ArteEast Quarterly
winter 2014
ArteEast is pleased to announce the release of the winter 2014 edition of ArteEast Quarterly, an online publication that offers readers a critical forum for contemporary artistic practices in the Middle East, North Africa and their diaspora.
Winter 2014 ArteZine: Propaganda, Aesthetics and Ruptures
Guest editor: Adham Hafez
This edition of ArteZine edited by Adham Hafez, the founder of HaRaKa, a non-profit platform for research and development in the field of dance and performance in Egypt, focuses on ruptures in a given artistic practice or within a country’s arts history. In particular this issue explores power dynamics in the art world, and as a consequence it also deals with propaganda and the role of the state in shaping certain dynamics of power.
This issue features Sawsan Gad, demographer and researcher, who traces the troubling story of the ‘Reda Troupe’ in Cairo against a revolution’s history in Egypt’s 20th century, while Abdullah Al-Bayyari’s words deal with power, manipulation and the body, as he studies what political performances are in the Arab world now. We find echoes on power in Ismail Fayed’s text, as he addresses the role of the ministry of culture in Egypt and how it shaped generations of citizens—and artists. Later in the publication, we trace historical and institutional ruptures that suddenly emerge in one work of art, to accidentally raise questions on shame, and gazes at its viewer. “Ayib” is Shayma Aziz’s newest work that problematizes modes of seeing and societal conventions; those directed towards a woman, or towards the production of beauty in contemporary art.
For this issue of ArteZine, click here.
Winter 2014 Gallery: Collectivity of the Everyday
Guest curators: Alya Sebti and Wafa Gabsi
Featured artists: Nidhal Chamekh, Simohammad Fettaka
Curatorial essay: Ismael Leamsi
The last edition in a six-quarter cycle of exhibitions that spotlights artists from the Maghreb in an extended lead-up to the 2014 Marrakech Biennial themed “where are we now?” In this final installment Ismael Leamsi leaves us with these words, “like the first man invented the first fire, what work is there for the artist besides the act of transforming the everyday into absolute and solitude into otherness.”
For this issue of Gallery, click here.
