ArteEast Quarterly summer 2013
This summer, ArteEast celebrates its tenth year as a leading New York-based arts organization dedicated to connecting the MENA arts sector with global arts communities and audiences. As we look ahead to the next ten years, this is a moment of renewal and reflection. We are asking important questions of ourselves and engaging in new conversations with our regional and international colleagues. In this summer’s ArteZine guest-edited by Cairo-based arts initiative Beirut gets at the heart of this inquiry by asking, “What is an institution? and, how do institutions of art position themselves and speak to the surrounding upheaval and change?”
To mark this institutional milestone, we are also launching our new website with this latest issue of ArteEast Quarterly, as the new design permits us to better represent the central role that our online publications play in our work, to make the depth and breadth of our work over the last ten years more accessible to our growing readership, and to continue to build this space for critical discourse on innovative contemporary art emerging from the Middle East, North Africa and their diaspora. At the same time, the Quarterly itself is also undergoing changes: we are stepping back from regular issues of Shahadat, where we present new MENA literature in translation, and are preparing to launch CinemaJallah, a new online publication dedicated to regional cinema culture.
Summer 2013 ArteZine: What is an Institution? Granting Institutional Fictions
Guest Editor: Beirut
This issue reflects questions at the core of Beirut’s institutional practice. Founded in Cairo on June 30, 2012, amidst a moment of collective rethinking, reforming and overturning of institutions, Beirut’s founders dedicated their third season of their first year to asking: What is it to build an institution as a curatorial act? Can an institution evolve using the language and logics of art practice? If social and political imagination is a prerequisite for change, can the realm of art be imagination’s guardian, nurturer and inspirer in a time of economic and political violence? In late April 2013, they invited international colleagues from Kunsthalle Lissabon (Portugal), CCA Derry~Londonderry (Ireland), FormContent (London), and Art in General (New York) to convene in Cairo for a three-day meeting dedicated to exploring the essential question of what an institution is or can be. This issue of ArteZine represents a record of the thoughts and ideas that emerged out of the conversations that took place during those three days and points to the increasingly global dimensions of conversations that the MENA arts sector is participating in today.
For this issue of ArteZine and to learn more about the contributors, click here.
Summer 2013 Gallery: Poetics of the Everyday
Featured artists: Zineb Andress Arraki and Hicham Berrada
Guest Curator: Co-curated by Holiday Powers and Alya Sebti
Guest co-curators Alya Sebti and Holiday Powers deepen the investigation of the everyday in North African contemporary art practice, this time considering the artistic tools that can re-present the banal, quotidian, unspectacular and unextraordinary nature of the everyday. Featured artists Hicham Berrada and Zineb Andress Arraki create an aesthetic experience out of the everyday, bringing a poetics to daily life and processes that can be captured through the use of new media. Considering the ubiquity of ‘new media’ in art and the circulation of the everyday through numerous social media today, this issue of the Gallery asks us to consider how new media can enable new methodologies to capture attention and create an impact.
For this issue of Gallery, see here.
For more information about the publications contact Barrak Alzaid, Managing Editor, ArteEast Quarterly.
