Rabih Mroué opened Home Works III with his piece »Who is afraid of Representation?«, in which the story of a crazed Lebanese is juxtaposed with examples of Body Art, mainly from the 1970s. Because genitals are explicitly involved and the helpless attempts at justification on the part of the madman come rather close to real political rhetoric, the Lebanese censorship authorities arrived promptly on the scene, and, after a hard-fought, eight-hour row with the organisers, for the following presentations the text was purged of sexually explicit words and the names of political groups.

Home Works is run by Ashkal Alwan - The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts -, headed by Christine Tohme and financed in the main – like PhotoCairo – by international cultural foundations. For a week at the end of November, Home Works III presented a full programme consisting of performances, video presentations, lectures and discussions involving both local and international artists and theorists. The venue was a theatre in the Hamra, a once elegant shopping street in Beirut. The festival exhibition was, in a spatial sense, somewhat detached; it was displayed in the Sfeir-Semler Gallery, which has its main headquarters in Hamburg, but has recently opened up a Beirut branch, large and luxuriously appointed, on one floor of a factory on the outskirts of the city. In addition to the professionals who are involved with art from the Arab world, Home Works also reaches an ever broader local audience.

The festivals in Beirut and Cairo were founded by independent initiatives and are far from being instrumentalised by the official cultural authorities for purposes of cultural tourism or national prestige. While the first two issues, in 2002 and 2003, were mainly concerned with raising the visibility of local artistic potential, this hardly seems necessary today. Most of the artists from Beirut and Cairo are now also to be seen in international exhibitions, and some of the works shown were previously on display at various places in Europe. Maha Maamoun, co-founder of the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) in Cairo, which, along with the Townhouse Gallery, organises PhotoCairo3, explained in an interview that it was precisely the participation of Egyptian artists in international exhibitions and the simultaneous experience of the limits of this exposure that had made clear to her the necessity of establishing local platforms.

The CIC and the Townhouse Gallery dissociate themselves clearly from the official Egyptian cultural bodies, which have considerable finances at their disposal: a museum for modern art with an annual budget for new acquisitions, a large annual national exhibition, a pavilion at the Biennale in Venice, numerous bursaries for artists and art prizes, and, since 1984, the Cairo Biennial. All of these activities are closely connected with government politics, and use the national art that they encourage in the service of propaganda. This official cultural sphere looks on the independent scene with great mistrust. Exhibitions are regularly closed by the censorship authority, sometimes simply because they are seen as not painting a positive picture of Egypt.

Eight years ago, William Wells opened the Townhouse Gallery, which has now firmly established itself in its district because of its social projects as well. Its exhibitions and events, its library and studio provided a framework within which a new art scene could form. At first, individual projects were produced, such as »Going Places« (2003/2004), which used the advertising space on municipal buses, »in a furnished flat in cairo« (2004), artistic interventions in a rented furnished apartment, and PhotoCairo, founed in 2002. Since 2005, work has been done on setting up permanent structures, such as the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum or the CIC. The spacious apartment into which the CIC recently moved is to be equipped to function as a production location as well as an exhibition venue. In addition, it will provide workshops for young artists who have been unable to receive a theoretical or practical grounding in contemporary art within the state education system.

With its exhibitions and events during the entire month of December, PhotoCairo3 provides a platform that the local scene can use to develop and enhance connections with the international art context. PhotoCairo3 sees itself as a »positioning statement« that »interrogates [the strategies of] artists who question, employ and reinvent the reproducible picture as a means of positioning individuals and institutions within a national, cultural, socio-economic and ideological context.«1

Jean-Luc Moulènes photo series »Produits de Palestine«, exhibited in the CIC, probably came closest to fulfilling this aim. In view of the fact that Palestine does not exist as a sovereign state, the label »Made in Palestine« contains a thorny proposition. After all, the sale of wares produced in the Palestinian Territories is made difficult or impossible by the Israeli occupation and blockade, particularly outside the Territories. Moulène has come up with a photographic setting for these commodities in which mostly two examples of each product are placed next to one another, with front and back or lying/standing on a white or grey surface in cool lighting resembling that of conventional »still life« photography. The coordinate-less image space and the ambiguity of the positions of the articles as upright or lying down, which in advertising photography serves to glorify and fetishise the products, here become metaphors for the status of the Palestinian state. These minimalist product presentations also serve Moulène as a case study for an examination of how his photos could appear when not being marketed as art works. He conceded that, with his »advertising photography«, he was taking a capitalist circulation of wares for granted and thus showed Palestine as a capitalist state, as if there were not alternative. The 48 photos that go to make up »Produits de Palestine«, collected in a booklet produced by PhotoCairo, at any rate provide a different picture of the presence of Palestine than the images usually shown in the media.

Ayreen Anastas’ film »Pasolini Pa Palestine«, shown in Beirut, also tries to explore the question of how Palestine can be seen. It deliberately dispenses with the familiar pictures of Israeli road blocks, and does not even allow Israelis and their army of occupation to come into view. Using an unpublished film documenting Pasolini’s research trip to Palestine in 1963 to prepare his »Gospel according to St. Matthew«, Anastas and her film team reconstruct the route taken by the director. The idyllic sites in the »land of the Bible« seem to have hidden depths because of our knowledge of the political situation that is not shown. This also affects the way we view the short sequences from Pasolini’s film that Anastas has worked into her own. Pasolini wants to see his mythical idea of the biblical Palestine in this landscape and its people, but has to exclude all the history in between to be able to do so.

Anastas’ film images seem deliberately non-ideological, casual and very idyllic, showing a pleasant country to visit. That is also how the young German, whom Anastas interviews during her trip, sees the region. He lives in a kibbutz because it’s nice and practical, but he doesn’t really want to know what a kibbutz actually is or was. A track superimposed over the original sound of the images fades in commentaries on the pictures and discussions about various editing decisions, this too is done seemingly without value judgements or interpretation. This meta-level, together with the double point of view and the jump of over forty years, poses the question of what and how filmmakers and viewers can see and understand.

Both festivals gave a wide scope to lectures and discussions focusing on the question of the political dimension of art. In Beirut, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière scrutinised various concepts of political art under the title »Les paradoxes de l’art politique«, and Lynn Love, an author from New York, headed a panel on the relationship between art and science. In Cairo, the theorist and curator Stephen Wright spoke on »The Use Value of Art and Political Art Practices« and Gregory Sholette, an artist from New York, talked about »Interventionist Art«.

Rancière sees art and politics as being connected by their dissent, their objections to the facts of reality that are accepted as natural. This complementary relationship between art and politics, he said, resulted in a politics of art, which preceded the politics of the artists and could also undermine them. He views artistic attempts to directly pursue political goals with great scepticism, because a form of art that tries to dissolve the tension resulting from the overlapping logics of art and politics and to define their political function runs the danger of neutralising both. Rancière sees political potential today rather in a form of art that increases the complexity of reality.

Wright, on the other hand, calls on art to leave the area and the institutions and conventional forms of presentation assigned to it. He sees the future role of artists as being that of using their specific competence to intervene directly in reality as kinds of secret agents. Gregory Sholette has already been active with an »interventionist« art practice of this nature since the end of the seventies, in various collectives. In his talk, he spoke of his own experiences and introduced several »interventionists«, such as The Yes Men, who »advise« multinational corporations and sabotage their public relations, or the collective Yomango from Spain, which, with its stealing actions, attacks the consumer society in a good-humoured way. At the end, Sholette asked the audience how actions like those of Yomango would work in an Egyptian department store. The unanimous answer was a sceptical one; the action would be barely transferable, as classes here define and organise themselves differently, and consumption has a meaning that is not comparable. However, a failed Yomango action in Cairo might come close to what Rancière means with dissent.

Home Works III ran from 17 to 24 November 2005 in Beirut. Information at http://www.ashkalalwan.org/; PhotoCairo3 could be seen from 11 to 31 December 2005 in Cairo. See: http://www.thetownhousegallery.com/photocairo3.html

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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