Category: Volume 2 Issue 2

This article examines the memory-image in a set of drawings produced by the Iraqi artist Dia Azzawi on the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camp, Tel al-Zaatar, during the Lebanese civil war. It traces the development of this memory-image in Iraq in the 1960s, within a paradigm of the modern artwork established by the work of the artist Kadhim Haidar. Generalizing in modern art a mode of allegory from the poetic tradition of the husayniyyat, that paradigm introduced a philosophy of history in which the past was interpreted as a tradition of tragic forms that could be revived in painting … Read more

This article presents an interpretation of three works by Cairo-based artist Hassan Khan. The works are “17 and in AUC” (2003), “Conspiracy: Dialogue/Diatribe” (2006/2010) and “Dead Dog Speaks” (2010). I argue that in these works Khan stages a withdrawal from the legacy of the 1967 Naksa. He does this by means of a separation of his figures from their particular contexts, reflexive narrative strategies, non-periodic scene structures and substitutive manipulations of his figures. I argue ultimately that Khan’s staging of uprooted figures of Egyptian identity sends up the ethnographic notion of the “native informant” on which post-Naksa nationalists discourses have … Read more

This article examines Syrian art discourse on either side of the Naksa, the defeat of the Arab forces by Israel in June 1967, particularly transformations in the social value Syrian artists accorded to the irreducibly formal elements of the artistic craft. It analyzes these values by focusing on a reform program in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus, 1964–67, as well arts coverage in al-Bacth newspaper, exhibition texts, and the reception of artworks by Nazir Nabaa, Guido La Regina, Mahmoud Hammad, and Ahmed Nawash. It also explores the connotations of the term “plasticity,” a description of … Read more

This article observes how the new understanding of art which was introduced at the end of the 1960s by pop art influenced groups was pursued and radicalised in the second half of the 1970s, in a period generally referred to as the weakening of the avant-garde. It focuses on the texts by Leonhard Lapin, promoting art as a means of creating a new living environment. Taking Lapin’s text as a framework, the author analyses the intervention in the official exhibition of monumental art in 1976.

Leonhard Lapin’s “Objective Art” was written for “Event Harku ’75. Objects, Concepts” – an exhibtion and an accompanying symposium on the premises of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Harku, near Tallinn, Estonia, in December 1975. Objective art, in the artist’s mind, answered to the industrialization and urbanization of the late 20th century, to the growing significance of not only mechanical but also electronic machines in everyday life, and to the emergence of the so-called artificial environment. Rather than representing this environment, new art had to intervene in it or even produce it. Lapin’s call was quite different from other … Read more

Leonhard Lapin’s “Objective Art” was written for “Event Harku ’75. Objects, Concepts” – an exhibtion and an accompanying symposium on the premises of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Harku, near Tallinn, Estonia, in December 1975. Objective art, in the artist’s mind, answered to the industrialization and urbanization of the late 20th century, to the growing significance of not only mechanical but also electronic machines in everyday life, and to the emergence of the so-called artificial environment. Rather than representing this environment, new art had to intervene in it or even produce it. Lapin’s call was quite different from other … Read more

In chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, St. John of Patmos is made to eat a book he has not read. The witness of the apocalypse is impregnated by an event which he now carries. This essay extrapolates on the condition of the witness who ingests a drastic event and searches for a tongue with which to speak that which he does not fully know. As a ventriloquist, St. John is proposed as someone who is not muted by the event but rather one who finds his tongue forked and capable of speaking much and simultaneously. This essay also … Read more

This article discusses an approach to arts writing rooted in the work of Egypt’s earliest art critics and historians, yet associated primarily with the legacy of those writers who dominated artistic discourse of the 1960s. In suspending the assumption that Egyptian arts writing resists methodological analysis, I seek to describe the procedures and premises that characterize this approach, as well as address its longstanding dominance within the field, its relationship to the role of concepts of change and continuity in shaping artistic discourse in Egypt of the latter part of the 20th century, and its enduring influence today.

Nun’s Fret Not is a photomontage project that tells the story of a nun who, following an epiphany, embarks with her convent on becoming a “missionary artist” through a study-by-mail artist’s course, and her subsequent disillusionment. A continuation of the work begun in icehouse in 2010, it re-contextualizes Kovitz’s previous art work into a meta-narrative that examines recurrent themes in his art practice: artist and audience, success and obscurity, art market and art education, dominant cultures and subcultures. All characters in this project share the same face– the face of Litmus– an alter ego Kovitz made for his work based … Read more

This introductory essay by members of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey provides a quick overview of the significance of the 1967 defeat of Arab military forces by the Israeli army for the historiography of modern and contemporary Arab art. It then details a recent turn to more critical engagement with that historiographic framework, as exemplified by the 2012 conference The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories, and introduces the four articles published in ARTMargins that came out of the conference.