This project will discuss the documentary image against the background of the visual traces and ramifications of violent conflicts, wars, and political uprisings in the Arab world. Through the encounter with digital and mobile image archives, post-cinematic installation art, user-generated content on the internet, and contemporary media art, this paper seeks to explore the economy of crisis in (post-)revolutionary and (post-) colonial visual topographies and conceive of new relationships between temporality, materiality, and affect. Technologies of media and of the visual are no longer evident solely by means of cables and buttons, but have permeated human and non-human lives by data streams, technological infrastructures, sensor-based networks and screens. Digital – documentary – images of the war in Syria, the on-going crisis in Iraq, and the Egyptian uprising, for one, disclose the intricate relationship between technological processes and ‘naked life’ that permeates the boundary between virtual lifeworlds and the materiality of human lives. The topographies of the zones of conflict, their violent and vernacular surplus, are absorbed in / as documentary modes of the real and reflect self-identifying territories of agential practices. Documentary images in/through mobile media and their digital connectivity, quality and transformation have thus altered the relationship between the image and its referent by focusing on the interrelation of the virtuality of spatiotemporal movements and structures, the technosphere of cultural production, and the subject’s time, life, and death in geopolitically contested spaces. The structural transformation of documentary images shapes the new public sphere of a medial materialization of political, social, and economic crises. Given the decisive role digital technologies in social networks have acquired during revolutionary events in the Middle East and North Africa – and the audiovisual and digital aesthetic strategies artists have employed – the emphasis will be on reassessing the question of agency through the documentary image. This paper will trace the implications of different configurations of the documentary real and its affective impact on the art and economy of crisis.

Elements of the virtual become actualized under unique, local, temporal conditions that cannot be predicted. They happen only in the "now." It helps to approach this logic from a visual arts lens, as Laura Marks does in her book, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, where she traces new media art along a historiography of Islamic thought from the birth of the algorithm in ninth-century Iraq through fifteenth-century Islamic mysticism and neoplatonism, or “beginnings of virtual reality.” One of the critical points Marks builds upon is a notion of events in time as unique and foldable, and therefore, transformative. This talk will critique several creative media projects by illustrating and improving our understanding of the sensibilities and cultural logic(s) that are being expressed by the people on virtual platforms. One example is an interactive digital mosaic of the surveillance image that went viral of the Baker boys killed on the beach in Gaza, along with computerized sound files of the tweets in English and Arabic and an organized gallery of the images most tweeted. The images give a layered sense of how people responded to Israel’s massive destruction of Gaza on that day: in their percussive urgency, there is a lot of repetition…When a beholder navigating [this] interface takes the time to look at and listen to some of these millions of posts, the time and place of the senders begin to unfold. This is one example of new media art that uses social media extraction and data analysis of contemporary global struggles, people’s movements and national crises (using Egypt and the US as foci) in order to study our communications over such crises as the recent war in Gaza and the Ferguson protest, and what they say about us. Building on the example above, this presentation will examine several recent new media art that make a global call for participants to view, study, and use virtual networks, social media, and other digital archives . I will argue these expressions as a form of counter or (sous)veillance.

Contemporary Egyptian art is undergoing a subjective turn, evidenced by a number of exhibitions shown in Cairo from 2015 through early 2017. This turn can be situated in relation to the last six years of aesthetic production in Egypt and its inseparability from the political shifts that have transpired in the country. With the failure of the 2011 revolution, the subsequent shrinking of political space, the ban on protests, and now, the clamping down on the aesthetic sphere itself, art’s uncertainty about its function has increasingly intensified. There has been a stark shift from the bold street art that covered the city, which became an iconic symbol of protest, to the diminished space for art today. Indeed, many of the early post-revolution discussions about contemporary Egyptian art pertained precisely to the question of whether and how art could uphold its revolutionary function. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic notion of intimate revolt, this paper argues that in the absence of politics in the traditional sense, the exploration of subjectivity in contemporary art is political, one that configures psychic space into a novel relationship with social or public space. This turn inward is a double gesture. On the one hand, art reflects on its own status as art, and on the other hand, it prompts reflection upon the status of the Egyptian subject in the post-colonial, post-revolutionary context. This paper will discuss a number of contemporary exhibitions from the past two years to substantiate the claim that Egyptian artists are turning inward to explore the psyche, not only in the absence of politics, but also as a form of politics. Among the recent exhibitions to be considered are Ahmed Sabry’s Fifth District, Hany Rashad’s Bulldozer, the group exhibition A Season in Hell, Huda Lutfi’s Dawn Portraits, and Amr Nossier’s Painting and Drawing.