E-Book, Englisch, 476 Seiten
Sfeir-Semler The Rise of Arab Art
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6113-0
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 476 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6113-0
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Since the 1990s, contemporary art in the Arab world has experienced exponential growth and numerous changes. With the appearance of artists from the region in international exhibitions, the dynamics within the art scenes changed significantly. Museums & art foundations began to collect, biennials were launched, contemporary art galleries, fairs, residencies and schools emerged in many countries, and the governments of the Gulf states launched megaprojects. This reader serves as a guide for anyone interested in the foundations, structures and growth of these art scenes. It also functions as an anthology of what is now considered established in the Arab world, with contributions covering all aspects of the subject—both from across the region and from a Western perspective.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
- Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunststile Asiatische Kunst
- Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunststile Islamische Kunst
- Geisteswissenschaften Islam & Islamische Studien Islam: Literatur & Kunst
- Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein
Weitere Infos & Material
Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Contents
Preface
Tarek Abou El Fetouh and Lawrence Abu Hamdan in conversation
Echoes of Algiers: Art, Memory, and Belonging
Building on Shifting Sands
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi: Early Days
From OAS to OASIS
Becoming an Artist in Saudi Arabia
BIDOUN
Transmodernism: A Renewed Outlook on Modernism in the Arab World
A Nomad’s Map
Notes on Tunis
An Assemblage of Artists and Events, 1985–2025
Enfolded Worlds: Exhibiting Art from the Arab World 2000–2016
Arab Art at Auctions
From Palestine to Abu Dhabi
The Art Dubai Story
The Phoenix / Beirut Forever
Art in Morocco From 1950 Until Today: A Historical Reader
The Age of Mirror-Museums in the Persian Gulf
A Brief History of Canvas Magazine
Paris-Riyadh
On Representing Syrian Art: A Partial History of Exhibition and Imagination
2004–2024: From the Louvre to AlUla: Emerging Arab Contemporary Art
On Pleasure: How to Be Non-Professional
Creating and Exhibiting Modern Iraqi Art, in Baghdad or Elsewhere: Between Individual Initiatives and State Support
Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Andrée Sfeir-Semler
Beirut, Twenty Years
Sharjah Art Foundation and Sharjah Biennial
Beirut Art Biome 1990–2025
Scratching on things I could disavow: A photograhic record _ Appendix I 2003 – present
Riwaq Biennale: Art, Heritage, and Speculative Institutions in Palestine
Riwaq Biennale: A Living Institution of Art, Heritage, and Resistance
On Being Held: Artworks as a History of Institutions
On the Cusp Looking Back: Beirut in the 1990s
Syrian Art: Bearing Witness, Building Hope
Patronage in the Arab World
Sfeir-Semler Gallery: Beirut
The Uncertainty of Times: Reflecting on a Field in the Making
I’ve always known that I’m an artist
Darat al Funun – The Khalid Shoman Foundation: A Home for the Arts and Artists from the Arab World
The Sultan Gallery: A Brief Overview of the First Permanent Art Gallery in Kuwait
Three Accidental Encounters
Qatar’s Commitment to Art and Culture
I Will Always Like How it Began
On the Legacy of Townhouse Gallery, Cairo
The Arab Image Foundation: A Dialogue on the Possibilities and Limits of an Institution
A Chronology of Art Infrastructure in the Arab World
Arab Artists Index
Image Credits
Acknowledgments
Imprint
Tarek Abou El Fetouh and Lawrence Abu Hamdan in conversation
Lawrence Abu Hamdan (b. 1985) is a Lebanese-British artist and independent investigator, or “Private Ear,” with a doctorate from the University of London on the role of sound in legal investigations. Over the past decade, his work has explored the political dimensions of listening, resulting in forensic reports, films, lectures, performances, and exhibitions worldwide. In 2023, he founded Earshot, the world’s first non-profit dedicated to the use of audio in human rights and environmental advocacy. His investigations have served as evidence before the uk Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, informed advocacy campaigns by Amnesty International and Defence for Children International, and contributed to reporting at the International Criminal Court and in the press. Abu Hamdan has held academic posts at institutions including the University of Chicago, the New School, and Cornell Tech. His work has been showcased by leading museums and biennials, including Moma, Tate Modern, and the Venice Biennale, earning numerous international awards, such as the Turner Prize (2019).
Tarek Abou El Fetouh is an independent curator based in Brussels. He established visual and performance art initiatives across the Arab world, including the Meeting Points Contemporary Art Festival, which took place in different Arab cities. He curated numerous exhibitions in the uae, the region, and beyond, including the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale (2024), the Public Art Program for Expo 2020 in Dubai, and the exhibition of Home Works 6 in Beirut (2013). Abou El Fetouh was Senior Curator and Director of the Performance Department at the Sharjah Art Foundation between 2021 and 2024.
Tarek Abou El Fetouh (taf): I want to start this conversation by going back to when we first met, around 2012, and worked together on a couple of projects. I thought this was an important moment for you, as you were settling in Beirut, and it was a turning point as you moved from music to sound and contemporary art. Coincidentally, that time also marked the end of a cycle for me. At the time, I was running the Young Arab Theatre Fund, and it was the end of my journey with Meeting Points, which I had initiated in Amman in 2003. Back then, traveling between cities was relatively easy for people and we launched Meeting Points as an event that took place in multiple Arab cities simultaneously. Over time, it expanded, and rather than becoming a big festival, created echoes in Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, and Tunis, but with no center.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan (lah): The idea that these events are echoes of each other seems very fitting. Echoes are sounds which all have the same origin, but they are formed by their environment, and they are only echoes once they become distinct sounds in their own right. Was it your idea to use Meeting Points to highlight what is both shared and distinct about culture and cultural production across these Arab cities?
taf Fundamentally, it was about connecting with each other in the region—not just with each other as artists, but also with new audiences across Arab cities. When we started, the only places where artists could meet were festivals in Europe. There were no real opportunities for touring within the Arab world, except for government-organized events. But if you created a work in Beirut, you wanted to present it in Damascus, Amman, Tunis, or Cairo. To make this possible, we had to collaborate closely with local partners. Each city had its own organizers who received the event, hosted performances, and worked alongside institutions to bring everything together. Artists started performing in multiple places, and this helped build and strengthen a network. I curated the first four editions and in 2007, I invited Frie Leysen to curate, which led to its expansion into European cities as well. That edition was the biggest ever, held in eleven cities. Leysen introduced parallel events, inviting local artists to curate their own programs: Selma Sofiane in Tunis, Raed Yassin in Beirut, Aleya Hamza in Cairo, Oussama Ghanam in Damascus, Ola Khalidi and Samah Hijawi in Amman. In some locations, such as Beirut, the program was particularly impactful, featuring a lineup of performances alongside exhibitions with Wael Shawky and Yto Barrada for example. In Tunis, it led to the emergence of Dream City Festival: what began as a project within Meeting Points evolved into a very important biennial festival of contemporary art in Tunis. It takes place in public spaces, and has been presenting editions since 2008. Then came the sixth edition of Meeting Points, curated by Okwui Enwezor under the title Locus Agonistes: Practices and Logics of the Civic. It was really about emancipatory logic and new public spheres and took place in Beirut, Brussels, and Berlin in 2011. And then you and I met in 2012, in preparation for Meeting Points 7, curated by the Zagreb-based collective What, How & for Whom (whw), which led to presentations in Antwerp, Beirut, Moscow, and several other places between 2013 and 2014. Were you somehow at the end of a shift in your practice, from music to contemporary art?
lah The shift in my work actually happened earlier, around 2007–08. But the moment you’re pointing to is also an interesting one. When I moved to Beirut, it of course had a big effect on my practice. In a way it felt like the practice found its home. Before that, in London, it felt like it was strewn. The nice thing about London is you always have an international scene, alongside an extremely localized British art kind of practice. But I was not comfortable with that, I never saw myself there, and every time I would put work in those contexts, it felt like there was too much world in it. There was too much world in the work. And that wasn’t cool or trendy. And then when I came to Beirut, I found that space and that voice, also working with other people and having different kinds of conversations.
taf I remember around that time—many artists came back to Beirut. It was also the moment I was curating the exhibition of Home Works by Ashkal Alwan in 2013.
lah Exactly. It felt like a booming moment, it felt alive. It really did. I had just made the work in Cairo, The All-Hearing, the summer before I moved to Beirut, so these were important years for me.
taf When we met, you were working on a radio project with Marwa Arsanios and the 98 Weeks.
lah It’s great that you bring up 98 Weeks because I think the work of Mirene and Marwa [Arsanios] was so important at that time. I was coming into cognition, so I took for granted the space they had created in Beirut. Now that it’s no longer there—and there are of course other things—we feel its absence. It was doing such important work on an informal level, keeping practice and discourse running in parallel in a way that was totally accessible. Anyone could propose something, you felt it was both totally open but extremely rigorous in the way they positioned themselves. I think that space was important in shaping me as an artist.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, The All-Hearing, 2014Video, color, sound, 13:00 min, still
taf So, there is actually a turning point around 2007 when you started creating artworks, and you were in London, and there is another turning point when you settled in Beirut in 2012–13.
lah The work I did in Cairo in 2013 was the first time I really engaged with the questions of sound, ethics, and urbanity, in a very specific way. What Cairo taught me was the way in which noise is a kind of predeterminant of power. That who defines noise, who is able to say what is and what is not noise, is that which is in power. And you see this struggle play out very literally in cities like Cairo and Beirut. And it’s also where you can understand how a sonic practice like mine becomes refined through a set of social conditions. That’s the way in which those cities left an impression on the practice. Before that, in the earlier transition that you’re referring to, there was already a kind of political awakening, but it centered more around the idea of punk and alternative spaces and understanding sound—or music—as a vehicle to create spaces outside of the capitalist modes of music production, which is called diy culture in the uk. In London, in Leeds where I grew up, there was a huge scene that was formative for me in understanding how you produce activism, social organization, and all of that circled around music. But as committed as it was politically, it was also committed experimentally. It was the first kind of awakening for me in understanding what could be music. That what I never imagined could be music. And the understanding of what could be noise came later, in Cairo. That what I never imagined could be noise. So, I think these kinds of thresholds of acoustic imagination are just pushed, and they’re still pushed with me to this day. With each project I expand my capacity to think with sound.
taf I would like to talk a bit more about the sound investigation in your artistic practice, that you present in the forms of installations and/or performances. The fictional aspect is usually very important in performance, while in investigations, facts are essential. How do you do it? How can you find the balance, if there’s any to...
