The Istanbul Biennial is one of the largest and most important art events in the Middle East. Every two years more than 150 international artists are exhibited all over the city, selected by a globally renowned star curator. Thousands of visitors from all over the world flock to Istanbul for each edition, and the city has become one of the top 10 exhibition destinations for the global art elite. The Biennial is also indispensable for both tourism and the economy, as it is financed almost exclusively with sponsorship money from large corporations in Turkey. The last twenty years of the Istanbul Biennial are extremely well documented and scientifically reviewed, but very, very few things are known about the founding period of the Biennial, and the Biennial Foundation IKSV publishes little information about the first years of the Biennial. For example, neither in Europe nor in North America is a publicly accessible version of the catalogues of the first two Biennial editions available. The official archive of the Biennial Foundation also contains almost no documents or records from the founding years. In the scientific literature, this period is usually only briefly and broadly described and does not contain any in-depth details. Based on private and previously unpublished archive material, I will present the early history of the Istanbul Biennial and show that the Biennial was by no means planned as a global super exhibition. On the contrary, in the first editions the Biennial was surprisingly critical of capitalism and globalization. Rather, the aim was to create a transnational network of the local art scene and to open new exhibition venues in Istanbul. But with the fifth edition at the latest of the Istanbul Biennial, these principles were thrown overboard for a higher international representation. The split between the local art scene and the global art elite was repeatedly reflected in major artist protests and boycotts that have been taking place against the Biennial organization since 2007. With my paper, I want to show that the Biennial Foundation deliberately conceals its early history in order to distance itself from political and ideological positions that could endanger the financial success of the event.

Jordan’s international aid sector has grown rapidly as Jordan has become a hub of response to the Syrian refugee crisis. This development has directly benefitted artists, and Jordan’s creative sector has boomed in connection with the growing aid economy. Artists are often directly funded by aid organizations for services such as camp beautification, creative activities for refugee communities, and organizational branding. Artists are also a frequent target of cultural diplomacy funds. At the same time, the aid economy has supported the emergence of a young, cosmopolitan, middle class of aid workers, both domestic and foreign born, who gain cultural capital by patronizing the arts and art related businesses. One impact has been to raise the political profile of the arts, as artists now occupy positions of political, economic, and cultural influence. From this position, artists are empowered to present visions of Amman/Jordan to a wider public, and through these visions to make claims on the city and nation, its communities and politics. This dynamic has been especially visible in two sites: Jabal al Luweibde, a neighborhood that is an increasingly popular hub of artistic activity, where people come to be part of an artistic scene; and Amman Design Week, a new, annual festival that celebrates the creative sector and highlights the potential contribution of creatives to Amman’s urban governance. In this paper, I explore how these intersections between aid and creative production are transforming Ammani/Jordanian identity, creating new possibilities for urban community and political engagement. I also critically examine how artists’ political engagements negotiate intersections of local and transnational power in Amman’s emerging art world.

Farhad Moshiri, the Tehran-based Iranian artist, rose to fame with his embellished, bejeweled paintings, adorned with calligraphic inscriptions of Iranian Pop culture and love poetry. I argue that Frosting Stories, one of the artist’s more recent artworks exhibited at the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh PA (2017-18), is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on violence, at once hypervisualized and camouflaged by glittering embroideries and the tactility of (imitated) cake frosting. Drawing on Krista Thompson’s formulation of bling and the use of shine as artistic strategy, I discuss Moshiri’s employment of shine as making (in)visible the relationship among pain, desire and consumption. Like many other Iranian artists, Moshiri often uses Persian script to place his artworks in a symbolic context of national identity, such as the Jar Series where the artist adorned patinated, albeit flattened representations of antique jars with verses of Pop poetry. Frosting Stories however, takes a different approach to writing. The script is far from refined in a way that it adamantly emphasizes its distance from calligraphic craftsmanship. Its rawness, achieved through constant change in size and flow of the letters, the irregular movement across lines and lack of structure and spacing among words, are all indicative of a practice-sheet, or what is known in the history of Islamic Persian calligraphy as Siyah-Mashq. On the most immediate surface, Frosting Stories is a practice-sheet written in a raw and childish handwriting. Frosting Stories mounts its critique of consumerism at the intersection of commodity culture of 1990s in Iran, the globalized capitalism and the American culture. The artwork embraces collapse of the 1970s generation’s revolutionary hopes and the sublimity of calligraphy as ‘national art,’ turning into a fervor to consume, possess and eat. The tactility of the artwork as cake and its invitation to consume vanishes at the moment of realizing that the frosting is made of acrylic, thick white paint. Bann, Stephen. “Historical Text and Historical Object: The Poetics of the Musee De Cluny.” History and Theory17, no. 3 (1978): 251. https://doi.org/10.2307/2504739. Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: on the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Pr., 1992. English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Thompson, Krista A. "The Sound of Light." The Art Bulletin, Vol. 91, No. 4 (December 2009), 2015, 482-483

For almost 10 years of political protests, unrest and war since 2011, the unfolding political realities of the Arabic speaking region has pushed artists to work around and through censorship, exile and economic deficit, creating unique aesthetic propositions, institutional critiques and new discourses on political change. Other than their artistic excellence, what is important about these practices is the new methods and tools they offer to Middle East Studies and political scientists. These artistic propositions carry with them ample knowledge about the region, with visceral urgency and subjective personal nuances, all giving rise to new agencies and singularities that challenge normative grand narratives on recent political phenomena. So, what artistic forms and institutions have emerged over the past ten years that could allow us to understand Arab contemporary politics differently? Building on Ziad Adwan’s scholarship on theatre and nation states, Peggy Phelan’s work on marked and unmarked bodies, and Diana Taylor’s performance studies and politics, and based on extensive fieldwork and interviews I have conducted for over ten years, this presentation will look at key artistic projects including the feminist old women choir Haneen (Syria/ Germany) working on PTSD and the war, the revisitations of Islamic heritage and critiques of vilification of Muslims in exile seen through the work of choreographer Radouan Mriziga (Morocco/ Belgium), Adam Kucharski’s Extra Territorial Ministry of Arab Culture (USA/ Saudi Arabia) and the political role of cultural institutions in post-socialist Arab states, Lamia Gouda’s performative ‘Blood Protest’ on the absence of a discourse on female sexuality within political strife (Egypt), and Ismail Fayed’s queer critique of Nasser and Um Kolthoum’s genealogy of Arab chauvinism through his performance “Shams El Assil” (Egypt). This presentation will survey the social, economic and political contexts of these projects, the artistic tools of intervention, concluding with a discussion on the necessity for performative responses to critique dominant regimes of power, allowing us to unfold interdisciplinary platforms of reconsidering the second wave of revolt in the Arab world, through a performance studies scholarship and intersectional positions.