Quarterly guest edited by Lina Attalah
Gallery curated by Vivian Ziherl
ArteEast Quarterly—an online journal engaging contemporary practices from the MENA region and its diaspora—is pleased to announce the release of its 2016 fall issue.
Guest edited by Mada Masr founder Lina Attalah, this fall issue ponders the betrayals and promises of publishing in the Arab world. Taking its cue from “Betrayal”—an essay in which Vilém Flusser regards the invention of print and the advent of media culture as a divulging of information in which language is betrayed—this fall issue delves into publishing histories as they relate to intellectual ones, homing in on the friendships, conspiracies, and treasons inherent to the production of ideas and their circulation in print. What writing and thinking are possible in the media, in readership, in censorship?
Born from a series of letters, Mansour Aziz and Cynthia Kreichati‘s essay weaves stories from the lives of controversial and inspiring figures such as Abdullah Al-Kosaimi, Chelsea Manning, and Omar Amiralay, with personal anecdotes and reflections on publishing as a means to speak truth to power.
Also born out of letters, Sarah Rifky’s reflections on writing address non-writing as a practice of presence and possible break from hopelessness. Non-writing and withdrawal present an alternative engagement with the world, no less political in its silence.
In a roundtable moderated by Jennifer Evans and Lina Attalah, Nael El Toukhy and MF Kalfat discuss the politics and resurgence of translation in post-revolutionary Egypt. They ask whether no translation is better than its opposite, and discuss the transactions involved in making an Arabic text available in English or vice versa.
Adelita Husni-Bey’s art intervention is based on the transcription of a conversation and mapping session conducted with journalists in Egypt after the revolution in which participants interrogate terms they routinely use in journalistic writing. Excerpts of the 2013 transcript infiltrate texts by other contributors, mapping onto hyperlinked words multiple and unintended meanings.
In conjunction with the summer issue, The Gallery section of the magazine curated by Vivian Ziherl presents “Before and After Origins,” a selection of work from the Jerusalem Show VIII. “Before and After Origins” extends the Palestinian people’s right to return to the land from which they were evicted in 1948 to other global and contemporary struggles, including those of displaced populations in South Africa, Burma, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia, as well as Refugee and Afro-Caribbean diaspora communities in the Netherlands, among others.
The gallery presents images by Megan Cope, Jawad Al Malhi, Tom Nicholson, Shada Safadi, as well as historical collections of artifact from the The Tawfiq Canaan Amulets Collection and engraved shells that form the collection of George Al Ama.
For this issue of ArteEast Quarterly, click here.
For more information about the publication, please contact our Managing Editor Mirene Arsanios. Sign up to received to receive the ArteEast Quarterly directly in your mailbox!