EXHIBIT 02 - DISORIENTATION II

Disorientation II * looks at the era of Egyptian President Jamal Abdel-Nasser as a moment of rupture when the repercussions of the failure of his pan-Arab unity plan and the ensuing Arab nationalism fractured fragile structures meant to stand up and endure in the face of outside hegemony then, and in its wake shattered in a succession of breakdowns, wars, displacement, and miseries.

Disorientation II counterpoints a utopian era with the reality of today. The fragile watercolour renderings and nostalgic photographs, images and settings from the sixties and seventies, seen as one is ushered into the exhibition, are juxtaposed against an imposing body of sculptures, monumental photographs and installations, somber videos and performances that follow, and project a certain disdain for the helpless, unforgiving situation of loss and conflict experienced in the Arab world today.

This text does not try to explicate the various artworks and projects that the artists have contributed towards Disorientation II, and in no way does it attempt to untangle the complex and knotted history that brackets this exhibition. It is simplya series of syncopated thoughts that try to negotiate a path through the labyrinth of the artists’ thought provoking and intricate series of articulations and representations that comprise the show.

The exhibition opens with a flashback in time with Hala Elkousy’s work On red nails, palm trees and other icons; an intimate room full of hundreds of images, video screens, side lamps and chairs, all reminiscent of a time some half-a-century ago, when visual representations reflecteda certain utopia, similar to JamalAbdel Nasser’s Pan-Arab unity vision. One cannot stop the feeling of nostalgia for those days, for an era when hope of salvation from occupation and western hegemony was still possible. Art of the era and most other forms of visual representation showed and expressed optimismfor the possibilities of freedom: liberated societies, equality and justice for workers and farmers, and democratic rule. We see inone of the newspaper clippings hanging in Hala Elkousy’s room the legendary Che Guevara posing for a picture with farmers. Elkousy tells that during that period the likes of Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would visit the villagers and farmers in Egypt, not only the city of Cairo as is the case today.

As we leave this room, Ali Jabri’s sketchbooks, drawings and renderings [from the earlyseventies] paint an outsider’s perspective of Cairo; Elkousy’s hometown. Yet he still captured the moment when Egypt in general, and Cairo in particular, was at the center of the Arab consciousness, embodying the values of unity, selflessness and revolution. Jabri, like an anthropologist, archeologist, architect and sociologist, all in one, uncovers the intricate details and subtleties that made that place and that period in time so special. The popular saying goes “the devil is in the details” but Jabri’s work tends to chime more with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “God is in the details”. Yet a shift took place in Jabri’s collages from the eighties. Driven by a series of disappointments, saddened by the wars in the eighties and let down by the duplicity of politicians and leaders, Jabri’s collages from this period depict the hypocrisy, disjointed lives, abundantlies and anguish of the time.

Closure for the period comes with Wael Shawky’s Telematch Sadat. The title and staging of the work reference the world-famous German television competition “Telematch” broadcast in the seventies and eighties where teams from different German towns played games in costume. For Telematch Sadat Shawky asked children of a village to reenact the Anwar Al Sadat assassination of 1981, which symbolically marked the end of the period that defined Egypt as a leading force in the Arab world and ushering in fragmentation and disillusionment that became the currency of the day. Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab world’s political arena commenced in 1978 when Anwar Al Sadat signed the Camp David Peace Accords with Israel. Egypt was suspended from the League of Arab States whose headquarters were moved to Tunis.Yet more importantly this period was to define a decade of bloodshed, wars, losses, displacement and instability. The Iran-Iraq war cameat a great cost in lives and economic damage to be followed by the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi army in 1990. The civil war in Lebanon, interjected by the Israeli invasion, destroyed the entire country, wasted many lives and resulted in the expulsion of the PLO to Tunis, thus crippling its influence and operations, and definitely leaving the Palestinian people living under the Israeli occupation feeling stranded and in a state of bitter defeat. The Sabra and Shatilla massacre come to top everything, as the final nail in the coffin. The death of Algerian President Houari Boumédienne in December 1978 signified, in one way or another, the opening of a Pandora’s box, the ramifications of which would spill a lot of Algerian blood and destabilize the country for more than two decades. The way the Syrian regime dealt with the Muslim Brotherhood’s armed insurgency (1976 - 1982) in Hama put a definite end to any challenger to the Baath party rule there. Jordan witnessed the most severe protests and social upheavals in its history during the 1980s, and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen sustained some 60,000 casualties in the violent clashes of 1986. Sudan witnessed two coup d’états and the escalation of the civil war between the south and the north. And these are only a partial account of what happened in the eighties. The nineties witnessed still other horrific stories, catastrophes and fiascos but no less than those of the last decade. Hopelessness, helplessness and a very bleak prospect, if any, for a better future leaves many people in the Arab world desperate and angry, resentful and, if not bitter, deeply cynical at the very least.

There are several references to monuments in this exhibition and each one is saturated in its own way with the prevalent sense of disdain, conflict and division. Beirut Caoutchouc by Marwan Rechmaoui is fraught with these divisions, and the societal fragmentation of Lebanon. A map made of thick, flattened rubber is etched to divide it into 60 pieces, not simply to delineate different neighborhoods of Beirut, but to delve deeper into the history of the sociopolitical, and economic causes of the movement, settlement, and division of this complex urban cartography.Rechmaoui investigates architecture and cartography to try to make sense of demography and society, working like an anthropologist, to reveal strata after strata of the city’s pseudo-unity. Rechmaoui’s second work in the exhibition, A Monument for the living is a three-dimensional human-size scaled replica of Burj Al Murr, a skyscraper at the edge of Beirut that was left unfinished dueto structural weaknesses, and used by various militia factions during the civil war in Lebanon as a sniper’s nest, a prison and a place to hold hostages. The building, a landmark in the city in a strategic position, was left unused and dilapidated after the war, with its tower too tall to knock down and too dense to implode. Thus it became an indestructible monument of a civil war that has never been resolved or reconciled, living on as a hulking memorial in the city’s horizon. The monument becomes a monument not for the dead of the civil war, but for those who survived, and in recreating it Rechmaoui speaks to the different power manifestations a monument can allude to, or inhabit.

Beirut is almost a miniature model of Arab countries where different classes, ethnicities, and religions seem to collide in their attempts to reconcile, where migrants and refugees - Armenians, Palestinians, Iraqis and others - are in constant flux, and where corruption and power struggles are at play. Yet it is very important here to halt the flow of the exhibition, to interrupt this evolving quasi-narrative of the contemporary history of the Arab world. One pauses as if to observe the minute of silence demanded from an audience in honour and memory of the dead and the martyred in any other public event. In Disorientation II we are silent in memory of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. There is no need to explain the background and tell the story of the massacre in this text, but it is very important to mark this event which so poignantly encompasses the plight and calamities of refugees and migrants, while also marking a pinnacle of achievement for the juntas in their struggle for power. Monika Borgmann’s film Massaker allows us this possibility, for thefirst time, through the confessions of the perpetrators. Six people who took part in the massacre of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps’ Palestinian inhabitants, “both on orders and on their own personal initiative” as we learn in the film, narrate the particularsof their heinous acts. They also reveal details of the relationship between the Lebanese Forces Christian militia who perpetrated the massacre - the six protagonists of Borgmann’s film were members- and the Israeli army which was in control of Beirut in September, 1982, and which surrounded the camps and provided protected entry for the Lebanese Forces Christian militia to carry out the genocide.

Beirut is not the only site of conflict though. We learn from Hriar Sarkissian’s ExecutionSquares that other places that might at first glance seem tranquil and serene are fraught with power struggles and extremes. Sarkissian’s photographs depict a number of urban squares in three Syrian cities, Aleppo, Latakia, and Damascus, where public executions of civil criminals take place. These landscapes in the early morning give a sense of foreboding, and in contrast to the busy clamor of the day, the squares are empty and tense. The untraceable ending of lives in those squares comes as a counterpoint to Rechmaoui’s Monument for the living. HereSarkissian attempts to represent those whose lives have been taken, using the monumental photographic format of emptiness. We know that the squares and streets will soon be filled with life; yet there is a certain eeriness to the photographs in places which at this early hour instead of portraying the dawning of a new day ironically represent the ending of life. Along comparable lines, Rochers Carrés, the photographic series by Kader Attia, investigates the human interaction with an architecture fraught with a history of colonialism, a present cursed with poverty, and dreams of a future that may never be fulfilled. Rochers Carrés is a breakwater beach constructed by the administration of Algerian President Houari Boumediene, of huge concrete blocks whose sides can be as high as 3 or 4 meters. Attia explores the meaning of boundary, the space that separates the young people who sit staring at the sea from the prospect of a better life in the continent beyond the vast sea. It is ironic, Attia writes, that the young Algerians’ exasperation atRochers Carrés is not so different from that in the French banlieues where most emigrants from Algiers end up living, with “the same lack of hope in the future, same sexual misery, same frustration, same lack of social acknowledgement, same feeling of failure and same suffering.”

Boundaries, borders and delineated territories are an important part of the construct of Disorientation II. As is the case with Marwan Rechmaoui’s Beirut Caoutchouc - a map trampled with factional divisions and social fragmentation - Mona Hatoum’s Present Tense speaks of the map awarded to the Palestinians as part of the interim agreement in Oslo. A simple look at Present Tense says it all. Drawn on olive oil soap, a perishable material, it alludes to the fact that as a foundation for the map it is destined to dissolve. And it may also allude to Pilate’s washing his hands with the soap, as if declaring, “I have nothing to do with this arrangement or agreement. I wash my hands of it.” What seems at first to be a strange disease that disfigured the surface of the soap is actually tiny red glassbeads outlining the areas that were handed over to the Palestinians to control. These red circles form the Palestinian Authority territories on the ground, and they come across with a single glance at the map as totally disconnected, forming a noncontiguous group of scattered islands in a vast sea of land occupied by Israel. The soap should have had some scent to it, reminiscent of childhood and home when the odor of olive oil, the foundation for the only soap available then, brings to mind a feeling of warmth and belonging. But one soon notices that time and age have taken their toll and now the scent is only a memory fading by the day along with hope.

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri take us to investigate the Palestinian territories. For their project What everybody knows, they travel across the country talking and video-recording conversations with a good number of people over a 16-day period. The people they meet are from many backgrounds - a professor, a former detainee, a geographer, a Bedouin, an architect... The outcome is presented as 16 one-day trips or journeys which together outline a map “about the social, psychological, and political dimensions of contemporary life for Palestinians in occupiedPalestine.”

Zooming in on one particular location in Palestine, Wafa Hourani recreates a model of Qalandia refugee camp from cut-out photographs and cardboard boxes. Qalandia, situated north ofJerusalem, gained infamy from one of the main checkpoints situated at its entrance connecting Ramallah and its vicinity to the east and south of the country. Yet Hourani’s Qalandia 2047 brings with it a twist. His model attempts to representthe Qalandia refugee camp in 2047, one hundred years after its original inhabitants were expelled from their homes following the 1948 war, to find on this spot of land a temporary refuge, hastily setup at that time by the UNRWA, which tragically appears now more like a permanent arrangement. Hourani’s satirical solution to the claustrophobic situation in the camp is to devise mirrors on the separation wall that towers over the camp and suffocates its residents, thus giving the illusion of an uninterrupted skyline and an infinite open space. In the context of Disorientation II, this work can be seen as a monument to the steadfastness of all those living in refugee camps who are determined not to leave their arduous living conditions for a temporary, comfortable life outside the camp; instead, they stand by their resolve to go only to the homes they were driven from in 1948.

Tarek Al Ghoussein picks up on the ramifications of the events in 1948 and addresses some of the UN resolutions pertaining to the Palestinian cause in his most recent work (D II series). In contrast to Hourani’s attempts to address issues pertaining to refugees and displacement, Al Ghoussein inserts himself in the work as a son of diaspora Palestinians who is not permitted by the Israelis to enter Palestine. In this way he creates a certain tension between the still, desolate landscape, the sun-weathered inanimate objects, and his intervention, which together with the industrial-looking green fabric he brings along represent a disquieting interference. A level of dislocation ensues from his presence and his actions, and yet in aggregate it doesn’t alter much in the vast, uncompromising landscape. It is only a matter of time before a sand dune will swallow hatever trace he leaves behind. One wishes to see it otherwise -but the sign that he holds with the number 181 is just a trace of one of many UN Resolutions pertaining to the Palestinian cause, which seem now to be weathering away. Soon they will be swallowed up in the heap of many other unfulfilled UN Resolutions, drifting, formless, flattened and scattered by the strong winds of a dictated, compromised and forced solution that will fall from above.

It is leaders and officials who come up with these parachutedin solutions and resolutions that impose certain realities on people and concoct illusions. Grigori Potemkin, a minister during the reign of Russian Empress Catherine the Great, concocted a brilliant illusion in 1787 when Catherine the Great visited Crimea, which had been annexed by Russia four years earlier. In order to show her that these lands, part of a peninsula in present day Ukraine stretching south into the Black Sea, were worth something, he erected a series of fake, prosperous settlements along the Dnieper River which were really nothing more than facades of buildings and strategically-placed fires that could be seen during the night when the Empress would be less likely to spot the fakes.

Yto Barrada’s Gran Royal Turismo partakes in a somewhat similar deception when a convoy of three black Mercedes cars, obviously carrying officials, passes through a little treeless town with dirt-ridden sidewalks and walls. Palm trees suddenly pop up and the sidewalks and walls flip to reveal fresh paint and clean surfaces draped with flags. When the convoy leaves town, the trees, flags and fresh paint disappear and the town is back to its sad and dirty old appearance. The beauty of Barrada’s Gran Royal Turismo is that it’s constructed as a circular racing track, creating an infinite hollow notion of repetition without any possibility for real change, thus alluding to tactics that some countries and authorities use when the country’s own leader, the one and only person with the power to effect change, visits a poor area or a rundown part of town. Instant cleanup disguises dismal living conditions, and then to the great disappointment of the residents, all the dress-up weathers and disappears soon after the official is gone. There are times and places when authorities actually remove palm trees they planted in order to save them in fresh condition for the next visit.

The element of circular movement and the notion of hollow infinite repetition in Barrada’s Gran Royal Turismo makes a subtle connection with Diana Al Hadid’s work, which echoes a rotary movement with a spiral in a dilapidated Babel-like sculpture. Her Portal to a Black Hole consists of a spiral staircase made of organ keys positioned in the center of the sculpture leading to the oculus of the dome. The oculus in the Pantheon was the only source of light other than the door and represented a central sun within a concrete sky. It was originally a temple to all gods, but it was converted into a church. It is generally credited to Apollodorus of Damascus, a Greek architect, born in Damascus, Syria. Al Hadid’s sculpture is conceived as a pseudotemple, or an “architectural black hole” that emits the sounds of B Flat, which cannot be heard by the human ear. Al Hadid states “My structure, while culling from the architecture of Greek temples and Gothic Cathedrals, purports to form a line, not to God, but to another undiscovered, impossibleto reach location - a black hole, a hypothetical place completely cut off from our world and our history. The ruined structure appears to have been operational one day, but is now silent and dysfunctional.” The spiral black hole in which Al Hadid depicts this church is perhaps ominous as to the unpromising future ahead, and a commentary on a nihilistic view of history.

Where are the Arabs? asks Samah Hijawi in a performance, taking us back full circle to Jamal Abdel-Nasser’s era, to the beginning of the exhibition, to that utopian and glorious moment when Arab nationalism and unity was still a possible dream. However, repetition is imbedded in her oratory, identified in the recurrence of certain ideas throughout the length of the speech, and even though in the Arabic language and culture repetition is normally used to emphasize conviction, in her case it can only allude to emptiness, boredom and futility of the performance of certain political figures, as is also manifest in the circular movement of Barrada’s piece and Al Hadid’s dilapidated spiral staircase that leads to a black hole.

And history repeats itself. Tarek Atoui Undrum II: the Chinese Connection ends with the lowest point humanly audible in the musical scale, creating a challenging connection between the practices of several popular political movements in the Arab world and the trials of opera, music and art masters who were adjudicated and condemned by the youth of the Chinese communist party during the Maoist revolution. His physically challenging sound performance mirrors his personal struggle with the flux of unsettling political, social and cultural changes, as rough, dense and distorted electronic sound textures collide with the sounds of trials and Maoist propaganda. We can stretch our imagination to place Hijawi’s speech performance next to Atoui’s sound performance in a twisted, complimentary way, as if one leads up to the other and possibly feeds from the other.

Disorientation II follows a circular path, emphasizing the notion of repetition of familiar shortcomings, the squandered opportunities and violent power struggles that lead to wasted lives, bitter societies and the betrayal of human values. If only Ibn Khladoun’s theory on the movement of history as exemplified in the life of a city, would hold in the 21st century, for us to witness the inevitable defeat of rampant corruption, injustices and discrimination and the reappearanceof people with higher morals, ethics and values.

* This second edition comes as a continuation of Disorientation – contemporary Arab artists fromthe Middle East, which was held at the House ofWorld Cultures in Berlin in 2003.

Disorientation II: The Rise & Fall of Arab Cities

NOW RE-OPEN AFTER MAINTENANCE

22 November 2009 - 20 February 2010

4pm-10pm, Sunday to Thursday, 2pm-10pm, Friday to Saturday

Jack Persekian, Artistic Director of the Sharjah Biennial, will curate Disorientation II, an exhibition of works presented by artists from Middle Eastern countries, which explore Arab cities from the perspective where both unity and division co-exist. The exhibition also looks at Jamal Abdel-Nasser’s period as a moment of rupture, when the repercussions of the failure of his pan-Arab unity plan and Arab nationalism had fractured the then fragile structures.

Participating artists: Tarek Al Ghoussein, Diana Al Hadid, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Tarek Atoui, Kader Attia, Yto Barrada, Monika Borgmann, Hala Elkoussy, Mona Hatoum, Samah Hijawi, Wafa Hourani, Ali Jabri, Marwan Rechmaoui, Hrair Sarkissian, Wael Shawky

This exhibition is in Manarat Al Saadiyat, a new cultural venue located on Saadiyat Island, home of the Cultural District.

From Abu Dhabi take the Corniche Road towards Meena, then follow signs to Yas Island, take Sheikh Khalifa Bridge onto Saadiyat and follow the signs.

From Dubai take the exit sign to Yas Island from the highway, follow the road straight through to Yas Island and onto Saadiyat where you will see signs to Manarat Al Saadiyat.

For more information please call 02 6908207.

ARTS ABU DHABI