Search results

In this interview Omar Kholeif talks to Uriel Orlow about his recent project for Ibraaz Platform 008: <i>2922 Days</i> (2014), a culmination of two earlier works that uncover the undocumented eight-year entrapment of 14 cargo ships in the Suez Canal at the outbreak of the 1967 war between Israel and...

<em>Ibraaz</em> Senior Editor Omar Kholeif talks to Antonia Carver, director of Art Dubai, about the changing nature of institutional infrastructures in the Gulf. In this conversation, they discuss the social contexts of the art world, and whether the model of the art fair provides a different perspective on modernisation in...

In this interview, artist Köken Ergun discusses contemporary art's relationship to religion. The conversation raises pertinent questions, including the issue of whether the institution of contemporary art is constructed as a secular one that ghettoizes particular artists who explore religion and ritual in their work.

Operating since 2000, the Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF) is an organization that, despite its name, largely supports visual artists who hold a connection to the Arab world. One of YATF's most significant projects is Meeting Points <em>–</em> a biennial platform that roves from city to city. The seventh edition...

The 13th Istanbul Biennial went by the title <em>Anne, Ben Barbar Miyim ?/Mom, Am I Barbarian?</em> It was a heartfelt and genuine attempt by its curator, Fulya Erdemci, to grapple with what can only be deemed an impossible task. From the outset, Erdemci had proposed that her exhibition would 're-think...

Is it pure coincidence that the 55th Venice Biennale, the world's most nationalistic 'fair' for visual culture, opened only a couple of weeks before the 2013 G8 summit took place in Northern Ireland? The play of global power relations for most cultural tourists visiting the Venice Biennale may at first...

When a colleague handed Omar Kholeif a copy of Peeping Tom's issue focused on the Beirut art scene, he felt both confusion and excitement. There, on the cover, were listed the names of virtually every single collaborator that he had ever had the good fortune to work with as an...

Ayah Bdeir is the creator of littleBits, an open source system of preassembled, modular circuits that snap together with magnets – making learning about electronics fun, easy and creative. An engineer, inventor and interactive artist, Ayah received her master's degree from the MIT Media Lab and undergraduate degrees in computer...

How can an arts agency engage or intervene with the politics of conflict and post-conflict situations? This is a question that I have wrestled with since I was first introduced to Culture+Conflict's mission during an informal conversation in 2010. The question of whether it 'should' or 'could' connect with such...

Mahmoud Khaled is an artist who lives and works between Alexandria and Beirut. Since studying painting, Khaled has focused on exploring how we use the different spaces in which we live and communicate. In <em>Do You Have Work Tomorrow?</em> (2012) a newly commissioned project for Ibraaz, the artist captures the...

Hassan Khan is an artist who lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. To coincide with a new selective survey exhibition at SALT in Istanbul, Ibraaz's Senior Editor Omar Kholeif opens up a conversation with Khan about a body of work produced between the late 1990s and the present day. The...

Shady El Noshokaty is an artist and educator based in Cairo, Egypt. For over a decade, he has pioneered a number of independent experimental media art workshops in Cairo, fostering a critical dialogue between patriarchal higher educational institutions in Egypt and peer-assisted learning groups. In the following interview, El Noshokaty...

In the wake of the uprisings that swept the Middle East since December 2010, a spotlight has, for better or worse, fallen on artists from the region. In this essay, Egypt-born, UK-based writer and curator Omar Kholeif looks at some of the problems attending this increased interest in art from...