PRESS RELEASE 12 December 2011

Tarzan and Arab, Colourful Journey (2010) Larissa Sansour, Palestinauts (2010)

Subversion 14 April – 5 June 2012

Marwa Arsanios · Sherif El-Azma · Wafaa Bilal · Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige · Khaled Hafez · Larissa Sansour · Tarzan and Arab · Sharif Waked · Akram Zaatari

Cornerhouse is delighted to announce Subversion , a unique group show of new and recent contemporary Middle Eastern art which explores and rethinks modern Arab identity. Twelve emerging and established artists use autobiographical narratives amalgamated with fiction, popular culture and subversive parody, to express the dichotomies they face as they perform multiple roles in a society which is frequently represented to the outside world in a contorted and mediated manner.

Spanning an array of techniques including installation, video, photography and sculpture, the artists collectively illustrate fragments of the distorted imagination that often preoccupies the Arab world, uncovering the contrasts of existence in a disputed political region. But instead of conforming, they approach the various masks they are expected to wear with a sense of humour whilst referencing to the duplicitous performances of their everyday life.

Emerging Gaza artists and filmmakers Tarzan and Arab will present their award- winning Gazawood project (2010), including short film Colourful Journey and a series of striking cinema poster pastiches of imaginary movies from different genres (illustrated above left). Originating from a region that has not had a functioning cinema since the 1980s and heavily relies on satellite TV and illegal DVD copies, the works on display strongly reflect the twins’ interest in and passion for film.

In A Space Exodus (2009), Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour adapts a segment of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , providing it with new, Middle Eastern context. The film follows the artist on a surreal journey through the universe echoing Kubrick’s thematic concerns for human evolution, progress and technology. In her film, however, Sansour posits the idea of a first Palestinian in space, and, referencing Armstrong’s moon landing, interprets this theoretical gesture as ‘a small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind’. Originally developed as part of the A Space Exodus installation, Subversion will also feature Sansour’s Palestinauts (2010) (illustrated above right).

Akram Zaatari ’s How I Love You (2001) is a study of sexuality among gay men in Lebanon. A couple and three individuals talk about their sex lives, about commitments and failures, their passions and love in a society where homosexuality is still taboo and punished by imprisonment. Using light to produce a white veil that obstructs the viewer, the speakers are unidentifiable. Unlike the conventional veil masking subjects on news channels and documentaries, Zaatari’s glistening light makes these subjects seem like mystical, untouchable creatures, subverting conventional documentary techniques.

Curated by Omar Kholeif. The accompanying film programme will be announced in 2012.

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For further information please contact: Elisa Ruff, Media & Communications Officer on E: [email protected], T: + 44 (0)161 200 1529 or M: +44 (0)7852 191 752.

Notes to Editors

Marwa Arsanios Lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. Marwa obtained her MFA from Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts, London (2007). She has exhibited all across the world including London, Beirut, Athens, Oxford, Lisbon, Santiago de Chile, Rome and Damascus. Her work was shown at Art Dubai in the Bidoun Lounge (Art Park), at the Forum expanded of the Berlinale 2010, at the Homeworks V forum in Beirut, at Tokyo Wonder Site in Tokyo and most recently at the Istanbul Biennale. Her videos were screened in several festivals and events such as the e-flux storefront in New York, and most recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She has been granted an artist’s residency at the Arab Image Foundation for 2009, a research residency at the Tokyo Wonder Site in 2010 and a three months residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academie for 2011. Marwa is also a part-time lecturer.

Sherif El-Azma Sherif El-Azma, born in Manchester in 1975, lives and works as a freelance video artist in Cairo. Since 1997, he has been working as on various projects in the film and video industry, for example as a video editor, production assistant and video cameraman. He has produced five short videos in Cairo since 1997, which span from classic documentaries to experimental film. His 2001 short, Interview with a Housewife, an interview with his mother, impressively documents the situation of Egyptian women and was rewarded with the prize for Best Video Artist at the Nitaque Festival in Cairo. The most important theoretical element that recurs in his work is his examination of the contemporary Egyptian media language used in Egyptian documentaries and cinema films.

Wafaa Bilal Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal, an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, is known internationally for his on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international politics and internal dynamics. Bilal suffered repression under Saddam Hussein’s regime and fled Iraq in 1991 during the first Gulf War. After two years in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, he came to the U.S. where he graduated from the University of New Mexico and then obtained an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2008, City Lights published Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun , about Bilal's life and the Domestic Tension project. Bilal was named 2008 Artist of the Year by the Chicago Tribune.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige Born in Beirut, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have worked together as artists and filmmakers, predominantly shooting fictions films and documentaries. In 1999, they wrote and directed their first fiction feature film, Around the Pink House . Since then they have added documentaries to their repertoire, which have been screened at international film festivals, art centres and museums. In 2008, they were recipients of the Best Singular Film Award at the Cannes Film Festival with Je Veux Voir (I Want To See). For the past 15 years, the artists have focused on the images, memory and history of their country, Lebanon - its wars, its conflicts, its political battles. As photographers, video artists and filmmakers, they have presented their works in numerous exhibitions and collections of images and films.

Khaled Hafez Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963, Khaled Hafez lives and works in Cairo. From 1981 till 1990 Hafez followed the evening classes of the Cairo Fine Arts College whilst studying medicine. He attained MFA in New Media from Transart Institute / Danube University Krems, Austria in 2009. Hafez’s works are part of the Saatchi Collection, London, UK, the Muhka Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium, Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo, Bosnia and the Mali National Museum, Bamako, Mali.

Larissa Sansour Born in Jerusalem in 1972, Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Her work is interdisciplinary, immersed in the current political dialogue and utilises video art, photography, experimental documentary, the book form and the internet. Sansour's work features in galleries, museums, film festivals and art publications worldwide. Recent solo shows include exhibitions at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Galerie La B.A.N.K in Paris, DEPO in Istanbul and Jack the Pelican in New York. She has participated in the biennials in Istanbul, Busan and Liverpool. Her work has appeared at the Third Guangzhou Triennial in China, LOOP in Seoul, South Korea, Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and PhotoCairo4 in Egypt. Sansour's graphic novel The Novel of Nonel and Vovel, a collaboration with Oreet Ashery, first appeared in Venice Biennale bookshops and was since launched at the Tate Modern, UK, the Brooklyn Museum, USA, and Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, Denmark. Her short film A Space Exodus was nominated in the Best Short category at the Dubai International Film Festival. 2011 exhibitions include LIVING at Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark and the Incheon Women Artists' Biennial in South Korea.

Tarzan and Arab Ahmed and Mohamed Abou Nasser aka Tarzan and Arab, both 23, are identical twin brothers based in the Gaza Strip. The artists studied fine art at university, but have never been able to visit an art gallery or a cinema. In 2010, they won first prize at the A.M. Qattan foundation's biannual Young Palestinian Artist Prize. The prize- winning exhibition was presented in the West Bank city of Ramallah and later at the Mosaic Rooms, London.

Subversion marks the first exhibition outside of this context, and the first time their work has been shown in a group exhibition context of this kind.

Sharif Waked Born in 1964 in Nazareth, Israel, Sharif Waked lives and works in Haifa. With ferocious humor, Waked engages with the Middle-Eastern political conflict, turning terror into a somber cabaret. One of his breakout video works; Chic Point (2003), is a seven-minute video that imagines ‘fashion for Israeli checkpoints’. Young men parade down the catwalk, gradually revealing their toned midriffs. The piece evokes military checkpoints where people have to show their stomach to soldiers to insure that they are not wearing an explosives belt. Instead of promoting a narrative of victimhood, Waked re-appropriates this language and creates a tongue and cheek critique of Palestinian representation. Waked has exhibited at various biennials, museums, and art venues internationally.

Akram Zaatari Born in Saida, Lebanon, in 1966, Akram Zaatari is an artist who lives and works in Beirut. Throughout his career, Zaatari has been exploring issues pertinent to postwar Lebanon. A collector of testimonies, documents, and objects, his search focuses on the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars, the logic of religious and national resistance, and the production and circulation of images in the context of a geographically divided Middle East. Zaatari is a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut), through which he has developed works by collecting, studying, and archiving a subjective photographic history, most notably studying the work of Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani, as a register of social relationships and of photographic practices.

Omar Kholeif (Curator) Omar Kholeif is an Egyptian-born, UK-based writer and curator. He is currently Curator at FACT, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, the UK’s leading centre for the support, commission and exhibition of work by artists working with film, video and new media. He is also an Associate Curator at the Arab British Centre in London. Kholeif is the Founder of the Arabic Film Festival (UK) and the Arab Fringe, and Co-Founder of the Centre of Cultural Confusion. His writing appears frequently in Art Monthly, Film International, the Guardian, frieze, Wired UK, Camera Obscura, and Scope to name but a few. He is a founding Editor of Portal 9 , a bi-lingual cultural journal published in Beirut. Kholeif is a graduate of the University of Glasgow, Screen Academy Scotland, and The Royal College of Art, London. He is a Churchill Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He recently co-edited the reader Vision, Memory and Media (Liverpool University Press 2010) with Andreas Broegger.

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