At the recent 11th Istanbul biennial over one third of all artists exhibited were from the Middle East region. While the biennial's location in Istanbul -rightly taken by its curators (WHW) to be the center of the world--clearly influenced this selection, one cannot help but notice the extent to which the Middle East has begun to circulate within the arts community as a densely saturated metonym for politics. In keeping with the recent theoretical re-valuation of the political in art criticism, the Biennial's theme, Brecht's 1928 query "what keeps mankind alive" was meant to engage "Brecht's Marxism and his belief in utopia, utopian potential and [the] open political engagement of art" in contemporary critical and curatorial practices. What better site from which to stage the meeting ground of politics and aesthetics than the Middle East? Indeed, as I will argue, and attempt to problematize, the Middle East has come to stand in simultaneously for the specter of the political and the promise of politics. Critically examining numerous works by Middle Eastern artists (such as Rabih Mroue, Jumana Abboud, and Larissa Sansour) exhibited at the Istanbul biennial, I engage the following questions: (1) How do we make sense of the ubiquitous way in which the Middle East has come to serve as a staging ground for the question of politics, while critically exploring the prevalence of binary understandings of the region as trapped between 'local' ethno-nationalisms and 'global' neo-liberalism? (2) How do we examine the ontological precarity of the region emerging simultaneously with its aesthetic overvaluation? If, as Nicolas Bourriaud wishes to argue, the revealment of precarity is a political act in itself; how can art on the Middle East help to visualize power and its obscene excess, yet also avoid what Milica Tomic has referred to as "the aestheticization of ... suffering - which would just be another form of exploitation in the generation of artistic value"? I end with a discussion of the significance of artistic works that harness not just form and content in their reconfiguration of the political in art, but that have also mobilized or displaced various affective structures.