Guest editor: Nora Razian
ArteEast Quarterly—an online journal engaging contemporary practices from the MENA region and its diaspora—is pleased to announce the release of its 2017 spring issue. Guest edited by curator Nora Razian, this issue explores crisis ecology and its intricate connections to politics, gender, and real estate through the lens of particular case studies and practices.
In the summer of 2015, trash bags began cramming the streets of Beirut. The precarious landfill that had served as the capital’s dumping ground reached overcapacity. Unable to prioritize public good over private and tribal interests, politicians stood and watched from their insulated quarters, impervious to the smell of decay and protesting calls of the crowd.
That same summer, Beirut’s modern art museum re-opened following an extended period of renovation. Nora Razian, together with Nataša Petresin-Bachelez, curated the exhibition Let’s Talk About the Weather: Art & Ecology in a Time of Crisis which addressed the anthropocene from the particulars of a city and region like the Middle East. Four books edited by Ashkan Sepahvand were published in conjuction with the exhibition.
For the spring edition of the Quarterly, Razian re-extended an invitation to some of the authors and artists previously published or involved in the exhibition, thus pursuing an ongoing and timely conversation around climate change and the inexorable destruction of the planet’s natural, political, and social environments.
Nadia Christidi’s essay, Decaying Flesh (#1623), investigates the uneasy connections between military simulations, botanical life, and exhibition making.
Dima Hamadeh writes on Marwa Arsanios’ Falling is not collapsing, Falling is extending, a video and installation that looks at the cynical cycles of capital, land appropriation, and real estate—how the destruction of one leads to the thriving of the other, how both natural and human environments get shattered in the name of profit.
Ahmed Nabil’s interview with Sheila Jasaonff discusses Science & Technology Studies (STS), a field in which technology, law, and the environment intersect to question science’s claims of objectivity.
Fadi Mansour’s story propels us in a dystopian future where Beirut is experience through simulations of synthetic environments resulting from past environmental disasters.
For this issue of ArteEast Quarterly, clickhere.
Managing Editor: Mirene Arsanios
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