I have just returned from viewing Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum in NYC.
The catalog announces this as the “first exhibition in a New York museum of contemporary art from and about the Arab world.” The exhibition title comes from the 1076 film Ici et ailleurs. Starting out as a film by Jean-Luc Goddard and Jean-Pierre Garin about the Palestinian revolution, the movie, after many of the Palestinians filmed were killed in the 1970 raids on Palestinian camps, was shelved and later reworked with Anne-Marie Mieville into “a complex reflection on the status of Images [and] their function as instruments of political consciousness.” The exhibition took off from this concept.
The show reflects the concerns of 45 artists living in the Arab world or the diaspora, as well as addressing the dilemma of culturally defined art, and art as representation of an expected political or cultural stance.
That said, the artists who chose to exhibit (the catalog also contains statement from several who declined) have created gripping work reflecting their preoccupations, and the role of the artist in the face of historical events. Much of the work is photographic or filmic, wresting the image away from the media portrayals, often taking possession of history with the introduction of archival materials.
Especially interesting to me was Wafa Hourani’s room-sized construction, Qalandia, 2087 where she imagines the camp 100 years after the first Intifada. The “Palestinian Mirror Party” has covered the separation wall in mirrors, the checkpoint is removed and becomes a free-speech point, and the airport is turned into an aquarium (with live goldfish).
A touching concept piece by Rheims Alkadhi, “Hairs from the Hairbrushes of Palestinians,” has the artist living with four Palestinian women in a village near Nablus, paying women from the local Women’s Association to help her collect and knot together thousands of strands of hair to create a strand that would reach 40 kilometers to Jerusalem.
Mohamed Larbi Rahali paints the inside of thousands of matchboxes in an ongoing project titled Omri (My Life). These beautifully rendered autobiographical memoirs depict small simple moments in his day; he continues to carry several bank boxes with him at all times, recording overheard conversations, scenes witnessed or imagined, with paint, ink, and tiny found objects like seashells or buttons.
The exhibition continues until September 28. More information can be found at the New Museum website, http://www.newmuseum.org/.
