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

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.

In the Arab world, we can surely say that a group of individuals with a common understanding of how to live and what to think is in the process of making up a culture. Whether these individuals are artists, architects, designers or intellectuals is irrelevant; the message being sent out to the audience is the same. The artist telling us about war in his or her country, and the artist using calligraphy or landscape painting in an attempt to forget war ever existed, are the flip-sides of the same coin. Today, visual culture is strongly affected by information disseminated by the media and the circumstances surrounding our daily lives.

The MENA region is booming because the contemporary culture there is taking a stand, it is shaping the new generation of individuals and the wider global community.