ArteEast is pleased to announce the release of the Winter 2013 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 diasporas. Consisting of three sections—ArteZine, Shahadat and Gallery—ArteEast Quarterly complements ArteEast live programs to serve a global audience.
Winter 2013: ArteZine
Title: Touching, Feeling, Revealing
Guest Editor: Barrak Alzaid
This edition of ArteZine explores connections between kinship structures and art history to reveal methodologies for unearthing narratives erased by market forces and geopolitics. Each essay is anchored in a shifting sense of place that reflects the distances between contributor and site of exploration. The contributions in this issue uniquely enact the work of recuperation and knit together genealogies of art practice beyond standard art historical modes:
Fatima Al Qadiri and Monira Al Qadiri model a strategy for young artists to map their own genealogy via testimony and family history through an interview with their mother, renowned Kuwaiti artist Thoraya Al Baqsami.
An archival artist project by Amal Khalaf and Nadia Khalaf titled MICRO-BEIT offers a subversive approach to tracing the ways in which national heritage is imbricated with family legacies.
Nida Ghouse takes us beyond the Arab Gulf and crafts a lyrical text that attempts to make meaning of the Mediterranean and its connection to time and memory, delivering a nonlinear exposition on madness.
Mikhail Karikis‘s sonic and visual study of a community of women divers on a small island in the Pacific bears witness to their insistence on sustainable practices operating outside the trend of industrialization and how they are able to reverse traditional gender and economic roles.
Winter 2013 Gallery
Title: The Daily Route
Guest Curator: Wafa Gabsi
Featured artists: Ismaël, Fakhri Ghezal, Marianne Catzaras, and Bouderbela Meriem
Guest-curated by Wafa Gabsi, the winter edition assembles the Tunisian art scene in Part Two of 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?” this Gallery picks up on the conceptual and regional threads in the last edition on the Moroccan scene curated by biennial director Alia Sebti and leads up to a forthcoming one on the Algerian scene curated by Zineb Sedira and Yasmina Reggad. This edition of Gallery showcases artists who deal with the fragmented history of Tunisia by re-evaluating simple gestures from everyday life that provide a creative alternative and contest the redundant influx of images that arose as a result of the country’s recent revolutionary fervor.
Winter 2013 Shahadat
Guest Editor: Sousan Hammad
Title: The City of Translation
The rich collection in this issue of Shahadat reflects Sousan Hammad‘s unique approach to translation as a form of collective engagement and draws on the works of poets from urban milieus in Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon that are transformed through the emotional force of poetry. From the poems of Najwan Darwish, set in an imaginary Haifa, and Alaa Khaled‘s Alexandria, a city that exists in its own reveries, to the surreal dreamscape of northern Lebanon in Vénus Khoury-Ghata‘s tales (translated from French by Marilyn Hacker), The City of Translation helps create, or recreate, the places that are constantly pursuing us.
For all Quarterly Issues visit www.arteeast.org.
For more information about the publications contact Barrak Alzaid, Managing Editor of ArteEast Quarterly.
To sign up for the ArteEast Mailing list email mailinglist [at] arteeast.org.
