New art from the Middle East: Shifting chronicle

摘要

Ask most American museum-goers, even avid ones, to name a prominent artist from the Arab world, and they will probably draw a blank. Now an ambitious show at the New Museum in the Bowery district of Manhattan aims to put that right. "Here and Elsewhere", which opened on July 16th, does not propose to define Arabic art as a unified whole or even try to pin down a regional aesthetic. Instead, it presents more than 45 artists working in a wide range of media, who chronicle or bear witness to political and social change in the Middle East in all its heated confusion and messiness. The exhibit borrows its title from a French film of the same name, "Ici et Ailleurs", made by Jean-Luc Godard and his partner, Anne-Marie Mieville, with Jean-Pierre Gorin, about the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The project ran into trouble during filming in 1970, when King Hussein ordered the raiding of PLO camps in Jordan. Many of those who had been filmed were killed. Uncertain at first about how to proceed, Mr Godard and Ms Mieville decided to recast the unfinished work, mixing what they had shot with file footage, voice-over narration and written commentary. The New Museum takes that multi-pronged approach as its cue.