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'This essay is not about the politics of terminology,' writes <em>Ibraaz </em>Senior Editor Stephanie Bailey in her closing editorial for Platform 010, 'as much as it is about the histories to which regional terminologies are bound, and the processes that occur in and around their making. The intention is not...

'The 2017 Sharjah Biennial (SB13), <i>Tamawuj,</i> curated by Christine Tohme...seems to unite the geopolitical and institutional concerns of the Sharjah Biennial's previous two editions in order to, as the exhibition statement explains, 'mobilise ongoing conversations'. This thematic expansion has been articulated both conceptually and physically, with SB13 taking place across...

This interview takes two exhibitions Hajra Waheed staged in the UK in 2016 as a starting point through which to explore Waheed's expansive practice: <i>Sea Change, Chapter 1: Character 1, In the Rough</i>, at London's Mosaic Rooms, and <i>The Cyphers</i> at BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Here, Waheed...

The following text represents an expanded version of the closing remarks delivered by <em>Ibraaz</em> Senior Editor Stephanie Bailey as part of Field Meeting 4: Thinking Practice. It forms part of the online publication Ibraaz produced for Field Meeting 4: Thinking Practice, which can be viewed here .

Younes Bouadi is Head of Production and Research at Studio Jonas Staal. The studio runs an artistic and political organization called the New World Summit, for which Bouadi recently oversaw the construction of a parliament building in Rojava at the invitation of the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava. Here, he talks...

Navine G. Khan-Dossos uses painting to explore 'the algorithmic nature of the interconnected world we live in' by melding geometric abstraction with traditional aniconism of Islamic art, and the patterns underpinning digital life. Khan-Dossos elaborates on this research in this discussion with <em>Ibraaz </em>Senior Editor Stephanie Bailey, which starts with...

Stephanie Bailey reviews <em>Black Friday </em>at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, artist Sophia Al-Maria's first solo exhibition in the United States. The show, based around a film shot on drone in Qatar, examines the idea of 'disaster capitalism' encoded into the shopping malls of the world, taking...

'Still (the) Barbarians', this year's EVA International biennial exhibition in Limerick, Ireland, is a reminder of the country's postcolonial history in this centenary year of the 1916 Easter Rising. Curator Koyo Kouoh has taken this historical event as a starting point from which to 'examine the relationships between the various...

In this interview <strong>Tarek Abou El Fetouh</strong> discusses <em>Time is Out of</em> <em>Joint</em>, an exhibition that presents a history of corresponding temporalities that recalls both our inability to deal with the complexities of our time, and the necessity to draw connections between us beyond defined 'regions'.

Stephanie Bailey reports from the 2016 March Meeting, organized by the Sharjah Art Foundation, and themed around education, engagement, and participation.

Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco talks about her new book <i>Dangerous Moves: </i><i>Performance and Politics in Cuba</i> (2015), which analyses performance art and political engagement in in post-revolutionary Cuba. Fusco discusses how performance art can be defined; why performance art has long been marginalized in Cuban society; and...

Stephanie Bailey visits Home Works 7 in Beirut and the Athens Biennale, and remarks on how a critique of the market's impact on cultural production in the contexts of Beirut and Athens is an issue when considering the work being done on the ground.

This interview with Urok Shirhan is framed around a performance staged by the artist in 2013 as part of Home Works 6, and Matthias Lilienthal's X-Apartments project, in which Shirhan offered visitors the chance to obtain 'Membership to the Occupation of Iraq'.

<em>Ibraaz</em> Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey reviews three performances by Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui, as part of a series of events for the 41st iteration of the Aeschylia Festival, Greece. These interactive performances, in an crumbling amphitheatre, invited audiences members to make participation a key aspect of the performative process and,...

<em>Ibraaz</em> Senior Editor Stephanie Bailey reviews the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, an exhibition that played out with the backdrop of the Greek economic crisis, but finds that its concerns have much more global effects.

This essay was written for the Golden Lion award-winning Pavilion of Armenia's catalogue at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) curated by Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg. It considers how history is articulated in the work of artists who engage with their cultural heritage through the memory of displacement.

Vangelis Vlahos's work mines archives so as to produce geopolitical perspectives of historical events. In this interview with <em>Ibraaz</em> Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey, Vlahos discusses his work in archival research and its delineation through into specific historical frames. Through this, he considers Greece's role not as a peripheral nation, but...

The New World Summit is an artistic and political organization dedicated to providing 'alternative parliaments' by hosting political groups that have been excluded from democracy. In this interview, <em>Ibraaz</em> Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey talks to Jonas Staal, founder of The New World Summit, to discuss the project's origins, present, and...

In this conversation, Aikaterini Gegisian talks to Stephanie Bailey about her Ibraaz 008 project <i>it is small, we like it this way , </i>a fictional photo reportage comprised of image fragments found in lifestyle USA magazines of the sixties in articles that focus on the Middle East, North Africa and...

<i>Don't You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics</i> is an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) within the framework of 'The Uses of Art', a project by the European museum confederation L'Internationale, which proposes 'a space for art within a non-hierarchical and decentralized...

In this interview, Stephanie Bailey talks to artist and filmmaker Amar Kanwar about The Sovereign Forest</i> (2011– ), an ongoing project that is comprised of films, books, sculptures and photographs, presented partly as an archival installation that continues to expand and grow. The project portrays the exhaustive resistance movements that...

Originally developed by Stefano Rabolli Pansera in 2009 as a trans-disciplinary research platform, Beyond Entropy is an independent collaborative practice that operates globally in association with public organizations, private institutions and governmental agencies. Since 2012, Beyond Entropy has operated not only in Europe, but also in the Mediterranean and Africa,...

This was written as part of the Ibraaz-produced online catalogue for <em>The Jerusalem Show VII: FRACTURES</em>, curated by Basak Senova, organized by the Al-Ma'mal Foundation, and staged in 2014 as part of Qalandiya International 2014. In the text, Stephanie Bailey considers the meaning of the exhibition's title in relation to...

Stephanie Bailey reviews <em>Here and Elsewhere</em>, at the New Museum, New York, a presentation of 45 artists from 15 countries that <i>the New Yorker</i>’s Andrea K. Scott supposed would have sounded like Edward Said’s nightmare’.

In this conversation with <em>Ibraaz </em>Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey, Raed Yassin talks about the way his work encourages audiences and participants to become actively engaged in the interpretation and dissemination of an artwork and the ideas that feed into its construction.

Forming part of Delfina Foundation's<i> The Public Domain</i> programme of artistic research and production, </i>a recent Tate Modern panel discussion among Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR: founding members Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman), historian and political scientist Ilan Pappé, and curator and critic Okwui Enwezor, raised a broad...

Eungie Joo programmed the Sharjah Art Foundation's 2014 March Meeting and was recently appointed Curator of Sharjah Biennial 12, to open in 2015. In this interview with <em>Ibraaz</em> Senior Editor Stephanie Bailey, Joo speaks of her vision for SB12 to contemplate how artists' positions help to consider new possibilities for...

In this interview with Ibraaz Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey, Hisham Al-Madhloum, Directorate of Fine Art in Sharjah, explains the focus on arts engagement in Sharjah from the 1980s to the present day. Al-Madhloum discusses his experience of building culture in Sharjah, while explaining how the aim now, as it was...

Monira Al Qadiri is concerned with reality and how it exposes itself in events that occur seemingly out of nowhere, like flashes of insight. In this interview with Ibraaz Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey, Qadiri explains how economy, conflict, power and metaphysical values play a role not only in the configuration...

Tarek Atoui's artistic practice engages with sound as a force for communion and interrogation. He does this by building new software and specializes in creating computer tools for interdisciplinary art forms and youth education.In this interview, Atoui discusses the way his work has evolved since 2008, and how it has...

In this interview, Georgia Kotretsos talks to Stephanie Bailey about the one-month period, from January 2013 to December 2014, when she became artist-in-residence at L'appartement22, in Rabat, Morocco, an independent space for contemporary art that organizes exhibitions, workshops, and residency programs.

Wael Shawky's work explores the cycles of history and myth – those narrative structures that both produce and propagate society's various belief systems, from the religious to the political. In this interview, he talks to Stephanie Bailey about the treatment of narratives within his practice, as both a form for...

With the unveiling of its refurbished and expanded space in January 2014, Delfina Foundation launched <i>The Politics of Food</i>, a four-year programme of artistic research and production that invites artists, curators and critics from around the world to respond to the politics of food, agriculture, and the environment. Stephanie Bailey...

Though the world seems caught in a complicated political, economic, and indeed, ideological crisis, the question of the day is simple: what does the future hold? This question underscored the discussions that took place at 'Future Imperfect', a symposium organized by Ibraaz in collaboration with Tate Modern and the Kamel...

In April 2013, Rana Hamadeh staged a performance (part of an ongoing project, <em>Alien Encounters</em>, initiated in 2011) titled <em>The Big Board, or…'And before it falls, it is only reasonable to enjoy life a little'</em> (2013) as part of <em>The Magic of the State</em> (2013) at Lisson Gallery, London, curated...

Independent curator and film producer, Αdelina von Fürstenberg, is director and founder of Art for The World, a non-governmental organization founded in 1996 with a view to use art as a social force. This same belief has driven von Fürstenberg's career, which spans decades and first found inspiration in Harald...

Maryam Jafri has long engaged with the archive. One of her projects, <em>Independence Day 1936-1967</em> (2009-ongoing), comprises of 67 plus archival photographs mainly from the first independence days of various Asian and African countries (over 23), including Indonesia, India, Vietnam, South Vietnam, Ghana, Senegal, Pakistan, Syria, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique,...

In this review, Stephanie Bailey looks at the central exhibition of the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale, <em>Everywhere But Now,</em> and explores some of the messages that are being articulated in the curatorial by Adelina von Fürstenberg. Running from 18th September 2013 through to 31st January 2014, the exhibition includes 50 artists...

It was on the occasion of Slavs and Tatars's latest exhibition, <em>Long Legged Linguistics</em> (27 July-10 October 2013) at Art Space Pythagorion in Samos, an island that sits on the border between Greece amd Turkey (separated by the Aegean sea), that a lively panel discussion moderated by curator Marina Fokidis...

An intriguing line of inquiry emerges from three exhibitions currently on show at Tate Modern<strong>. </strong>There is the exhibition of works by Saloua Raouda Choucair (born Beirut, 1918) showing to 16 October 2013, a retrospective of 'Visionary Modernist', Ibrahim El-Salahi (born Sudan, 1930) to 22 September 2013, and a presentation...

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...

The two-day conference 'Regional vis-à-vis Global Discourses: Contemporary Art from the Middle East' (6th-7th July 2013) was held at the Brunei Gallery at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London and was convened by Dr. Hamid Keshmirshekan</em> . The conference was organised by the London Middle East...

In this interview, Libyan-Italian artist Adelita Husni-Bey talks about the idea of 'positionality' for an artist who comes from both sides of the regional divide. Being half-Libyan and half-Italian not only raises the issue of nationality when it comes to how artists are defined, but also reflects on the problems...

Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi grew up with the Sharjah Biennial. She was thirteen when it was conceived (in 1993) and remembers the first editions being held in the Expo Centre. When she graduated from the Slade School of Art in 2002, she travelled to Germany and chanced upon Okwui Enwezor's 2002...

Yuko Hasegawa is the Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, who was invited to curate the 11th Sharjah Biennial – <em>Re:emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography</em>, staged for three months from 13th March through 13th May, during a glorious 2013 Gulf spring. It was a contentious biennial...

When contemporary art theorist Irit Rogoff introduced 'relational geographies', she proposed the idea of taking two seemingly disparate things and drawing out connections between them that may not have been immediately apparent. It is a view that invokes, to a certain degree, French philosopher Gilbert Simondon's view of an 'associated...

A legacy has developed around Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. It is rooted in traditional Iranian reverse mirror painting and mirror mosaics – <em>Aineh-Kari</em> – appropriated to produce new and modern forms guided by the universal laws of geometry. Famously, Warhol kept a work by her on his desk, though...

In 2012, Robin Kahn worked with a collective of women from Western Sahara to create<em> The Art of Sahrawi Cooking,</em> an installation and series of events for dOCUMENTA(13) . The project was inspired by a book Kahn produced: <em>Dining in Refugee Camps: The Art of Sahrawi Cooking</em> (2010), the fruit...

<em>Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear,</em> a collaboration between the Tate Modern in London and the Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, took place in the small, darkened Tate Project Space tucked away in the corner of the Tate Modern's ground level. It was the perfect setting for an exhibition...

Caveh Zahedi is an Iranian-American filmmaker whose work is positioned uncomfortably between what is acceptable and what is not. <em>The Sheik and I </em>(2012), the artist's most recent feature film, is also his most controversial work to date. Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation as part of the 2011 Sharjah...

How do you educate displaced people and for that matter, who is displaced in the twenty-first century? For artist Ahmet Ögüt, the project is simple: with the cooperation of the Delfina Foundation and Tate Modern, Southwark Refugee Forum, Migrant Resource Centre, The Silent University, a knowledge and skill-sharing platform, was...