Early in her career, the artist Larissa Sansour used to make documentaries about Palestine. She stopped creating these photojournalistic films when viewers assumed she was projecting her own bias onto the narratives, finding the realities of Palestinian life under occupation too surreal to be reality. In response, Sansour turned to science fiction, leaning into its inherent uncanny nature and the “language” of colonial imposition to flip the narrative history of occupation—changing the depictions of Palestinians from victims into future revolutionaries. This presentation argues that Sansour creates dystopian futures wherein Palestinians subvert the visual structures of colonialism as a revolutionary act. In Nation Estate (2013), Sansour imagines a future where Palestine has been reinvented as a vertical high-rise building. Each floor of the building stands in for a city/site of significance. While this future Palestine is restricted to verticality, it allows Palestinians access to, at least a simulacrum of, places the occupation has long since denied to them. Additionally, the video’s main character, played by Sansour herself, is pregnant. The feminine power embodied in her perpetuation of the Palestinian lineage serves as a gendered resistance to the typically masculine characterization of violent military and colonial occupation. In another dystopian video work, In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016), Sansour subverts the colonial instrumentalization of archeology to establish future-historical narratives of ethno-national connections to the land through a imagined female-led resistance group that deposits fabricated “artifacts” throughout Palestine. In the future, when the artifacts are dug up, speculative narratives about the people who used them, and their ties to the historic landscape, can be used to rewrite contemporary realities of their descendants. In both projects, Sansour utilizes the surreal nature of science fiction imaginings to call attention to the historic structures maintaining occupation and thereby manipulate them to revolutionize the future.

In 1984 Iranian architect Nader Khalili (1936-2008) was invited to a NASA symposium on lunar bases in the 21st century. Titled "Lunar Structures Generated and Shielded with On?Site Materials," Khalili's presentation was subsequently published in the Journal of Aerospace Engineering, in which he outlined the ways in which methods of constructing centuries-old Iranian adobe architecture could be adapted for lunar surfaces. This presentation shows how Khalili's extensive research and experimentation in the Iranian desert presented itself as an impetuous for his futuristic thinking in design. Khalili's work in Iran had resulted in a series of building projects that were made cheaply and ecologically and were particularly apt for the refugees and disaster victims on Planet Earth. However, by the architect's own account in the political atmosphere of the late-1970s and early 1980s, the world was more fascinated by the future than the present. So, Khalili translated his humanitarian "earth architecture" into shelters for the Moon and the Planet Mars. While predominantly focused on Khalili's structures for lunar surfaces, this presentation contextualizes Khalili's work within the broader framework of contemporaneous American Sci-Fi (particularly the writings of Ben Bova)as well as Iran's literary, cinematic and artistic inclinations (or lack thereof) toward sci-fi and futuristic genres in the second half of the 20th century. The paper concludes by surveying the work of contemporary Iranian architects who have been inspired by Khalili's design thinking and building methods.

Students who enrolled in Syria’s College of Fine Arts in 1970, the year Hafez al-Assad came to power via a “Corrective Movement” within the Ba’th Party, found their degree studies interrupted by the 1973 war with Israel. Drafted into the military as active duty soldiers, they fought in battles that the Syrian state claimed as victories (and won medals for bravery), only to return to the studios to make art around pessimistic images of the cyborg: men and women, denuded of subjectivity, whose bodies fuse with the slickly milled surfaces of planes and bombs combined with elements of older industrial machines studded by gears and bolts. This paper will explore a small set of these artistic projects, reading them as a refraction of several distinct kinds of futurity that were active in the cultural discourse of the Ba’thist Syrian state of this era. These include a particular technological imagination in which bodily prostheses dovetail with the prostheses of the state apparatus—an imagination that, when given visual expression in Syria, tended to draw on science fiction cinema, among other popular sources—and other, more utopian ideas of ex-colonial, socialist futures based upon 1960s experiments in cognitive healing via the arts of a total sensorium. The paper aims to track the articulation of these ideas in Syrian art not as a schema of progression (i.e. industrial-military complexes replacing the handmade) but rather as a territory of contention that became recognizable in the artistic practice of this generation of Syrian makers.

American-Qatari artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia al-Maria coined the term Gulf Futurism together with Kuwaiti artist-musician Fatima al-Qadiri. As they explained in a Dazed Digital magazine interview: Over the last fifty years, the Arabian Gulf has given birth to a very particular brand of futurism. It is a phenomena marked by a deranged optimism about the sustainability of both oil reserves and late capitalism. Similar to early 20th century Euro-Futurism and mid-century American kitch and retro-futurism, Gulf Futurism is evident in a dominant class concerned with master-planning and world-building, while the youth culture preoccupied with fast cars, fast tech and viddying a bit of ultra-violence. (Al-Qadiri and al-Maria, November 2012) Gulf Futurism explains an existing phenomenon both artists have observed in architecture, urban planning, art, aesthetics and popular culture in the post-oil Persian Gulf. It is a premonition of our global future imbued with science fiction views and technological pessimism. In the last two decades, science fictional art productions together with futurist aesthetics have provided new keys to understanding the present, to critically analyze the past, and to open on utopian or dystopian visions of the future. Giving free way to the unthinkable, the unutterable, science fiction constitutes a main avenue in approaching the complex realities of the Arab Geocultural Space. These representations together with the diasporic condition of many artists, have led to a deep reflection on the notion of ‘uruba (Arabness), searching for new narratives of the autochthonous, as ethnic futurist aesthetics did elsewhere: Finno-Ugrian Ethno-futurism appeared in the 1980s; then came Afrofuturism in the 1990s; Sinofuturism, Indofutusism, Desifuturism, Latin@futurism, and, most recently, Gulf Futurism. This presentation will examine the Gulf Futurism movement through art historical perspectives in Sophia al-Maria and Fatima al-Qadiri’s contemporary projects in order to explore insight into their visual apparitions. Then, we will analyze the different definitions and references attributed to Gulf Futurism in order to understand how this phenomenon became a “starkly avant-garde culture of the Middle East” (Al-Qadiri and al-Maria 2012). Altogether, Gulf Futurism should be understood as a tool used to question and criticize past historical narratives and to formulate new ones that allow to open the horizon to more promising times and to go beyond presentism (Hartog 2003) in the post-oil Arabian Gulf.