Subversion. Featuring work by Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Khaled Hafez, Larissa Sansour, Marwa Arsanios, Sharif Waked, Sherif El-Azma, Tarzan and Arab, and Wafaa Bilal. Curated by Omar Kholeif. Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, UK. 14 April - 5 June 2012, preview/symposium 13 April 2012.
[Omar Kholeif is Curator of Subversion, a large-scale exhibition and public program, which runs until 5 June 2012 at Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. More about Omar Kholeif here; follow him on Twitter here.]
Anthony Alessandrini (AA): What was the idea behind this show, and what made you decide to curate it?
Omar Kholeif (OK): The spark for Subversion clicked in my head in 2009. I had just come back from a frustrating summer in Egypt trying to find some material in a number of different deteriorating film archives, and when I returned to the UK everyone was buzzing about a show in London that had lots of so-called Middle Eastern (and Arab) artists in it. It was a show entitled Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East at the Saatchi Gallery in London. This triggered all sorts of emotions within me and many of the artists with whom I was working, both from within and from outside of the Arab world. At that point I felt, and I still feel much the same way now, that Western institutions were still talking about artists from particular parts of the world using the same rhetoric that originated from post-colonial writers in the 1990s. In a sense, we had never moved beyond outdated modes of identity politics. Instead, I wanted to talk about what it means to be an individual in a post-internet, post social media human condition.
[Akram Zaatari, How I Love You (2001). Film still, single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist.]
I started having a series of open conversations with Sarah Perks, who is Cornerhouse’s Programme and Engagement Director. After these initial discussions, I went back to the works and artists whom I found were urgently compelling—in particular, the films of Larissa Sansour and Sharif Waked. One of the themes that resonated most strongly, and which continued to re-surface through subsequent discussions, was this notion that artists from and of the Arab world felt that they had to perform to a sense of national or regional identity that politicians, the news media, and the art world and its cultural brokers had cast upon them. This sense of a performed identity runs throughout the exhibition, and is indeed what influenced the title of the show. The name Subversion indeed is intended to be ironic or playful—a critique of the fact that media only tends to think or dialogue in oppositional binary terms, especially when speaking of particular ethnic or geographical spheres.
With Subversion, in many respects, my goal is to utilize some of the same tropes or structures as essentialist media and exhibition making institutions (that is, focusing on a particular region in the world through subjective eyes), but instead of linking people or works of art together on the basis of geographical, ethnic, or political terms, I decided instead to connect works based on conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic possibilities and questions.