On the afternoon of June 24, 2011 Picasso’s 1943 portrait of his lover Francoise Gilot, Buste de Femme was exhibited on the grounds of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The bringing of Picasso’s Buste de Femme to Ramallah was the culmination of a two-year collaborative effort between the Academy and the Van Abbenmuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The project, which has been more widely advertised and which has attracted more media attention, conversation and analyses both local and international than any other project in the history of contemporary Palestinian art is-amongst other descriptions that have been used to define it-a case in the cultural politics of shaping and articulating through a resort to “imagination”- what it means to be a modern Palestinian subject living in a sovereign State-to-be. By drawing on studies of affect in cultural politics (Ahmed 2004, Massumi 2002P), I aim to explore the sensory and affective experiences evoked by Picasso’s iconic painting’s dislocation to Ramallah, namely through a discourse analysis of the media and public relations content of the project, field interview material, as well as published art journal critiques of the project by tracing the reading of the project across transnational space and locating it within the various discursive sites it unraveled within, in both the “global” arts circuit as well as the “local” cultural scene. What emerges is the centrality of the State in the project’s conceptualization and the disappearance of the Nation in its process of materialization. This compels us to rethink the notion of what counts as an instance of subversion in transnational processes of arts production by questioning the different forms that resistance through cultural practices take, the reasons they take them and how they transform with the passing of time.

The national is relational—the extraneous condition of the national defines postcolonial art practice and curation, internalizing a state of estrangement. This paper highlights art positions engaging global art economies yet claiming neither an independence from the market nor geopolitical or personal neutrality. Instead, these practices attempt to expose, evade, and subvert the power of the nation state in the art world. Resistance towards the state is being methodically erased by the global art market mechanisms—for instance, Iranian citizens are well represented on the international exhibition and fair circuit, where their representation of the state is mute; nevertheless, financial sanctions on trade with Iran affect artists, dealers, and collectors in the same way as they affect other trades. An ongoing curatorial initiative OtherIS (www.otheris.com) interrogates art production and exchange with the sanctioned countries—rather than gloss over the existing sociopolitical condition via unsignified inclusion, its projects highlight the position of exclusion and clandestine economies that ensue. On the other hand, global mutual investment trust models, such as MutualArt and its affiliate the Artists Pension Trust (APT), apply technological innovations in statistics and financial risk management concepts to art as another asset, its systems ostensibly disengaged from the national economic and ideological interests. Yet as artist Walid Raad has demonstrated in his investigative tableau on the APT as part of his series Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, affects of the national attend to the transactions concerning art. The two case studies exemplify the potential of art agency to undercut signifiers of both the national and the global as they focus on the extra-national interstices of art production and distribution. Circumvention of the national calls for a relational estrangement—its theorization will be sought in Henri Lefebvre’s critique of the Marxist notion of alienation “as this single yet dual movement of objectification and externalization—of realization and derealization.” The nationalized object can be successfully realized in the global art marketplace; whereas the national that is externalized, or alienated, is not as easily commodified—this condition of alienation providing a liminal space for a critique.

When produced within a colonial context the politics of art is often couched within the language of identity; that is, art produced by the colonized is most commonly understood as a resource for representing a repressed cultural and national identity in the face of historical and ongoing domination. Where are we to locate the politics of art, however, when such identities are specifically that which is being disavowed? Starting from the proposition that the matrix of Israeli colonial power is constituted through a regime of identification organized around a particular spatiotemporal configuration of sensible experience, that is, an arrangement of what can and cannot be seen, heard, thought, said, done, I consider how the productions of Palestinian contemporary artists are contesting this regime through an aesthetic rupturing of this sensible experience. My analysis considers the strategies by which these artists are suspending, deferring and interrupting what is visible, audible, thinkable, sayable and doable without representing or asserting a cultural or national counter-identity in return. Based on ethnographic research carried out between 2009 and 2011, I first focus on a close reading of the practices and works of three Palestinian contemporary artists and their works – Michael Halak (hyperrealist painting), Nardeen Srouji (sculpture/installation) and Sharif Waked (video) – as polemical stagings of the colonial figure of the “present absentee,” a figure conspicuously out of place and out of time. This is followed by an exploration of how aesthetics in this context can thus be interpreted as a practice of politics understood as the disruption of the relation between a colonial sensible experience and artistic production. These considerations, I argue, impel us to rethink the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Palestinian contemporary art in Israel outside of the binary of resistance/collusion in which art remains either at the service of a given Palestinian national ideology or is discredited by its complicity with an Israeli colonial logic.

In the early 1950s, in order to set the modern art then developing in Baghdad on a firmer, intellectual foundation, the artist Jawad Salim founded an art group. The art group was based on a problematization. On the one hand modern painting had a precedent, in the thirteenth-century manuscript illustrations of what is known as the Baghdad School; on the other hand however, that tradition had been lost, and thus painting was something entirely new. Salim resolved this paradox by interpreting modern painting as a “renewal” [tajdid] of the medieval tradition, and he institutionalized this interpretation in the art group he founded, the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, which announced its formation as “the re-birth of the Baghdad School.” The interpretation of renewal emplotted modern art in the general philosophy of history formulated by the Arab Awakening, or Nahda, in which the history of the Arabs was interpreted in terms of civilizational decline and re-birth. The emergence of a political consciousness among the Arabic-speaking populations of the Ottoman Empire entailed a new historiography of the Abbasid caliphate. While that historiography provided a foundation for the new state of Iraq, it also undermined the national schema, by positing reference points that were not those of the nation but of time. In the context of the Nahda, modern art was structured according to a temporal logic, rather than a national one, conceived in terms of continuity and discontinuity, loss and creation, the inaccessibility of the past and the urgency of the present. To make this argument, I look at a series of paintings Salim did throughout the 1950s called Baghdadiyyat. I show how Salim’s artistic problem was how to give form to the general sense of vitality that permeated the Nahda, the sense of an awakening-to-life after centuries of death, a desire for life in the face of death. And I show how he drew on different figures of feminine sexuality in order to work through this problem of life. I suggest that sexual desire seemed to articulate both the impersonal thrust of life and the individual desire for freedom.