Nuha Asad: Faces with One Feature

Contemporary Art from the Islamic world
from Universes in Universe - World of Art

Nuha Asad: Faces with One Feature
By Mahita El Bacha Urieta

"At the 7th Sharjah Biennial in 2005, marking the second time she ever participated in an exhibition, Nuha Asad showed a continuation of Faces with One Feature, a project initiated the previous year.

It includes photographs of heads wrapped in undulating, red satin cloth, and craned back as though trying to see the sky in spite of their faces being veiled. In other photographs are groups of people with veiled torsos. The visible parts of their bodies (clothing, hands, footwear) hint at what kind of people are hidden under the cloth: local couples and everyday workers, usually recognized as immigrant workers that came to the Emirates from poor countries.
I n reference to this, Nuha Asad says: "Essentially the people are equal, although they might differ regarding their origins, culture, economic situation, or social status. My work is about the humanity in us all, even though I don't aspire to erase the differences between us. Difference is a basic attribute of nature, and something that I accept while focussing on the thin line which separates our common humanity from our cultural and social differences." ...
Mahita El Bacha Urieta is a London based curator and arts/culture projects producer. Recent work includes coordinating the Sharjah Biennial 7, 2005."

"We knew how to deal with the secret agencies"

BAGHDAD, 25 Sep 2003 (IRIN) - "After years of being shunned by the regime of former president Saddam Hussein, Hassin Bresen's songs are popular once again – they are played on the radio and sung by children on the streets of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

“I was shunned because I was the only singer in Iraq who didn’t sing the songs praising Saddam as a hero,” Bresen told IRIN, as he remembered how he was treated. “Uday (Saddam Hussein’s son) controlled the TV station, and he pushed me aside. I was not allowed there.”

These days, the professional singer is just one of the many artists gathering at Hewar Art Gallery in Baghdad to discuss how things are going in Iraq. Painters, poets, sculptors, novelists and playwrights gather in chairs in the garden to talk.

In the restaurant next door, a famous barbecued fish dish is the special on the menu and crowds gather to sample it and Bresen’s latest song, which tells the story of what happened to Iraqi people over the past few months after former president Saddam Hussein's regime fell. Iraqi residents are not “Ali Baba” (thieves), Bresen sings.

"The people just want to correct the wrongs of 35 years under the dictator when they take things from government offices to their homes. Iraqis should be proud of their heritage," he sings.

Bresen wasn’t the only one persecuted for his work under the regime. Almost all of the paintings at Hewar Art Gallery are colorful, abstract pieces. Sculptures are abstract bronzes - mostly of human forms. The realistic paintings are stylised settings of families relaxing, or still life paintings.

Painters did mostly abstract work so that the government wouldn’t be able to criticize them, says Maher al Samarrai, a painter who worked and taught in the United States for many years to escape from the oppressive Iraqi government. He said he felt he had to leave the country after showing a painting of a fish with a chain in its mouth. Government officials questioned him strongly, but didn't jail him.

“When they asked, I said, ‘it’s general, it’s not about the government.' I said there are places all over the world where people cannot breathe,” Al Samarrai told IRIN. “We knew how to deal with the secret agencies. We talked about different subjects, but covered the idea.”

Gallery owner Qasim Alsabti, who creates plastic art, says artists who exhibited at his gallery tried to stay out of politics. But paintings and sculptures still caught the attention of the minister of information, who told the artists they had to paint in a realist style. One artist was jailed for a year after speaking against the government, but the others continued in whatever style they chose, Alsabti said, adding that his plastic sculpture was not political.

“We had a lot of problems with the government, but we established ourselves and sold many paintings," Alsabti told IRIN. “We decided to do just pure art.”

But Thikra Mohammed Nader was so afraid that police would take her or her family members prisoner, she published her novel “Before the End of the Century” in Egypt in 2000, rather than in Iraq. Even then, she said, she was constantly looking over her shoulder. “I wanted to tell people outside what we were experiencing, before Saddam Hussein and during his reign,” she told IRIN. “But I was very scared about my family.”

Alsabti started the gallery in 1992 in honour of soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war. He has mounted more than 100 exhibitions in the last 10 years. The government let the gallery stay open, mainly because it was fashionable for many of the people with money in Iraq to collect art, Alsabti says. In recent years, however, many of those families fled the country, leaving the artists without much means of support.

The gallery owner said he looked down on people willing to serve Saddam’s “propaganda centre” as he calls it - referring to those willing to work on Saddam paintings and statues for money.

But for Abdul Jabar, who was chosen in a competition to create a public art project to commemorate children killed during the Iran-Iraq war when a rocket fell on an elementary school, there were also some good things that came out of government recognition. After doing a monument to the children, for example, Jabar was commissioned to do a piece in Italy.

In the aftermath of the war this spring, much of Jabar’s monument has been destroyed - he believes by looters looking to sell some of the bronze as scrap. “They can’t take it all away, so it’s damaged,” he told IRIN. “I’m afraid they will destroy it. Nobody has given me help to protect it, neither American soldiers nor Iraqi police."

Steven Vincent - Observer - Art Crtic, Journalist, Writer, Blogger. True to him self.

His beautiful Blog - In The Red Zone

Remembering Steven Vincent By Jacob Laksin
Excerpts-

"It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one." So wrote Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran, her heartrending memoir of life in Islamist Iran. Unyieldingly modest, Steven Vincent would have questioned the pertinence of that insight to his own circumstances. Yet it aptly captures the legacy of the indomitable journalist who was brutally murdered in southern Iraq this week."...

"Most stirring of all, perhaps, was Vincent's eye for the little things -- the unremarked though by no means unremarkable snapshots of civilian life in free Iraq. An art critic in his former life, Vincent had a painterly knack for detail. Savor this image, from a report he filed during a January 2004 visit to Baghdad:

Once a rare delicacy -- Saddam prohibited many imported foodstuffs -- the fruits have flooded the country since liberation and the Iraqis can't get enough of them. Yesterday, while we were stuck in a traffic jam, my cabbie purchased two from a vendor walking between the immobilized cars. "Once bananas were just a dream," he laughed, handing me one. "Now, praise God, we can buy them on the street!"...

"Vincent harbored no illusions about the speed of democratic progress. "The transition from slave to citizen usually takes generations," he cautioned. But neither did he doubt that with the right mix of ingredients -- the courage of American troops, the determination of Iraqi democrats and reformers, and the steadfastness and good faith of the American people -- a free and placid Iraq was well within the realm of possibility. "We didn't start this fight, but by the grace of God, the power of the U.S. Constitution and the strength of the American people, we will finish it," he once remarked. Steven Vincent lived and died for that noble cause."

Steve Mumford - New York Artist - Observations in Iraq.

Baghdad Journal by Steve Mumford

Paper Tiger
The war has been very good to Steve Mumford.
by Jerry Saltz for the The Village Voice - Art
September 9th, 2005.

"And Steve Mumford has been very good to humanity through his art."
DC

Stephen Mumford has been showing in New York since the mid 1990s. Until recently he specialized in highly colored, semi-sensationalist, quasi-apocalyptic depictions of underwater nudes, submerged cars, and the like. Often these canvases resembled adventure posters or paintings you see on the sides of vans. They were jazzy and weird, but little else.

Around 2003 something changed. Up until two years ago, he was collaging images and depicting what he imagined, but he wasn't painting what he saw. This must have concerned Mumford because that year, during the Bush administration's relentless ramp-up to war, Mumford decided he wanted to go to Iraq to become what he calls "a war artist." After he tried unsuccessfully to obtain press credentials from several sources, the online magazine Artnet gave him the paperwork he needed and soon he was in Iraq.

There, Mumford was immediately embedded with the army's Third Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. He was with the troops in Basra, Baghdad, Tikrit, and Kirkuk. By his own account he was scared, thrilled, and bored. He was also incredibly productive. Equipped with a camera, brushes, and other tools, over 11 months and four visits he made hundreds of ink drawings and watercolors. Scores have been posted on Artnet as the visual component of his Baghdad Journal, his hardscrabble, to my ear monotonous and jargon-filled but undeniably thorough, 16-part, 75,000-word record of his and the troops' actions.

Not to be glib or impugn his motives, but the war has been very good to Steve Mumford. His Iraq work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the U.S. and is on display until September 26 as part of P.S.1's "Greater New York" show. Last December, The New York Times ran a splashy feature on him. He was named "Person of the Week" by ABC News and interviewed by no less than the late Peter Jennings, who deemed him "part of a great wartime tradition."

Mumford did become a better, more observant draftsman in Iraq. He learned to work fast and in tight spaces. Nevertheless, however much his work is compared to Winslow Homer, Otto Dix, and Kathe Kollwitz, his Iraq work comes off as little more than courtroom drawing or generic illustration. Really, it's not that different from news photos you see of soldiers relaxing, Humvees smoldering, or locals milling about. He almost could have done them from home. There's little of what Susan Sontag, referring to photojournalism's relationship to war, called "the photography of conscience." There's no Goya, nothing wrenching or ravishing. Mumford obviously cares about the troops, but his drawings have an academic, bleached-out detachment. The work is attentive but not insightful, detailed but not affecting. You never get the feeling he's examined the moral ambiguity of war, the guilt, adrenaline rush, deprivation, or self-gratification of it. The pictures are proficient but impersonal.

Good "war art" now would probably be what it's always been: more than just "war art." It would stand on its own, connect up to other art, and be both universal and specific. We would be able to look at it without knowing what war this is but still see the suffering, insanity, humor, dreariness, or the harsh beauty of combat. The superb war photographer Don McCullin said he wanted his work to "break the hearts and spirits of secure people." Mumford essentially lulls the eye.

Mumford maintains he went overseas "thinking the war was a huge blunder." Now he says he's "in favor of the mission," and that he "began to understand the invasion differently after spending time with Iraqis." That's fine. There's ample evidence of his commitment and passion in the written part of the journal. Unfortunately, it's not in the visual part.

Mumford should go back to Iraq and paint and draw this passion. He should really reveal himself, show us why the mission is right. His friend, the writer Steven Vincent, went to Iraq (at the same time as Mumford) and made his pro-war position clear in his book on Iraq. Sadly, Vincent was killed there last month by kidnappers days after writing a New York Times editorial critical of the Basra police. Mumford needn't risk his life. He should just put his beliefs into his visual work. I totally disagree with his position. However, if he truly painted his conscience, Mumford could really test the system. We would see if an artist who openly believes in the war would be embraced by an art world that insists it is open-minded and tolerant of divergent opinions. Mumford is obviously filled with the rage, desire, and the need for redemption that going to war seems to require. He just needs to get this on paper.

jsaltz@villagevoice.com

Iraq and Pearl Harbour Veterans / For Valour-IT

LOOKING FOR ARTISTS for Project Valour-IT

Portraits on commission can be a tool for fund raising. I am working on one for a town councilor. This is for a fund raising organized by an art gallery with which I am associated with.

It is a great idea. They ask a dozen of professional artists to produce a portrait for a benefactor. The benefactor gives $900 to the gallery and $300 to the artists. The gallery produce the show--big exposure with media and such, because those benefactors are public figures or active in the community. Every body wins.

Anybody out there have contacts you think could make this happen in your local community?

You want to get involved?

Contact FBL at Valour-IT: Voice-Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops

Project Valour-IT - draft for logo

Project Valour IT
Project Valour IT, in memory of SFC William V. Ziegenfuss, provides voice-controlled software and laptop computers to wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand and arm injuries or amputations at major military medical centers. Operating laptops by speaking into a microphone, our wounded heroes are able to send and receive messages from friends and loved ones, surf the 'Net, and communicate with buddies still in the field without having to press a key or move a mouse. The experience of CPT Charles "Chuck" Ziegenfuss, a partner in the project who suffered hand wounds while serving in Iraq, illustrates how important this voice-controlled software can be to a wounded servicemember's recovery.

This logo is only a test for this site.