Arab artists will have a heightened presence at the Venice Biennale this year, with five national pavilions from the Middle East  — representing Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates — as well as the international event's first-ever Pan-Arab exhibition and other independent shows. Considering the democratic upheavals and revolutionary fervor that have overtaken the Middle East during the last five months, the political moment will be sharply reflected in several of these displays. 

As a guide to the Biennale's Arab art, ARTINFO has taken a look at key venues to examine how they represent the Mideast situation today.

View Slideshow: Will the Arab Spring Bloom at the Venice Biennale?: A Preview of Four Politically Charged Displays

EGYPTIAN PAVILION

The Egyptian pavilion bills itself as "an homage to artist Ahmed Basiouny," who died on January 28 during the uprising in Cairo. Co-curator Aida Eltorie told ARTINFO via email that the exhibition, which is titled "Thirty Days of Running in the Place," "will consist of five video screens showing two projects." One is a previous work also called "Thirty Days of Running in Place," which Basiouny created over a year ago, and the other is footage that he filmed during the first three days of the uprisings in Tahrir Square.

According to a press release, the original "Thirty Days" was produced through "the act of running in a single standing point, with sensors installed in the soles of his shoes, and on his body." The body heat generated by Basiouny's running was "translated into a visual diagram" allowing viewers to "witness the movement of energy and physical consumption become born into an image." The fact that Basiouny was a victim of anti-revolutionary police violence makes this earlier representation of his living body especially poignant, and the notion of running as a stationary act is also rife with political overtones.

Given the current moment in Egyptian history and the role played by activists like Basiouny, the country's choice of artist is both inspired and inspiring. Still, from a critical standpoint, the exhibition raises some questions, since the footage filmed by the artist at Tahrir Square is not a finished personal work but a raw historical document. According to the pavilion's statement, the Egyptian ministry of culture seeks to "recognize and honor the life and death of an artist who was fully dedicated to the notions of an Egypt that only too recently demanded the type of change he was seeking his entire life." For this political remembrance to also hold water artistically, these two aspects of the show will have to function together as a coherent whole, either through unity or juxtaposition.

IRAQI PAVILION

Iraq has not had a pavilion at the Biennale since 1976. The United States declared an end to hostilities with the Gulf nation on August 31 of last year, but American troops remain there in an advisory role, and the country did not have an elected parliament until March 2011. Nevertheless, Mary Angela Schroth, an American who has run Rome art venue Sala Uno for the last 25 years, took up the challenge of curating the Iraq pavilion. In order to have an official pavilion at Venice, the country itself must request this status, and two Iraqi diplomats — Hassan Janabi, Iraqi representative to the United Nations Agencies in Rome, and Saywan Barzani, ambassador to Italy — asked that the pavilion be officially recognized by the Biennale.

With a location at the Gervasuti Foundation, between the Giardini and the Arsenale, the exhibition will include painting, video, installation, sculpture, and photography, and its six artists can be divided into two clear generational groups. An older generation — Ali Assaf, Azad Nanakeli, and Walid Siti — consists of artists who were born in the 1940s and 1950s and flourished in their home country during the 1970s, "a time of great enlightenment and international collaboration artistically" and "a golden age for Iraq," according to Schroth. These artists were abroad when the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 broke out and did not return to Iraq.

The younger generation — Adel Abidin, Ahmed Alsoudani, and Halim Al Karim — came of age during a fraught period including that bloody conflict, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the first Gulf War. They fled Iraq in 2003, through countries like Syria and Iran. "It was miraculous that they were able to find refuge in the West, given the difficult situation with Iraqi immigrants," Schroth told ARTINFO. Now their work "is more global in influence," he noted, with "less of a specific Iraqi identity."

No one exhibited in the show still lives in Iraq, but Schroth says that the pavilion has not forgotten the plight of artists there and will also premier a short film by Iraqi filmmaker Oday Rasheed featuring three artists living and working in Baghdad. "Presently, it is extremely difficult in Iraq to execute artistic practice as we know it in the rest of the world: there are no galleries (except a few in Kurdistan), no collectors, no support from the government, no exchanges, and even the academies are having a hard time with the new conservative political element," Schroth said. "However, there are artists (although not particularly experimental ones) and we hope that the pavilion of Iraq will lead to a renewed interest in exploring the situation in Iraq today."

The political situation, however, is not a focus of the Iraqi pavilion. Schroth said in her email that the pavilion "has decided NOT to identity itself with [political] conflicts nor the presence of the U.S. nor the current political situation (extremely complex) but to concentrate on a far more complicated and pressing problem: that of water resources." Hence the show is titled "Acqua Ferita" ("Wounded Water"), and the theme, Schroth adds, "is relevant to Iraq's reconstruction."

"THE ARAB CHANGING ROOM"

The artistic collective Chamber of Public Secrets was originally slated to participate in the official Lebanese pavilion, which the country subsequently canceled. Two of its members, Khaled Ramadan of Lebanon and Khaled Hafez of Egypt, have transformed the show into an independent project, to be curated by the Egyptian pavilion's Aida Eltorie. (ARTINFO previously published a Q&A with the curator of the canceled Lebanese pavilion, Georges Rabbath, who is planning a separate show with many of the artists who were to have participated in the national pavilion.)
Ramadan told ARTINFO in an email that "our voices will be the most
liberal and without the influence of curators or ministers or any other
type of political correctness."

The project, "The Arab Changing Room," is defined in a statement as "a knowledge production space." The artist-organizers "will process the informative artworks and the visual information received from our colleagues in the Arab world and transform them into a suitable aesthetic presentation to be seen by art audiences visiting Venice," and will also "produce its own content, in video, audio, and photography, but also theoretical texts." The project defines itself by its crowd-sourced, participatory nature and also by what it is not: an official pavilion of an Arab nation.

Ramadan is very dismissive of the artistic criteria used for pavilions such as that of the United Arab Emirates, telling ARTINFO by telephone that "the more loyal you are to the regime, you will have your artistic practices supported, even blessed by the regime, celebrated by the regime." He characterizes the art scene in Syria, Morocco, and Lebanon as similarly constrained. Still, Ramadan wishes that more Arab countries had decided to sponsor official pavilions this year. For him, Lebanon's cancellation "was not a very wise decision," and, in particular, Bahrain's withdrawal is a bad sign for the country's regime. "If you're scared it means you have something to hide, you don't want to really be in public and you're not ready even for constructive criticism," Ramadan said. "So they are kind of running away from their responsibilities."
In a follow-up email, Ramadan deplored Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed's firing of Jack Persekian as director of the Sharjah Foundation over the inclusion of a work in the Sharjah Biennial that the ruler deemed offensive and censored.

"THE FUTURE OF A PROMISE" 

"The Future of a Promise" is an official collateral event of the Biennale and its first Pan-Arab exhibition. Curator Lina Lazaar, a specialist in the postwar and contemporary departments at Sotheby's in London, is an advocate for Middle Eastern art, having encouraged the auction house to hold its first European auctions in Arab and Iranian contemporary art in 2006. In a phone interview, she told ARTINFO that she hopes that the show will provide "more accurate perspective on this side of the world." Work by 22 artists will be shown, including some of the biggest names in the Arab art world, such as Ahmed Alsoudani (who is also part of the Iraqi pavilion), Yto Barrada, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, and Kader Attia.

Naturally, "The Future of a Promise" was planned long before the Arab Spring began, but its title has become a very loaded statement. "It took us by surprise, and it's now a very interesting title given the situation," Lazaar said. "I'm trying to avoid any potential over-politicization of the material shown." Still, she recognizes that the political situation may be foremost in viewers' minds.

"The Future of a Promise" is funded by the Saudi automotive, finance, and media company ALJ Group and the Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj Capital, and the show is produced by the London-based art nonprofit Edge of Arabia, which recently sold six works at Christie's Dubai auction for over $1 million that will be used to support its educational programs in Saudi Arabian schools. With funding from Middle Eastern corporations and production support from the West — where many contemporary Arab artists live — "The Future of a Promise" has come up with a new recipe for participation in Venice, and it will be interesting to see if it becomes a model at future Biennales.

When working outside the system of national representation, "you have much more freedom, which is very exciting for us," Lazaar says. "Some who could have been associated with
national pavilions have made a conscious decision to join ours" for its
"more challenging nature." The Arab world is united by its use of Arabic, and Lazaar told ARTINFO that the show seeks to explore the "scope of this unity with a language" — depicting an Arab identity that many would argue is more meaningful than national distinctions.