Anthony Downey

Michael Rakowitz

I'm Good at Love, I'm Good at Hate, It's in Between I Freeze

Yinka Shonibare

Rachel Kent

Robert Carleton Hobbs

Shonibare employs a wide range of media????????????????????????sculpture, painting, photography, video, and installation pieces????????????????????????to explore matters of race, class, cultural identity, and history. The artist is best-known for his use of a Dutch-wax fabric, which, though labeled as "African," actually originated in Dutch Indonesia and was introduced to Africa by British manufacturers via Dutch colonizers in the nineteenth century. Incorporating the fabric into Victorian dresses, covering sculptures of alien figures with it or stretching it onto canvases, Shonibare uses the fabric as a metaphor to address issues of origin and authenticity. Published as a companion to Shonibare's first retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, this survey explores all aspects of Shonibare's work, offering a fully comprehensive portrait of his projects. Whether he is lampooning Victorian propriety or commenting on the latent ambiguities of the term "alien," Shonibare makes art that challenges straightforward interpretations. Essays by Rachel Kent and Robert Hobbs, together with a generous selection of color illustrations explore this talented young artist's work.

Yinka Shonibare MBE

Documenting the development of a multidimensional and ongoing work. Heba Y. Amin's The General's Stork explores historical accounts of biblical prophecies, colonial narratives, and the politics of technological warfare from a bird's eye view. Focusing on how military technologies were developed in the specific context of Middle Eastern geographies, Amin explores the extensive research that went into the development of a multidimensional and ongoing work. She also gives further background as to how, in 2013, the Egyptian authorities sought to detain a migratory stork that it accused of being an international spy.

The General's Stork

Heba Y. Amin

The 'archive' is often viewed as a collection of historical documents that records and orders information about people, places and events. This view nevertheless obscures a crucial point: the archive, whilst subject to the vagaries of time and history, can also determine the future. This point has gained urgency in modern-day North Africa and the Middle East where the archive has come to the fore as a site of social, historical, theoretical, and political contestation. Dissonant Archives is the first book to consider the ways in which contemporary artists from the Middle East and North Africa - including Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Jananne Al Ani, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mariam Ghani, Zineb Sedira, and Akram Zaatari - are utilizing and disrupting the function of the archive and, in so doing, highlighting a systemic, perhaps irrevocable, crisis in institutional and state-ordained archiving across the region. In exploring and producing archives, be they alternative, interrogative or fictional, these artists are not simply questioning the authenticity, authority or authorship of the archive; rather, they are unlocking its regenerative, radical potential.The result provides essential insights into the nexus between art and politics in the contemporary Middle East.

Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

Dissonant Archives

In this groundbreaking book, a range of internationally renowned and emerging academics, writers, artists, curators, activists and filmmakers critically reflect on the ways in which visual culture has appropriated and developed new media across North Africa and the Middle East. Examining the opportunities presented by the real-time generation of new, relatively unregulated content online, Uncommon Grounds evaluates the prominent role that new media has come to play in artistic practices - and social movements - in the Arab world today. Analysing alternative forms of creating, broadcasting, publishing, distributing and consuming digital images, this book also enquires into a broader global concern: does new media offer a 'democratisation' of - and a productive engagement with - visual culture, or merely capitalise upon the effect of immediacy at the expense of depth?Featuring full-colour artists' inserts, this is the first book to extensively explore the degree to which the grassroots popularity of Twitter and Facebook has been co-opted into mainstream media, institutional and curatorial characterisations of 'revolution' - and whether artists should be wary of perpetuating the rhetoric and spectacle surrounding political events. In the process, Uncommon Grounds reveals how contemporary art practices actively negotiate present-day notions of community-based activism, artistic agency and political engagement.

Anthony Downey

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