicated to each research topic. Our current research theme is “on
> publications”, a research on arts and cultural magazines produced in Lebanon
> and in the Arab world since the 30s.
> Through 98weeks, my interest was to generate knowledge, often an amateur
> knowledge produced outside academia (although both Marwa and I teach in
> universities) and that creatively seeks to rethink what is considered to be
> “lacking” in this context (lack of art schools, of art critics, of money, of
> exhibitions, museum etc.). How are these lacks  determined  in relation to
> Eurocentric models, and what  could we actually do, produce or think from
> here, and not necessarily in relation to “there”?
> Our work was always motivated by an -often personal- research interest,
> which may or may not respond to the current enthusiasm for Middle Eastern
> contemporary art. We are inevitably conditioned and perhaps the product of
> such interest, but within these conditions, we try to find guiding
> principles that are not determined by such logic.
>
> I would like to contribute to the discussion on the Egyptian revolution by
> addressing the question of the artist's role in relation to major historical
> and political events through a personal experience.
>
> One striking feature of the Beirut art scene is its ability to exist in
> parallel to a corrupt political system, in a country where the threat of a
> new war is never very distant. This ability to exist in parallel has both
> positive and negative aspects; social classes are deeply segregated, the
> rich and the poor live very different lives. However, the fact of having no
> common ground, no representative public sphere, also facilitates the
> creation of parallel organizations, which substitute for the workings of the
> state (I think that there are about 8000 NGOs registered in Lebanon).
> The situation of the art scene is interesting. Since the early 90s artists
> have been instrumental in voicing discomfort with the unaddressed and taboo
> chapter of the Lebanese civil war by asking for instance, how to mourn and
> how to think life together after such traumatic events (Walid Sadek in
> particular has addressed these questions in his work).
> These art discourses, however, never overlapped with public ones. Artists
> exist in parallel, think in parallel and although their production is
> effective- its produces thought and acts on less tangible levels amongst a
> community and at times a public- such production rarely acts on the topic it
> addresses (Walid Raad’s reflections on historiography will never impact the
> writing of Lebanese history).
> I realize that this dilemma falls back into the art historical debate of
> art’s relation to life, still I am confronted to this relation in ways that
> very tangible; if a war erupts, should I continue filling fund applications?
> It goes without saying that a war would interrupt any type of activities,
> but I find that affirming art making in such conditions is particularly
> confusing.
>
> During the Egyptian revolution, artist and musician Ahmed Basiony was
> killed in a protest. Paradoxically, it is this event- the killing of an
> artist whom I didn’t personally know- that made the event more “real” to my
> eyes. The fact that I reacted in such ways to his death because he was an
> artist triggered a set of distributing questions; was it only through such
> tragic events that art became “life”? Was art the only lenses through which
> I was able to perceive something as “real”? Paradoxically precisely because
> of its surreal quality (the symbolic sphere of art becomes the sphere of
> action). I am trying to reflect on my own reaction without necessarily
> knowing what to conclude.
>
> Thank you for reading and looking forward to hear your comments,
>
> Mirene
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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