“There comes a time when you need to take action” says Amina to Fouzi towards the end of Merzak Allouache’s 2012 Normal! –a film about an unfinished film, but also about Algeria and the role of creation in light of (or in the shadows of) the Arab Spring playing out in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt. In this talk, however, I would like to consider the film through a gendered lens, in which the “unfinished business” (la chose inachevée) is not only the film itself, but the realization of the role of women in contemporary Algerian society and cinema. In this film, like in another of Allouache’s recent films Harragas (2009), female characters must insert themselves into the public narrative of Algeria, rather than being welcomed with open arms by their male compatriots and lovers. But that is just what they do; from the start of Normal! we see Amina prepare a banner (“Free and democratic Algeria”) for the protest she plans on attending, and in Harragas we see Imène preparing food for the dangerous sea crossing to Spain she plans on making in the place of her brother who has committed suicide. That is not the case in Yamina Bachir’s 2002 Rachida (the first feature length Algerian film by a female filmmaker). While Rachida is the protagonist of the film, at times she does not seem to be the protagonist of her own life, preferring instead to remain outside of the political and violent struggles that rage around her, and to try to live a normal life, even when her refusal to participate (and plant a bomb) results in her getting shot. Is this call to “take action” a luxury of the male filmmaker but not available to the female filmmaker? Or are these all forms of female empowerment (traditional female schoolteacher, sister who replaces dead brother, protester who occupies her own space) – each which comes with its own price? This paper will explore the ways in which the potentials and the limitations of female participation in contemporary Algerian society is imagined by male and female filmmakers in recent Algerian cinema, as well as cultural and economic challenges faced by these filmmakers.

This paper addresses the sculptural practice of Lebanese abstractionist Saloua Raouda Choucair and presents new interpretational opportunities by introducing information found in the artist’s personal notes and documents. The artist, known most through her interest in the infinite has primarily been interpreted via Sufi thought and Islamic geometric practices but this paper reveals that from the 1970s through the end of her career in the 1990s was also looking at biochemisty and quantum mechanics. I argue that rather than considering this a breach or directional change that it can be looked at as a continuation of her exploration of the infinite and allows for a reframing of her practice at large. I present the unarchived documents alongside sculptural examples to establish the translation of the artist’s research into her practice and discuss the larger implications of how this affects our broader interpretation of her work.

This paper examines and historicizes the neo-avant-garde strategies that took place in Turkey in the late 1970s and its role in establishing different norm in Turkey within an evolving socio-political culture specifically in Istanbul. The ruptures in Turkey’s sociopolitical history, have led to a fragmented historicity, cultural amnesia and a fundamental cultural and political identity crisis, affecting the evolution and circulation of neo-avant-garde practices. The political connotations of the neo-avant-garde scene in the late 20th century continues to inform Istanbul’s artistic community and contemporary art scene. By providing a historical background for the rise of the idea of avant-garde, as well as looking at the works of the artists who were sent to Western Europe in the post-war period with state funds for art education as a part of the top-down and cosmetic modernization process in 1950s, this research will look at the avant-garde’s ongoing impact in the current art practices and culture scene. By looking at group exhibitions that focus on how neo-avant-garde had emerged through collective practices, specifically the exhibition series A Cross-section from Avant-Garde Turkish Art (1986, 87, 88, 90), New Directions (1977-1994), A,B,C,D (1986-92), 1st Istanbul Biennial (1987) as well as the effect of art education institutions and universities on these activities, this paper will temporalize the neo-avant-garde movement as a moment during the politically turbulent years of the late 1970s and 80s. 1970s established a subtle but fundamental relationship between today’s political environment and the transformation of Turkey’s social structure through globalization, and observed a break from cosmetic westernization process and formalist style into forming a more critical perspective. By looking at the recent exhibitions and activities focusing on the avant-garde movement between the years of 1970s and 80s, as well as the works of contemporary artists currently defining the art scene in Turkey this research will examine the renewed interest in the neo-avant-garde period.

In 1938, painter and theorist Ramses Younane, a leading member of the Surrealist, Cairo-based collective Art et Liberté coined a new definition of Surrealism which he called Subjective Realism. This was soon followed by the notion of Free Art, developed by fellow Group member Kamel El-Telmisany. Through this new definition, Art et Liberté proposed a new direction for Surrealism , which they perceived as a movement in crisis. Founded on December 22, 1938 with the publication of their manifesto Vive L'Art Dégénéré, the Group rejected the convergence of art and nationalism, aligning themselves with a complex, international and evolving Surrealist network spanning cities as far flung as Paris, London, Mexico City, New York, Beirut and Tokyo. At the dawn of the Second World War and during Egypt’s colonial rule by the British Empire, Art et Liberté was globally engaged in its defiance of Fascism, Nationalism and Colonialism. Through consulting a significant body of artworks from the 1920s until the 1940s, along with a diverse corpus of unpublished primary sources such as personal correspondence, periodicals, newspapers and magazines, exhibition catalogues and art-related publications by the Group and other sources, this paper seeks to demonstrate how, through a process of acute negotiation and appropriation, Art et Liberté developed a distinct Surrealist language that was at once, internationally minded yet locally concerned. The paper will also put forward a new reading of the Group’s 1938 manifesto by weaving in new evidence from hitherto unpublished material, proposing that it was equally intended as a response against a local flirtation, and in some cases alignment, with an increasingly popular Fascist ideology, as much as it was a response to the Fascist and Nazi oppression of the avant-garde in Europe . In doing so, the paper seeks to shed light on how the Group provided a restless generation of young artists, intellectuals and political activists, Egyptian and non-Egyptian, men and women alike, with a heterogeneous platform for cultural and political reform. Last but not least, the paper posits Art et Liberté's significant visual and literary contributions beyond the polemics of post-colonial discourse and the pitfalls of historicism, advocating for a new art-historical understanding of the Surrealist movement that transcends the polarizing paradigm of Saïd's Orientalism.

Shirin Neshat has gained prominent stature among Western commentators and Iranian based artists and art critics, who praise her work for shedding light on Iranian women’s lives in the post-1979 era. While her Women of Allah (1989) created shock followed by extensive commentary indicating that her art work resisted stereotypical representation of Islam, little is written about her following photo series Shadow under the Web (1997), Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy (1999) as well as her more recent series on Arab Spring titles My House is on Fire (2013), which seem like repetitions of the first original series with similar techniques and subject matter. Drawing on the framework outlined by Ali Behdad (self-Orientalism) and Hamid Dabashi (post-Orientalism), this study uses the method of visual ethnography to argue that in her representation of post-1979 Iranian society, Shirin Neshat takes an outmoded Orientalist perspective in order to appeal to Western audience, who in turn in the neoliberal capitalism praise her work for generic characteristics that save the inferior position to the subject matter she represents. She fashions this by using stereotyped locations of ruins and village buildings and portraying submissive female characters with hijab and partially covered eyes and lips; For her style, she combines Persian handwritten scripts with Arabic haraka, black and white primitive forms of photography, cropped hands and feet with tattoo and henna like patterns, and locations of Arab cities for representing Iranian spaces. This analysis reveals that rather than shedding light on the lives of Iranians or providing nuanced understanding of the region, Shirin Neshat’s work homogenizes the Middle East cultures as one entirety. Coupled with global cultural taste, her representations of Islam as desired in neoliberal capitalism, end up reinforcing the structure of Orientalism. The practical implications of this study are for contemporary museum curators, her audience who desire a nuanced understanding about Iran, and the artists who aspire to her as a successful role model.