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In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the...
In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the...
This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption – called "contemporary art" – emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary"...
This scholarly biography traces the life and art of Lebanese-American neo-expressionist, Nabil Kanso (1940–2019). It explores key moments across the artist’s transnational career by foregrounding his longest-running, internationally toured exhibition, the Journey of Art for Peace (1985–1993). More specifically, it traces the historical trajectory of his 10 × 28 mural-scale painting, Lebanon, from the circumstances of its production at the height of the Lebanese Civil War in 1983, through its short-lived exhibition history with the Split of Life series in the few years that followed. The book scaffolds an understanding of the artist as an activist and works toward offering distinctly s...
In Lebanon, the study of modern art—rather than power or hierarchy—has compelled citizens to confront how they define themselves as a postcolonial nation. In Fantasmic Objects, Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory art, Scheid traces an emerging sense of what it means to be Lebanese through the evolution of new exhibition, pedagogical, and art-writing practices. She reveals that art and artists helped found the nation during French occupation, as the formal qualities and international exhibitions of nudes and landscapes in the 1930s crystallized notions of modern masculinity, patriotic femininity, non-sectarian religiosity, and citizenship. Examining the efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists in Lebanon who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political being, Fantasmic Objects offers an insightful approach to the history and formation of modern Lebanon.
Der libanesische Künstler Aref el Rayess (1928–2005) schuf ein beeindruckendes, bis heute wenig erforschtes Œuvre aus Malerei, Zeichnung, Collage und Skulptur. Rayess war ein Reisender. Er lebte in vielen Ländern, saugte den Geist dieser Orte in sich auf. Seine Arbeiten spiegeln den Zeitgeist jener Epochen und Kunstszenen wider. Er war ein unabhängiger Denker, ein politischer Mensch, ein Freigeist. Zu seinen Sujets gehören die Menschen, die Gesellschaft, die Abstraktion und die Natur. Seine Handschrift und sein Malstil wandeln sich dabei ständig, bleiben aber immer eigenständig und unverwechselbar. Diese erste Monografie widmet sich der vielseitigen künstlerischen Praxis von Rayess, vor allem seiner Malerei zwischen den Jahren 1949 und 2005.
This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption - called "contemporary art" - emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary" wit...
Commissioned by the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq and published on the occasion of the 58th Venice Biennale, Fatherland presents the work of Kurdish Iraqi artist Serwan Baran and his investigation of the concept of ?fatherland? as opposed to what we traditionally understand as ?motherland.? Mixing curatorial texts by Tamara Chalabi and Natasha Gasparian with a series of poems and original letters from the 1980s written by Iraqi soldiers and collected by the artist during the years, Fatherland is both a reflective document that echoes Baran?s work and a commentary on the masculine and paternalistic dimension of the political culture in Iraq, a country dominated by men who have often enacted oppressive ideologies. 00Exhibition: Iraqi pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (11.05.-24.11.2019).
THE STORY: IMPRESSIONISM is set in the small art gallery of Katharine Keenan, where she and her assistant, Thomas Buckle, have been hiding from a world that has shattered them. Thomas has been hurt by what he's seen behind his camera as a world-tra