Visual Art

Visiting the Others: Aylam Rosenthal Ventures Into the West Bank Taking Photos and Gathering Stories.

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Just out of high school and not quite in college, Aylam Rosenthal is couch-surfing in Israel or perhaps working on a kibbutz right now. Although American, he spends time in Israel with his dad or grandparents, and he carries with him a family gift: his digital camera. His style of photography is highly colorful and light, and his images of peers convey romantic transformations from adolescence to adulthood equal to what you’ll see in GAP lifestyle advertising or Real Simple editorial. This could be a narrative of a young man traveling abroad leaving a trail of Instagram and Facebook photo journal images chronicling discovery of culture and heritage. However, he has ventured past Israeli security crossings into Palestinian territory, zone B, where he’s gained the trust of villagers, photographed them, and retold their stories. read more

Nour Festival in London Features Middle East Visual and Performing Art 20 October Through 6 November

arab-puppet-theatre-foundation_catching-the-ball-image-1-lama-chidiac — The Arab Puppet Theatre Foundation

Those lucky enough to be in London right now will enjoy a spectacular treasure trove of culture from the Middle East. Each year the city hosts the Nour Festival featuring visual art, literature, music, and performance — this year, from fifteen countries. Appropriately, the themes of this year’s festival focus on topics of displacement and conflicted identity as millions of people are driven from homelands by war forcing them into exile and causing them to face challenges that migration brings. read more

Western Art Roaming Syrian Destruction: Tammam Azzam Overlays Classic Vignettes Atop Catastrophic Images

Mona Lisa looks passively content at us as though the annihilated buildings behind her are part of a snap shot she asks locals to take of her before her vacation ends and she returns to Paris. Within moments she’ll post them on Facebook or Instagram and mention what a wild place Syria can be. When seen through a media lens, images of catastrophe, especially after five-plus long years of catastrophic images coming from Syria, bear a similar ongoing dreariness. We’ve seen image after image of blown up buildings and carnage on social media and news, and each iteration becomes more like the previous and the previous before that. Interrupt this unrelenting parade of mayhem with the intrusion of excerpts of famous classic Western art, and suddenly the rubble and the calamity are freshened up significantly as is our repulse to them. read more

Graffiti in the Middle East: Giving Up Personal Identity for the Sake of Social Justice

A slain revolutionist with her or his living counterpart on a wall near Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt

Graffiti was, at one time, unauthorized written or illustrated messages placed in public places using a variety of art materials that facilitated speedy application for the graffiti author. Speed was important, of course, because the author-artist had only a small window of opportunity to paint without being apprehended. Now, however, unauthorized graffiti has given birth to a highly sophisticated authorized art form, and it has changed from an on-the-run public nuisance to a highly respected and sought-after public space art genre, especially in urban areas where graffiti artists can attain significant popularity and media presence. Yet for artists in politically-challenged areas of the world who use graffiti to graphically chronicle resistance, money, public recognition and celebritydom are often forfeited to advance social justice for them and their people. read more

Compelling Words in Public Space: French-Tunisian Artist, eL seed, Writing on the Walls of The World

Words written in Arabic invoke a variety of responses from Latin-based language speakers. One one hand, Arabic appears otherly and foreign — the language of people enduring political and social conflict — a secret code perhaps, disguising malicious intent. On the other hand, Arabic writing is a historically recognized conveyor of poetry, music, philosophy, doctrine, and verse. The letters, always cursive, never Gothic, flow right-to-left in the opposite direction from that of the inquisitive West. An extremely orderly language in its Modern Standard or classical form, it is somewhat ironic that its speakers, obsessed with maintaining its complex written and pronounced nuances, has respected, encouraged, and subsidized free and creative graphical interpretations by its artists throughout centuries, and it continues today on a startling scale as demonstrated by poet-artist, eL seed. read more