ArteEast Fall 2013
Conference and Quarterly
We are pleased to announce the upcoming conference, “Arts and Culture in Transformative Times: Expanding the Philanthropic Dialogue on the Middle East and North Africa,” to be held in New York on October 29 at Asia Society, and October 30 at Open Society Foundations. This conference is organized by ArteEast, in collaboration with the Ford Foundation and its co-hosts, the Open Society Foundations, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the British Council.
In the midst of the profound and rapid political changes across the region, artists, filmmakers, curators and arts leaders in the Middle East and North Africa are playing an increasingly vital role in driving cultural and social change both locally and regionally.
A high-visibility commercial art market centered in the Gulf often overshadows the significant cultural production that is emerging out of regional art centers from Beirut to Cairo, Damascus to Marrakesh, and Ramallah to Tunis. These cities have not only been home to a long history of Arab artistic production but are currently the sites of the most dramatic upheaval.
Over the last few years we have seen a rise in the challenges that artists and art spaces in these cities face, at the same time that their role in society has continued to grow.
While European funders and arts institutions already engage with and provide support for these creative communities, involvement by U.S. foundations and arts institutions has comparatively lagged behind. This conference aims to serve as a catalyst for expanding engagement by the U.S. philanthropic and cultural communities and to open new opportunities for collaboration and arts exchange with MENA region.
For more information, click here.
For the full program, click here.
Fall 2013 ArteZine: The Sea is This Way
Guest editor: Dictaphone Group
Access to the sea is more than an individual right to a natural resource. It is a collective right whose absence shapes our relationship to the city. Surprisingly, but not unexpectedly, private beach resorts, exclusive marinas, and hotels, gates and entrance fees, appear on the coasts of many of the cities and towns across the Middle East. Whether deployed by private companies, ruling classes, or state institutions, these interventions on the coast result in the re-organization of the production of the built environment and thereby public access to the sea.
In this edition of the ArteZine, Beirut-based art collective and recipient of the Spring 2013 ArteEast Watermill Residency the Dictaphone Group tackles the question of public space from the perspective of access to the sea.
Contributors include activists, artists and researchers from Lebanon, Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Palestine. The Sea is This Way aims to open a critical debate about access to the sea as a social practice and as a right to “make and remake our cities,” raising questions of neo-liberal development policies, conceptions of public space, and alternative social practices as resistance.
For this issue of ArteZine, click here.
Fall 2013 Gallery: Cartography of the Everyday
Curators: Alya Sebti, Wafa Gabsi, Yasmina Reggad and Bérénice Saliou
Curatorial essay by Bérénice Saliou
Featured artists: Youssef El Yedidi, Sadek Rahim, and Fakhri El Ghezal
Cartography of the Everyday is part five in a six-quarter cycle of online exhibitions highlighting artists from the Maghreb, in an extended lead up to the 2014 Marrakech Biennial, curated by Alya Sebti.
This edition builds on previous conceptions of the everyday by highlighting mobility or the lack there of for artists Youssef El Yedidi, Sadek Rahim and Fakhri El Gheza. The way these three artists from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia create, circulate and interact with their peers allow us to draw the contours of a map dealing with the idea of (im)mobility as an act of subsistence/resistance within an art world ruled by the dogmas of network and connexion.
For this issue of Gallery, click here.
