Upon its unveiling in a city with one square foot of green space per inhabitant, Cairo’s 74-acre Al Azhar Park in 2005 was rightfully heralded as the greatest green space in the city’s modern history.(1) The Park was part of an urban revitalization project in the old city aimed at improving the life of the local community as well as restoring its historic fabric.(2)  Investigating the complex spatial politics of the site might seem counterintuitive given its celebrated civic nature; it is in fact crucial that we understand the way architectural interventions such as this remap social space, extending and consolidating hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. The boundaries of the Park and public use of it since its completion reveal the complicated nature of civic belonging in class-stratified Cairo. The ambiguous spatial relationship between the Park and its surroundings is perhaps nowhere more apparent than along the edge it shares with the neighborhood of Darb al-Ahmar. In an effort to respond to the specific spatial politics of the Park as well as to material and historic trajectories of building and habitation in Cairo, I worked on an architectural design proposal for an urban housing block within this common boundary.  The project takes issue with both the monumentalism(3) and contextualism(4) of many recent architectural projects in the Middle East, developing in its place an anisotropic(5) urban strategy that modulates in supple response to particular site conditions and design intentions. The project also proposes an alternative urbanism, reconsidering foundational aspects of the modernist master plan that continue to shape our creation and understanding of form within cities. Before turning to discuss the project, I will briefly describe Al Azhar Park and Darb al-Ahmar.

What the conflicts over the newly planned mosques in countries such as Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Italy, and the United States have in common is the attitude that it is acceptable to build a new mosque, as long as it does not look like one.  Notwithstanding the fact that Muslim citizens in these countries have a legal right to build their places of worship, such an understanding of the mosque as a specific building type very much goes against its fluid architectural concept and its multifaceted formal possibilities. While a lack of understanding and knowledge is evident in such debates, the growing public visibility of Muslims in Western Europe and the United States conditions an increasing fear of and preoccupation with the “other.” Ongoing debates over cultural and religious pluralism in the West also reveal the xenophobic and orientalist thinking that often informs these discussions.

Before I arrived, before I read Darwish, before I knew where it was on a map and some time after my mother tried to describe what her father’s father told her about it, Beirut was a part of me.  At family gatherings in Boston or New Jersey or New Hampshire, sitting on wall-to-wall carpets or on soft couches in rooms with homemade tabouleh and store-bought hommous on the coffee table, conversation would struggle toward remembering.  None of us actually know why the strangers whose blood we share left Beirut in the 1920s – there are rumors of flight from the law or from politics, others say our ascendants were merchants seeking a better life.

On October 6th 2008, when my short video, Israel’s Generals Speak came out on the internet, the media in Israel had a field day. “Israeli Generals Mislead,” cried the headlines, because one of the military people whom we interviewed for the piece said we took his words out of context. In the video, seven senior retired military men, and a former head of the Mossad, expressed support for the candidacy of Barack Obama, or his policies.

This article presents an insider's look at the making of the exhibition Palestine 1948 at the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. The exhibition concurred with the 60-year commemoration of al-Nakba, a term used in the Arab world to refer to the exodus of the Palestinians following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Featuring video-interviews and photographic testimonies, the exhibition showed how al-Nakba affected the lives of individual Palestinians. The choice for telling the story of the creation of Israel from a Palestinian perspective was anything but obvious for a museum in the Netherlands - a country known for its pro-Israel stance. It did not take long before the museum was blamed for being 'one-sided', leading to a law-suit on the grounds that the exhibition incited hatred against Jews. The article discusses the negotiation processes that took place during the exhibition.

When I initiated a series of small summer workshops in six Palestinian camps in Lebanon in 2001 with photographer Simon Lourié, I never imagined that we would be going back and forth to the camps for four years, or that I would finally decide to live in one of them, Burj al-Shamali.

It’s not new that Abu Dhabi is working on becoming the cultural capital of the Middle East.  Another sign of that is the return of ArtParis-Abu Dhabi for the second year, bigger and organizers say better than last time with 57 galleries from around the world exhibiting more than 3300 works of art.

Art is poised at the crossroads in the United Arab Emirates, particularly in Abu Dhabi.  Abu Dhabi, the important political hub of the Emirates, has arrived at the contemporary art scene very recently, unlike Dubai, with its history of involvement with exhibition spaces and setting for important auctions of Middle Eastern art, or Sharjah, site for the Sharjah Biennale that greatly expanded its offerings under the direction of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, daughter of the ruler of Sharjah.

Art is poised at the crossroads in the United Arab Emirates, particularly in Abu Dhabi.  Abu Dhabi, the important political hub of the Emirates, has arrived at the contemporary art scene very recently, unlike Dubai, with its history of involvement with exhibition spaces and setting for important auctions of Middle Eastern art, or Sharjah, site for the Sharjah Biennale that greatly expanded its offerings under the direction of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, daughter of the ruler of Sharjah.

Iranian art does well in the UAE – especially in Dubai where exhibitions of contemporary Iranian art can be found in a number of galleries including several located in the Al Quoz industrial area close to Sheikh Zayed Road. The work of some artists, such as the calligraphic paintings of Mohammad Ehsai and the sculptures of Parviz Tanavoli, commanded significant sums at Christie’s Auction in Dubai in the spring 2008 auction.(1)

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has only been established as a country for 36 years, and to date has had a very short and modest history in the visual arts, art education and art appreciation. Printmaking, which is a relatively new medium in the UAE, is not widely practiced. The few printmaking studios in the country are situated within a small number of institutes of higher learning in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah. Because there are no private or public print shops artists can access once they have graduated from university, the expansion of this medium is adversely affected. 

Young artists in the UAE have witnessed a continual change in landscape and culture in what is an apparent fusion of east and west. Photography is the tool of choice for many young artists whose main circuit of communication is though the virtual conduits of the Internet. Instantly they can cross borders and communicate with others across the globe.

2007 was a monumental year for art – and indeed, all things cultural – in Abu Dhabi. In a short space of time, the city has seen real progress in terms of cultural maturity. The Saadiyat Island project – complete with Louvre and Guggenheim museums - was announced to the world in February; the Tourism Development Investment Company (TDIC) created a dedicated exhibition space within the Emirates Palace hotel organising such prolific exhibitions as the Arts of Islam – Treasures from the Khalili Collection; three contemporary galleries, Ghaf Gallery, Al Qibab Gallery and Contempo Art Gallery, welcomed audiences for the first time; the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) brought heavyweight archaeological and anthropological exhibitions such as the British Museum’s Sudan, to the halls of the Cultural Foundation and, Art Paris-Abu Dhabi held a successful, glamorous inaugural edition in November. The city’s cultural calendar was increased ten-fold. However, is it also valid to look at Abu Dhabi one year on and question why there isn’t yet a contemporary commercial art scene to match the very one which has been blossoming, not so quietly, up the Sheikh Zayed road for the past three years?

Ayyub bin Russell Hamilton constructs complicated landscapes which are comprised of a multitude of images from photographs taken throughout the United Arab Emirates – from Abu Dhabi to Ras al-Khaimah; Dubai and Sharjah to Umm al-Qaiwain and all the points in between.