[-empyre-] Welcome to week 2 of February 2020 discussion: Thinking differently in scholarship and curation

[nat muller]

Hi all and thanks for the invite Dale,

The article you are referring to was this one: http://m.startribune.com/minneapolis-art-exhibit-rejects-middle-east-in-favor-of-a-more-inclusive-community/566312062/ <http://m.startribune.com/minneapolis-art-exhibit-rejects-middle-east-in-favor-of-a-more-inclusive-community/566312062/>
Here SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) is used as a decolonizing corrective to the Middle East. The use of (South)West Asian has been taken up for example by the critical and curatorial platform Mizna and has been a.o. sanctioned by Hyperallergic editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian and curator Reem Fadda. See for Reem’s take: http://www.radicate.eu/reem-fadda-associate-curator-for-the-middle-eastern-art/ <http://www.radicate.eu/reem-fadda-associate-curator-for-the-middle-eastern-art/>. It is real important to rethink the terms we use and how politically charged or exclusive they are. I’d like to point to another aspect from a curatorial perspective. One of the largest issues imho with Western institutions curating regional shows - whether termed Middle East, Arab, MENA, MENSA, West Asian, SWANA - is the tendency to on the one hand be didactic (i.e. it’s not so much about the art really, but rather about teaching you something about a region, usually involving an emphasis on violence and conflict) and on the other hand clump together practices that have little in common (i.e. a hugely diverse and heterogeneous region is reduced and flattened to a singular place). And while there’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t side to this, I am still pretty amazed, curatorially-speaking, how reluctant Western institutions are when it comes to dealing thematically and critically with artists from the region. While I agree with Kay that using ‘Arab’ as a grouping word opens possibilities, many artists are equally unhappy with being categorized as such. The lens through which their work is seen becomes limited. An early example is French curator Catharine David’s project ‘Contemporary Arab Representations,’ that was shown in 2002 at Witte de With in Rotterdam and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. While David introduced artists from Lebanon, Egypt, and a few years later Iraq, to European institutions/audiences, this project also became ‘representative’ of what kind of practices the region has to offer; it created a canon of sorts. The title of the project reveals the double standard: artists from the region are often burdened by Western institutions to ‘represent’ all kinds of things rather than ‘presenting' their work.

Nat

> On Feb 9, 2020, at 17:23, Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu <mailto:dmh2018 at nyu.edu>> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks, Beth and Sean, for sharing some of your research on ways that artists in KSA and UAE are navigating the limitations of territory.
> 
> I realized that the numeral dates were aligning with the weekend for many subscribers, so I’m starting week 2 on Sunday evening my time, which hopefully will more closely align with the start of the week in Australia and start of the day in North America.
> 
> 
> This week, I’ve invited Kay Dickinson and Nat Muller to extend the discussion into ways to think differently in our scholarship and curation. 
> 
> I’m pasting their bios below for a sense of the expertise that they bring to the discussion, particularly as it concerns art and media that are labelled as “Middle Eastern” or “in the Middle East.”
> 
> I’m curious how we as artists, scholars, curators, activists, theorists, students, and so forth can make ideas and perspectives visible and legible to broader publics without using terms that are reductive (like the ones Beth mentioned in her last post) or inaccurate (like Middle East) since the structures of publishing and curating are often based on keyword-search-friendly reproduction of these reductive and inaccurate categories.
> 
> There was an article published online in one of the arts/museums journals about an ongoing discussion about replacing Middle East with West Asia or Southwest Asia at a one of the museums in London, I believe. If I find the link, I will share. 
> 
> Dale
> 
> 
> 
> 2—Thinking differently in scholarship and curation
> 
> Scholarship and curation often adopt the nation-state as a category of analysis. Much like art and film are promoted at commercial festivals and art market, our scholarship and curating often under-represent the significance of other aspects of identity and politics. Even museums and educational institutions continue to reduce artists to place of birth and residence.
> 
> This week considers ways of thinking differently, whether the transcontinental, pan-Arab, pan-African, and non-aligned movements of the mid-20th century or the more recent deterritorialized movements that emerge via internet and mobile networks, often using the idea of the nation-state as an oppositional strategy against corruption and nepotism.
> 
> How can we conceive more complicated ways to organize art practices? Are concessions to the logics of film festivals and art markets in our publishing, curating, and programming unavoidable?
> 
> 
> Kay Dickinson is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal.  She is the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (bfi, 2016) and Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Palgrave, 2018).
> 
> Nat Muller is an independent curator and writer based between Amsterdam and Birmingham. Her main interests are: image politics and contemporary art from the Middle East. Recent exhibitions include Spectral Imprints for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in Dubai (2012); Adel Abidin’s solo exhibition I love to love… at Forum Box in Helsinki (2013); This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time at Stedelijk Museum/American University of Beirut Gallery (2014/15); the A.M. Qattan 2016 Young Artist of the Year Award at Qalandiya International in Ramallah and The Mosaic Rooms in London; Neither on the Ground nor in the Sky at ifa Gallery Berlin (2019). In 2015 she was Associate Curator for the Delfina Foundation’s Politics of Food Program (London). She has curated film programs for Rotterdam’s International Film Festival, Norwegian Short Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Video D.U.M.B.O New York. Her writing has been widely published and she edited Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s monograph (Schilt Publishing, 2015), Nancy Atakan’s monograph Passing On (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), Walid Siti’s monograph (Kehrer Verlag, forthcoming 2020). Her AHRC-funded PhD project at Birmingham City University researches science fiction in contemporary visual practices from the Middle East. She curated the Danish Pavilion with Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. www.natmuller.com <http://www.natmuller.com/> 
> 
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