October 3–November 19, 2025
In Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s video Ismyrna (2016), Hadjithomas speaks with Etel Adnan about the 1922 fire that engulfed İzmir (then Smyrna) on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey. In the course of their friendship, they had discovered that both their families had been in the city that fateful night. Hadjithomas’s Greek grandfather had escaped by boat, while Adnan’s parents—her Greek mother and Syrian father, an officer in the Ottoman army—left a few years later for Beirut, following the same route.
The construction of national identity is the leitmotif of “Made With Your Magic,” an ambitious, multi-country curatorial project launched last October by Tarek Abou El Fetouh. The Egyptian-born curator grounds his thesis in the maqam, a modal system of music that makes use of the quarter notes in between the eight notes of the tonal scale. The maqam is the basis for nearly all of what was once known as Oriental music, though it is less the sound than the styling that matters here. In 1932, at one of the earliest events of pan-Arabism, musicologists at the Cairo Congress re-classed the maqam as “Arab”—codifying its major forms and blithely overlooking the fact that the maqam draws from both Arab and non-Arab ethnic groups, such as the maqam Kurd or the maqam Nahawand, from the city in Iran.
These and other communities are the repressed unconscious of the planned six iterations of this project, which picks apart the idea of nation-states predicated upon ethnic lines. In its first “movement” in Tunis (the second follows in 2026), Philip Rizk, an Egyptian artist, showed Land Listening (2025), a film about the flooding of Nubian villages as part of Egypt’s nation-building Aswan Dam exercise. In a poignant contrast, Alia Farid’s Chibayish (2022) follows boys from the tribes of southern Iraq’s marshlands, which were drained by Saddam Hussein in a move for state control. The Saudi artist Ayman Zedani, in To the Water Hunters (2025), came across songs that rural people in both Saudi Arabia and Tunisia use to divine water, playing these in speakers encased in clay forms with jack-o’-lantern-like faces: spirits, wailing for water, that call to mind the animism that endures alongside dominant religions. And in the songful video Memory of the Salt (2025), projected grave-like in a low box on the floor, the Palestinian artist Noor Abuarafeh underlines the link between salt and starvation, as salt has helped preserve food in times of scarcity—from Palestine’s severe famine in the late Ottoman period to Gaza in the present day. Some of these works will travel to the project’s subsequent editions, in Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, Jeddah, and Tunis again, with new works and programming added for each city.
The Ottoman Empire, signaled from the start, emerged as a key historical thread through the Tunis exhibition’s works. In the first venue, the Dubai-based artist Alla Abdunabi constructed a Barbary lion—once a symbol for empire, now extinct—out of salt, which disintegrated on the floor (I endured for you, 2025). Abou El Fetouh’s decision to give the Ottoman Empire such prominence tracks the sultanate’s growing purchase among artists and thinkers in the Arab region, among whom it is seen as a significant historical lacuna. Its relative lack of study is due in part because its records were kept in Arabic-lettered Turkish, sequestering the primary material from academia’s predominantly French-, English-, and Arabic-speaking researchers. It is here worth noting that, in Turkey, rising interest in the Ottoman Empire also serves Erdoğan’s nationalist purposes.
A corollary of the interest in the Ottoman Empire is an emphasis on the multi-ethnic make-up of what is now contentiously known as the Middle East, and specifically an understanding of how the region’s co-existing identities were impacted by the founding of Israel. Within the exhibition, works including Jumana Manna’s video A Magical Substance Flows into Me (2016), which takes as its starting point the work of a Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s, bring this to the fore. As the state drew in Jewish communities who had lived across the Middle East for centuries, Israel weakened Mizrahi Israelis’ identity as Jewish Arabs and split the wider region into Jews in Israel and Muslim Arabs elsewhere. This bifurcation sidelined other communities such as the Druze, Yazidi, Chaldeans, Kurds, and Assyrians who had protective status under the Ottoman Empire. Everyone lost in the new, culturally impoverished states—including those in the majority.
By showing how the maqams are part of the region’s internal antagonism, “Made With Your Magic” incorporates the role of local politics as well as colonial powers. The project of decolonization often looks to the indigenous and dispossessed—often sloppily equated to the Global South—whose culture is seen as more “authentic” than that of local, colonial, or hegemonic elites. That mode of enquiry exists here, as in a work about the nomadic Mrazig by the artist Sonia Kallel, who learned their weaving techniques over months and made a sweeping textile piece (The Grounding Point, 2025) beautifully installed in the nave of an old church. But Abou El Fetouh also keeps alive the complexities that class and Arab states’ own policies, such as pan-Arabism, bring to bear on national belonging. Although, in the current moment, the idea of a state predicated upon ethnic nationalism clearly calls to mind Israel, “Made With Your Magic” takes a step back to consider all nationalisms as problematic ideologies that impose false unity on a diverse reality.
There aren’t any winners in this story and the keynote of the exhibition was often one of shocked loss. In one of its emblematic moments, Jalal Toufic gave a lecture about what the Turkish language surrendered when it was romanized under Atatürk’s nationalizing project. According to Toufic, in 1931, 51 percent of the Turkish language was comprised of Arabic words; that dropped to 26 percent by 1956, creeping towards a homo-ethnic language and, as Toufic puts it, to yet another a repressed unconscious: we don’t even know what was lost. As “Made with Your Magic” begins its journey across the Arab region, what is missing—the ethnic communities that first produced some of the maqams, lost to migration and war; their centuries-old peaceful co-existence with each other; and even the cultural infrastructure that can support Abou El Fetouh’s project in the present—will be as important as what remains.
