58 I n a panel discussion about collecting Middle Eastern art held on 30 March at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Canvas Publisher and Editor-in- Chief Ali Khadra told guests the story behind this magazine’s inception: that it was founded in response to the negative media backlash towards the region following 9/11 and seeks to educate the world about the wealth and breadth that is Middle Eastern art and culture. I pondered this on the flight from Hou- ston to Dubai and realised that I had flown over 25,000 kilometres to and from the 15th FotoFest Biennial to see exactly what Canvas has been battling for a decade: a Middle East represented by art that revolves around conflict and oppression. PREPARE FOR BATTLE The show, View From The Inside , curated by Karin Adrian von Roques, featured the photographs, videos and mixed media work of 49 Arab artists. One of them, Ahmed Jadallah, is a Reuters photojournalist and through his hard-hitting images, visitors viewed scenes of recent strife in Libya, Palestine, Syria, Bahrain, Egypt and Yemen. Not that those conflicts were not found elsewhere in View From The Insid e – checkpoints, soldiers, armed men, martyrs and other conflict paraphernalia were hung across Silver Street Studios, the largest of the biennial’s four venues. It was akin to watching news networks’ reports about the Arab Spring. This, for a biennial which “we did not want to give a theme to,” said von Roques at the event’s day-long conference on visual art in the Arab world. In a phone interview, the German-born curator explained that “Silver Street’s topic is the war and the conflict situation”. Why then, were Youssef Na- bil’s poetic self-portraits hung there? “For me, the whole idea [of these works] was not so far from the question about your own identity when you cannot live in your home country anymore because of conflict situations,” she replied, also citing space constraints and “a matter of budget” with regards to no specially commissioned works. Though artists such as Huda Lutfi, Steve Sabella, Shadia Alem and Manal Al-Dowayan participated, other leading names in the sphere of Arab photography were missing in America’s first, largest and longest-running photographic festival; among them Yto Barrada, Walid Raad, Jananne Al-Ani, Mona Hatoum, Taysir Batniji, Ziad Antar, Bouchra Khalili, Fouad Elkoury, Rabih Mroué and Akram Zaatari. The latter “accepted and then declined,” said von Roques, adding that “some didn’t want to be labelled as Arab artists.” Perhaps they didn’t want to be pigeon-holed into that dark and insular stereotype of ‘conflict art’ or even worse, ‘artists of the Arab Spring’. “The emphasis on the word ‘Arab’ was played out much more extensively than we are comfortable using, as we feel it does exoticise the work,” said a staff member from a Dubai gallery, which lent works to FotoFest. The decision to participate, said the rep, is the artists’. “It cannot be a complete picture of Arab photography nor can it be a reflection of the Arab world’s diversity,” said The world’s energy capital hosted the 15th FotoFest Biennial with a focus on Arab photography. Myrna Ayad reports. HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM 59 Maya El-Khalil, Director of Athr Gallery in Jeddah. “It remains that FotoFest created a platform for dialogue and it is definitely an initiative worth building on.” Then, there is the exhibition’s name itself – View From The Inside – which I found mislead- ing. The title could have been preceded with ‘A’ to convey that this is one view and not the view. In her essay for the exhibition’s publica- tion, von Roques writes: “In fact, if we wanted to have a heading for the Biennial that linked all the themes, then the title could be Change be- cause so many of the artists are responding in their works to change. This is change brought on by political conflicts, by war and destruction, by exile and the loss of one’s homeland, and by dis- enfranchisement and repression.” IS SEEING BELIEVING? Initially, von Roques and Wendy Watriss, photographer and FotoFest co-founder, wanted to feature the works of 30 artists but that number rose to 60, dropped to 50 and then settled at 49, when “a particular work” by Kader Attia “could not be found”. The idea to focus on the Middle East at FotoFest in the world’s oil capital had stayed in Watriss’s mind after seeing – and bringing to Hou- ston – Nazar: Photographs From The Arab World , an exhibition that was first shown at the Noorderli- cht Photo Festival in Holland in 2005. Curatorially, central concerns were the selec- tion of works and their grouping – those who per- haps do not focus on conflict in their oeuvre may have seemed ‘guilty’ by mere association. Take for example Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Faces – pictures of memorial-like images of mar- tyrs in Lebanon. It could have been enlightening for American audiences to instead have seen work from the duo’s The Lebanese Rocket Society – the for- gotten history of Lebanon joining ‘the space race’ in the 1960s. Or Lara Baladi’s Alone Together... In Media Res , the Egyptian/Lebanese artist’s media collage that references events in Tahrir Square. It could have been illuminating for American audiences to in- stead have wandered into Baladi’s Roba Vecchia – a kaleidoscope of motifs rooted in Arab pop culture. Participating Egyptian artist Khaled Hafez, how- ever, says that FotoFest gave “American audiences the chance to see issues of gender, identity, migra- tion and other concepts from a region that has long been vilified, or at best, exoticised.” NOT ‘A POND’ Works in the Spring Street Studios included those by Abdulnasser Gharem, Ahmed Mater, Hassan Hajjaj and Lalla Essaydi, among others, while the Williams Tower in Houston’s Galleria area, featured the works of only five artists, including Tarek Al- Ghoussein, Jowhara Al-Saud and Tammam Azzam. Hung in an amateurish fashion, one could be for- given for mistaking them for a student show. The Winter Street Studios seemed to focus on the themes of identity, aspirations and memory with works by Maha Malluh, Sami Al-Turki and Sama Al-Shaibi, among others. “I’ve never seen such vio- lence against women and now I know that there’s a lot of construction in the Middle East,” said a stu- dent from the University of Houston, who manned the reception desk near Al-Shaibi’s traumatising images from her Between Two Rivers series, which see the Iraqi/Palestinian artist carve wounds on her body in reference to the war in Iraq. Wonderful, I thought: violence against women and construc- tion are what a visual arts student will walk away with vis-à-vis Middle Eastern art. This brings me to the exhibition’s confer- ence, which included talks and panels by Ussama Makdisi, the Arab-American Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University, art historian Salwa Mikdadi and participating artists. However much I enjoyed Makdisi’s talk – in which he mentioned that the Arab world is comprised of over 20 coun- tries, a breakdown of its religious sects, astrolo- gers, philosophers and the region’s discovery of oil – I was amazed to hear what is, to me, an old conversation. I heaved a sigh of relief when Samer Mohdad, one of the Biennial’s participating artists and co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, said, “Arab art began before Islam.” Overall, it felt as though what is referred to as the proverbial ‘pond’ is really a vast ocean when addressing Middle Eastern art in the USA. Cul- tural protagonists in America still seem to dis- cuss regional art in the frames of ‘gender-based’ or ‘conflict-inspired’. On the other shore, conver- sations are about Modern Arab art, establishing foundations and increasing the visibility of the Middle East at the Venice Biennale. Naturally, in my capacity as editor of Canvas , I have seen the majority of works at FotoFest a multitude of times, which means that unlike other bienni- als, this was not a point of discovery for me, nor was it the image of the Middle East that I, and many others, wanted all reported 275,000 visi- tors to see. “Americans,” said von Roques, “asked about the veil; they thought it was mandatory until I explained that it wasn’t. Many didn’t know where Qatar was. This was a chance to give infor- mation.” Yes, it was. This page: Shadia Alem. (Detail) From the Black Mirror Celebration series. 2007. Mixed media. Variable dimensions. Facing page: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. (Detail) Faces . 2009. Lambda prints. 50 x 35.5 cm each. Photography by Myrna Ayad. REVIEW