Ahmed Mater

Ahmed Mater is considered to be one of the most influential contemporary artists of Saudi Arabia. His art is grounded by his educational background as a physician and the religious and cultural contexts of Saudi Arabia. His body of work that includes photography, calligraphy, painting, installation and video explores the narratives and aesthetics of the Islamic culture in times of globalization and consumerism.

The photo series "Magnetism", shows a magnet in the centre of the image that is attracting thousands of iron filings that symbolize the attractive forces of the Ka’aba. The installation that is reproduced in this photograph was shown at the British Museum in London, as part of the exhibition Hajj (pilgrimage).

Ahmet Ögüt

Ahmet Öğüt’s performances, installations, drawings, videos and photo works draw attention to the political and economic control of private and public life.

He employs travesty and a strong reductionism to reveal overseen mechanisms and institutions of repression. Furthermore he collects lost anecdotes that reconnect the common actuality of a place with overwritten and/or forgotten histories. In one word, his artistic practice resembles a micro-invasive intervention into the everyday life that uncovers hidden mechanisms of perception and knowledge production.

Ali Tnani

Ali Tnani works with various type of medias, such as photography, drawing and sound installation. Since 2007 he works on the idea of the “rest” and on the memory of missing places. Through photographs, drawings and paintings he proposes new ways of seeing things lost their destiny. Pieces of bread, torn fabrics, bones lying around next to a garbage can, or pieces of peel, become the landmarks in his "Cartography of the rest".

Ayşe Erkmen

Menia’s work questions the relationship between architectural and historical spaces, and challenges conventional notions around the exhibition space.

The body of her work can be read as a minimal lexicon that underlines alternative notions of historical places, revisits urban legends, and points out urban gaps by ephemeral interventions. Her artworks are a crossovers of sculptures and installations that trigger an interaction of viewers and passersby with socio-spatial configurations.

Boris Kajmak

Boris Kajmak is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores social realms through the use of materials, plays and languages.

He treats value systems as if they were founded objects with an accent on perception and psychology. His conceptual approach has generated sculpture, design and architectural pieces that have been exhibited internationally since 1999.

Félix Fernández Fernández

Fernández Fernández’s work is about relationships of individuals in their contemporary surroundings that organize and control time, space, body and personal and social identities. He employs a wide range of media and formats like video, sound, installations and cross-media hybrids assembling photography and performance.

The present body plays a key role in his work and often he features himself, adding a private autobiographical dimension that encounters a more socially constructed symbolism of objects and situations.

Hala Elkoussy

The installations, videos and photo works of Hala Elkoussy explore the limits and potentials of visual media against oblivion. In most of her work she captures ephemeral states of collective memories of her home town Cairo.

Myths and religious beliefs, rumours and facts, urban legends and other legends as well as any further words of mouth narratives that once went through an aperture seem to be recovered and sealed in a growing puzzle of iconic mementos.

Kader Attia

Kader Attia was born in 1970 in an Algerian family in Paris. He spent his childhood between France and Algeria, going back and forth between the Christian Occident and the Islamic Maghreb, has had a decisive impact on his work. Using his own identities, as the starting point, he tackles the increasingly difficult relationship between Europe and immigrants, particularly those of Islamic faith, in installations, video and photo works.

Kader Attia, The History of a Myth, 2010

Wide Screens for Tiny Objects

While installing “History of a Myth”, the multimedia installation of French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, I recalled an exhibition I saw in the Amsterdam Film Museum many years ago. The title of this show was “Big Lies of a Little Camera”, and it gathered reconstructions and adaptations of optical apparatuses and visual tech gadgets from the pre-cimema era. All the devices did quite the opposite of the cinematographic appliance. Instead of hiding the source of the viewer’s illusion in a small projection room, they clearly exposed the interplay of mechanics and optics, movement and light, and finally denuded the idea of the moving picture.
Time and techniques have changed, but Attia’s installation plays with these same issues, although in a different way. Rather than deconstructing habits of perception, it touches on the very base of any technically and artificially generated image; rather than exposing the illusion in viewers’ minds, it unveils the powerful technical translation of imaging devices. While both the original sculpture (a screw nut) and its magnified reproduction as a technical image occupy the same room, the first thing viewers see is not the miniature sculpture, but its blown up CCTV image. The size of the screen wipes out the presence of the real object, and without knowing beforehand, the small image source as well as the CCTV camera next to the screen are not evident.
The imposing image shows nothing but a simple screw nut, one of the cheapest and most ordinary items one can get at any hardware store. However, due to the impressive representation that is related to the calculated distance between video projector and screen, it automatically reminds viewers of the Dome of the Rock. The building on the Temple Mount connects all three Monotheisms; it represents the Holy of the Holies for Jews, for Christians it shelters the Holy Wisdom, and for Muslims it is the place of Muhammad’s ascendance towards heaven. More than half of the global human population know this building, and due to technical translation that is quite usual in surveillance and broadcasting, many of these people could easily confuse the image of a tiny nut with the representation of one of the most popular mystical monuments on Earth.
The technique of co-authoring this “big lie” is a small macroscopic lense on the body of a CCTV camera that is directly connected to the video projector via a BNC cable. But the most alienating element in this setting is the atmospheric sound of wind that was recorded on esplanades in front of mosques in Jerusalem.
“The History of a Myth” is not about illusions ĺike the cinema; the tiny nut is mounted on the right side next to the screen and the technical arrangement is indeed barely visible, but there was no intention to hide anything of this from the viewers’ eyes. However, the installation is telling us mostly about the underpinning lies in the relation of technical media and fragmented realities, as well as about the omnipresence of a myth that appears everywhere for anyone who believes in it.
Contemporary art is a field of many different strategies and practices. Some artist still make use of illusions; they are lying to tell you the truth, and by doing so, they are somehow following the path of pre-modern arts. Others are stuck on the track of modernity and telling the truth to uncover a lie. Attia’s installation seems to be the crossroad for both tendencies. Besides all the implied metaphors on identity and belief, the “History of a Myth” perfectly deconstructs the myth of media art by showing the lie of a blown up image next to the reality of its tiny object.

by
Timo Kaabi-Linke

Lara Favaretto

Lara Favaretto’s installations, objects and photo work play with the ambiguity of carnival and resignation. She creates situations that are lying beyond rational standards and economical rules and are full of enjoyable and playful absurdities. While employing strategies like modifications of objects and their isolations from usual contexts she draws attention to special characteristics that unveil tragic-comical features.

Lara Favaretto's work AS IF A RUIN (2012) was a site-specific adaptation of her confetti sculptures, consisting of about 800 pounds of confetti shaped to form a dark brown cube that referred to the ashes of Carthage the day after it was burned down by the army of the Roman Empire. The work touched on the historical depth of the site: a 'momentary monument' that decomposed and degraded during the time of the exhibition.

Mustapha Akrim

Akrim’s installations question the nature of work and the difference between constructing and creating art in the light of a society in a state of constant changes. He is part of a young generation of Moroccan visual artists that are developing a proper language in order to profile new fundamentals of expression, directly connected to the awareness of the history and the dynamics of power.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke

NKL’s installations, objects and pictorial works are embedded in urban contexts, intertwined with memory and cultural heritages. Her production is about manufacturing strangeness in what we usually consider the ordinary. Her active and constructive use of disturbing contradictions generates also a performative that brings beauty and violence together as well as refinement and brutality or the sublime and vulgarism. The results can be as shocking as clandestine, as cruel as artful, and sometimes it is as humorous as it might be sad.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Smell, 2012

A Handshake of Holiness and Profanity

In 1974, Gil Scott-Heron punched the lines, “The Revolution will not be televised…the revolution will be live”. The place of revolution is the street; it happens on the pavement, it burns and it smells. However, media accroach these kinds of events with their own spin, and so it happened that last year's uprisings in Tunisia were broadcasted as the “Jasmine Revolution”. This label was everything but homegrown. The refreshing scent of jasmine flowers was absent those days because jasmine does not flourish before May and the real smell of the Tunisian revolution rose from burning cars and houses.
One year later, people still go out into the street in Tunisia to protest for freedom and human rights. Now the protest is not directed against an autocratic regime but against regressive Salafi movements which represent the Islamic extremism in North Africa. Their “flag” with the white calligraphy of the Shahada, the Muslim confession of faith, on black background became the new symbol for political repression.
Smell is an embroidery of jasmine flowers sewn on a black cloth, representing the Islamic creed. As repression continues, the blossoms wilt and the scent of jasmine fades away.
One week before the closing of the exhibition Chkoun Ahna, a group of more than a hundred Salafists attacked the Printemps des Art Fair in La Marsa, a suburb of Tunis not far away from the National Museum of Carthage. The artists were accused of blasphemy and profanity and even received death threats. The government had more comprehension of the looting mob than courage to defend the rights of freedom of expression. The Minister of Culture and Heritage even camouflaged his intent of censorship behind the need to institutionalize the protection of the Sacred in the new Tunisian constitution. Following these events, Kaabi-Linke decided to donate the work SMELL to a staff member who worked at the National Museum of Carthage and who appeared to be a Salafi. When he first saw the work, he said that it showed what he carried in his heart and asked NKL if he could take it when the exhibition was over.
After the show, when I put the work into his hands, I asked him if the continual crumbling, withering and powdering of the flowers searing under the sun wouldn’t bother him. No, he said; he would take care of it as he ever does for his belief in God. Since the Shahada is written in blossoms on the black tissu he would add new flowers to the work as it disintegrated. After the attacks and menace against Tunisian artist in June 2012, I never would have thought of finding a Salafist who is that committed to a piece of contemporary art. Far from being in charge of the restoration, he was worshipping SMELL. While I saw a conceptual and even critical piece of art regarding that relates the very specific context of Tunisia after the civil uprisings in Spring 2011, he found his own private belief and universal religious truth. It was astonishing to see how easy opposite perceptions like holiness and profanity could match in the same object; and again it confirmed the very dialectics of a piece of art that always seems to be more one could see, feel and hear.

by
Timo Kaabi-Linke

Nida Sinnokrot

Nida Sinnokrot is a film maker and an artist. His films as his installations and sculptures explore the complex reality of conflicts and diaspora. He employs a variety of media to transform ordinary objects or actions into sensory experiences that reveal the complexity of forms and perceptions trapped within the mundane. KA transposes an ancient belief into a contemporary sculpture, the figure of the raised-arms, had already been a symbolic form in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

An ambivalent pose that combines engineering and a sacred gesture in an iconic object that is as much beckoning the heaven as it expresses despair.

...

Nida Sinnokrot's statement about Ka (Carthage)


"Sublime Pathos"

Ka (JCB,JCB) made from two standing backhoe arms (image 4), transposes the raised-arms Egyptian hieroglyph of an ancient belief system into a contemporary sculpture. An iconoclastic icon, all critique and political imperative follows from this simple clash between techne and primal pose.
Backhoe arms turned upwards from their intended orientation speak to a refusal to dig, a refusal to comply, a refusal to keep one's head down. Given the chain reaction of events, sparked by the selfimmolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian vegetable vendor, that spread across the Arab world, sending chills down the backs of the regionʼs dictators, this work of art seemed a fitting testament to Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution.
As the exhibition opening drew closer however, we were increasing met with obstacles which threatened to prevent this work from being installed inside the museum. Nevertheless, despite protest from the Minister of Culture, the exhibition's curators were willing to take all risks. With forklifts, cranes, and technicians standing by at the ready, we received a message that defying the will of the existing order would put the entire exhibition at risk of being shut-down. I complied.
Ka (Carthage) now, rather than assuming it's defiant, upright posture lays flat on the ground,
exhausted, unable to right itself. Here the work cannot be perceived as intended but rather is
grounded (literally) in the encounter of looking down upon it form the balcony above, a position of
pathos. Perhaps in Tunisia a repose is required before the next phase of the revolution, before
reawakening this sleeping giant. Perhaps this pathos will once again become sublime.

Nida Sinnokrot - May 11, 2012

Pascal Hachem

The work of Pascal Hachem is essentially based on performances and installations, which are often mechanized due to the artist’s background in engineering. He combines usual objects in irritating apparatuses that reflect political, social and environmental subtexts. His machines often cause an embarrassing feeling, as the series of hammers that slowly destroy the wall on which the apparatus is installed; or a T-shirt ripping because of the increasing weight of sand; or knives emerging from the sand; or the installation DIY with a chain of scissors which invites the viewer to interact with the work by pressing pedals on the floor that get the machine going.

Saâdane Afif

Sirine Fattouh

Timo Nasseri

Yousef Moscatello

Zineb Sedira

For many years Zined Sedira has explored individual and collective memories and the issue of human movement through video, photography and installations. The artist explores the issues of transmission, language, mobility and the representations of cultural symbols and identities. 


"With Guardians of images, combining documentary film and installation, Sedira attempts to propose a revaluation and dissemination of the photographic work of the Algerian revolution Mohamed Kouaci, through stories of his widow, Safia Kouaci. Who has tried very hard since the photographer's death in 1997 to preserve these priceless archives of Algerian history".