Interview With Omar Kholeif, Curator Of The 2015 Armory Show’s “Focus: MENAM”

For its 2015 edition, the Armory Show, New York’s oldest and largest art fair, is featuring the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean (MENAM) in its Focus section in recognition of the artistic emergence that is sweeping the respective regions. Noah Horowitz, the fair’s director since 2013, has stated that art from the Middle East has become “too important to ignore.” The Armory, in conjunction with the London-based nonprofit art organization Edge of Arabia and the Saudi-based Art Jameel foundation, seeks to raise the profile of art from the MENAM region.

The entire fair will feature a total of 199 exhibitors, and in the Focus section, there will be 15 galleries showcasing art from the MENAM region. This year, the Focus section is being overseen by Egyptian-born Omar Kholeif, who is curator of Whitechapel Gallery in London. Most conspicuous in this section will be a huge, golden bust of Saddam Hussein, created by New York-based Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal. “The sculpture of Saddam shows the absurdity of despotic regimes in the larger context,” says Asmaa al-Shabibi, director of Dubai-based gallery Lawrie Shabibi, which is selling the work. In the near future, Bilal plans to launch the Saddam sculpture into the stratosphere, so that it can orbit the earth for eternity and thereby realize a lifelong dream once held by the late dictator. Also on show will be a new work by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum–an ellipse of black marbles on the floor–and new sculptures by Susan Hefuna, the grand dame of Egyptian contemporary art. There will also be a prominent featuring of painters from the MENAM region, including Saloua Raouda Choucair and Shafic Abboud from Lebanon, Iraqi-born London-based Dia al-Azzawi and Marwan Kassab-Bachi from Syria.

On the eve of the Armory Show’s opening, ArtAsiaPacific spoke with curator Omar Kholeif to discuss his thoughts behind the “Focus: MENAM."

Who is the audience for the “Focus: MENAM”?

The city of New York and the 65,000+ visitors who attend the Armory Show [each year]. “Focus: MENAM” was conceived with New York in mind—a city that is arguably a gateway to the free world and a place of numerous diasporas. The fair, [which is] on a pier and along the water, attracts a huge cross-section of the American public.

Can Middle Eastern artists who are no longer living in their countries of origin still be seen as being truly “Middle Eastern artists”

This year’s Focus section is anchored around the Mediterranean, as a geographic focus and starting point. It’s about formal, spatial, aesthetic and conceptual movements in art and its history. This is not a show about ethnicity or origin. I am not interested in this kind of framing and it is not something that defines the section’s focus.

What do you hope “Focus: MENAM” will achieve?

The context of this year’s Focus section seeks to propose a new departure point for art. Rather than considering entrenched boundaries of what constitutes the Middle Eastern arts ecology, I took the decision to anchor the program around the Mediterranean, suggesting a new artistic cartography that links the art of Southern Europe to Western Asia and North Africa. In this proposed cultural sphere, parallels that at first may have seemed abstract quickly become transparent: shared histories of migration, colonization, as well as social and political reform start to materialize. Trade routes, common languages and religious and communal traditions are made visible.

I think all of the artists in the Focus section, in some way, push and extend the boundaries of today’s art-making, whether that is through their subject matter or form of work. I think that viewers visiting the Armory are going to be very surprised and will hopefully find the experience edifying. This isn’t going to be a place for boring social documentary, but rather a site to witness artists who explore the history of abstraction, who stretch the limits of figurative painting, who consider both European and regional traditions of art, and who take politics and subvert it with quiet and delicate humor. My hope is that audiences will see the artists of the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean as being part of art’s broad, dense genealogy, as opposed to existing in isolation.

Why did you choose Jordanian artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan as the feature artist of this year’s Focus section?

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who is the Commissioned Armory Artist, is one of the most important young figures working in art today. His work addresses the politics of listening and seeks to question how governments and institutions use technology to present versions of the truth. The Freedom of Speech Itself (2012) and Conflicted Phenomes (2012) are two bodies of work that seek to visualize how accent tests have been used by state regimes and governments to define an individual’s asylum or refugee status. Abu Hamdan presents his research [of this issue] through graphics, sculpture and audio documentaries. In these visual explorations, he questions how subtle nuances in speech can completely set off state-controlled machinery [that are used to determine accents] in the wrong direction, hence questioning the entire structure by which governments and regimes instill complete faith in the power of technology. It’s an incredibly powerful and incisive critique of contemporary life. His new project for the Armory seeks to explore how surveillance is embedded in everyday objects. I hope it will boggle people’s minds. Abu Hamdan will be presenting The Freedom of Speech Itself in the booth of Istanbul’s Galeri Non.