What relationship does visual culture have to the world we live in?

As far as I can see, there is little room for blind people and too much space for those who don’t listen.

Visual culture in a country like Morocco does not differ from its counterparts in the rest of those countries that remain, to some extent, beneath a foreign-made umbrella.

The production of the image in the post-colonial age compels us strongly to undergo subordination to foreign ideologies, because this is a production that does not heed the inner necessity of our societies. It is much more concerned with meeting other conditions, set outside the domain of our fabricated borders, through very shrewd policies.

It is so difficult to imagine the people in the world now getting their cultural resources without a visual component, especially in the Arab world where the photograph is becoming increasingly dominant in the media. For example, most newspapers and Arabic magazines are giving much more space to photographs, considering them as important as the written reports. Unfortunately this produces less analysis from the media in general. On the other hand, the various satellite TV channels, with their constant dissemination of imagery, are today a tool to inform and influence a large segment of the Arab people, namely illiterates.

Nowadays, visual culture is considered to be a vehicle for the constant delivering of messages of identity to the public. The image has become the universal means of recalling to an audience the history of how we speak; how we think; and how we envision the future.

Until a few years ago, the Arab world wasn’t considered a reliable and sustainable place for art and culture but just recently a series of geopolitical and cultural circumstances have triggered a new beginning.

By bicycle, he travels the roads and the districts searching for an answer to his many questions. He is a man, Tunisian, Arab, Berber and a native with roots in the Maghreb, Africa, the Middle East ... He is of this Earth and these oceans.

This is a very wide question and impossible to answer in a book, let alone a paragraph. However, it could boil down to two questions concerning visual artists, rather than visual culture per se: What can art do? And do artists have a responsibility to react and respond to their contexts?

Middle Eastern culture, which is Islamic and mainly very conservative, is in the process of redefining its interpretation of, and relationship to, visual culture. The role of contemporary art in the Middle East is different to that in many parts of world. Design, advertising, media, performance, photography, conceptual art, new media, film and computer technologies all have a critical role to play in addressing social, educational and political issues. However, the platform for expression is very narrow for artists and art critics in many countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Secondly, certain aspects of global contemporary visual culture expressed through the arts present very new concepts for Middle Eastern societies. Within such a cultural context, artists need to be abreast of what can and cannot be shown in public. Yet in spite of these difficulties and the necessity at times to circumvent these constraints, some interesting projects have taken place. It is even possible that with the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the situation may yet change.