ArteEast Quarterly: spring 2016
ArteEast is pleased to announce the release of the spring 2016 edition of ArteEast Quarterly, an online publication that offers readers a critical forum for contemporary artistic practices in the Middle East, North Africa and their diaspora. After a short hibernation period, ArteEast Quarterly launches with ArteEast’s new website that will feature the publication’s past issues starting from April 2016 along with ArteEast’s new artist residencies and other programs.
ArteZine: ”Nature is Our Body”
Guest edited by Nazlı Gürlek
With contributions by Nil Yalter, Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Carmen Bouyer & Ayça İnce, and Aslı Seven
”Nature is Our Body” explores a series of artistic and cultural practices from Turkey and the Middle East that critically engage with the Earth’s resilience and regenerative quality. Drawing from a range of historical and contemporary references, this ArteZine brings together four contributions that inquire about a common ground between nature and culture with the backdrop of climate change and a decaying landscape.
Revolving around the largely disregarded shamanic traditions of Anatolia, ”The Woman’s Tent: Plot for an Imaginary Exhibition” contemplates a fictitious presentation featuring two of artist Nil Yalter‘s historic works: an installation entitled Nomad’s Tent (Topak Ev/La Yourte): A Study of Private, Public, and Feminine Spaces (1973), and Shaman (1979), an early video that will be available online for the first time in the artist’s four-decade career. Intending to infiltrate hope in a drought-stricken piece of land, the show is set to be installed at a museum situated in a remote village, an ancient home of shamanism, in North-Eastern Turkey.
In ”And Yet My Mask is Powerful,” artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme contemplate the possibility of finding a new imaginary in the wreck, sampling visual and written materials including multi-layered photo-collages, poetry and text from ongoing research for their new, eponymously-titled project.
Artist and environmental designer Carmen Bouyer and sociologist Ayça İnce discuss their shared interests in indigenous cultures and farming in a conversation entitled ”Plant to Harvest Solidarity and Resilience.” Unpacking surprising parallels between the programming of an Istanbul-based urban farming initiative that İnce runs and Bouyer’s recent artistic production in İstanbul and İzmir, the dialogue flows between the domains of culture, agriculture and arts in search for potential strategies of self-sufficiency and sustainability.
Writer Aslı Seven concludes the issue with an essay entitled ”Reimagining Nature as Culture: Expanding the Boundaries of Making and Thinking of Art in the Anthropocene”. With debates from last year’s “How to think the Anthropocene?” conference in Paris in the background, Seven investigates contemporary art’s potential in understanding today’s complex ecological changes with a focus on two recent art works: Study for a Monument (2013–) by Abbas Akhavan and Who carries the water (2015) by İz Öztat & Fatma Belkıs.
Gallery: “Christian Palestinian Archive: A Project by Dor Guez”
Guest curated by Chelsea Haines
The spring Gallery of ArteEast Quarterly focuses on the Christian Palestinian Archive (CPA) that artist and historian Dor Guez initiated in 2009 when he discovered a suitcase with old photographs of important family events and portraits of relatives now living across the world. A selection from this archive, which has grown over the years with contributions of photography collections from around the world, will be on view at the artist’s upcoming solo project, also curated by Chelsea Haines, opening at The James Gallery, New York in April 2016. In anticipation of the newest edition of the project, this Gallery features images, some of which will be online for the first time, offering a glimpse into Guez’s multi-layered scanogram process through which the artist manipulates previously existing visual materials to reveal the incomplete nature of history and history writing.
For this issue of ArteEast Quarterly, click here
For more information about the publication contact L. İpek Ulusoy Akgül, Managing Editor, ArteEast Quarterly. Sign-up to receive the ArteEast Quarterly in your mailbox for free!