Dissonant Archives

Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

Anthony Downey

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784534110
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857739735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The 'archive' is often viewed as a collection of historical documents that records and orders information about people, places and events. This view nevertheless obscures a crucial point: the archive, whilst subject to the vagaries of time and history, can also determine the future. This point has gained urgency in modern-day North Africa and the Middle East where the archive has come to the fore as a site of social, historical, theoretical, and political contestation. Dissonant Archives is the first book to consider the ways in which contemporary artists from the Middle East and North Africa - including Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Jananne Al Ani, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mariam Ghani, Zineb Sedira, and Akram Zaatari - are utilizing and disrupting the function of the archive and, in so doing, highlighting a systemic, perhaps irrevocable, crisis in institutional and state-ordained archiving across the region. In exploring and producing archives, be they alternative, interrogative or fictional, these artists are not simply questioning the authenticity, authority or authorship of the archive; rather, they are unlocking its regenerative, radical potential.The result provides essential insights into the nexus between art and politics in the contemporary Middle East.

Image Credits

...

[Cover]	Courtesy of the artist. © Akram Zaatari
[18]	Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris
[19]	Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris
[21]	Courtesy of the artists, Galerie In Situ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), The Third Line (Dubai), and CRG (New York) © Joana Hadjthomas and Khalil Joreige
[22]	Courtesy of the artists, Galerie In Situ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), The Third Line (Dubai), and CRG (New York) © Joana Hadjthomas and Khalil Joreige
[24]	Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg
[25]	Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg
[26]	Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg
[28]	Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery
[29]	Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery
[32]	Courtesy of the artist

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Texts and Artists’ Inserts
• Introduction
• ‘What We Left Unfinished’
• Measures of Stillness and Movement
• Rethinking National Archives in Colonial
• Coming to Terms
• This is Tomorrow
• Lucien Samaha
• Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas
• Héla Ammar
• Lawrence Abu Hamdan
• Burak Arıkan
• John Akomfrah
• Maryam Jafri
• Archive
• The Museum Past the Surpassing Disaster
• I Have The Picture
• The Global in the Local
• Arab Digital Expression Foundation
• Media Farzin and Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck
• Adelita Husni-Bey
• Gulf Labor
• Ania Dabrowska
• Naeem Mohaiemen
• Meriç Algün Ringborg
• Amina Menia
• Jananne Al-Ani
• Vahap Avşar
• Theses on the Archive
• From Archive to Analytics
• Excerpts from a Grammar of Redaction
• The Black Market Archive
• Locating the Archive
• The Spectre (of Knowledge)
• Appendix
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Image Credits