WhiteBox Zooms in on Arab Artists
Beyond the Cloth, on view at WhiteBox, brings together artists' work both inspired by, and using the Kafiye, articulating a meta-narrative about the complexities of Arab culture and identity. Curator (and KAFLab’s founder) Hala A. Malak combines a diverse array of work by contemporary Arab artists, raising dialogues that dissect and rearticulate the Kafiye and its sociopolitical meta-narratives. The show’s multidisciplinary works include portraiture, installations, performances, video art, and street art. Encompassing the potent, the bold, the intricate, and the minimal, these works intersectionally reflect the multifaceted clashes and compatibilities between identity and politics within and beyond the Arab world.
Some artists utilize the Kafiye in works that explore feminist transgression and resistance, or fetishizations of Arab femininity outside the Arab world. Others, through their use of abstracted imagery seem to echo the weaving together and unraveling of boundaries, fences, and barriers, both literal and metaphorical. All the artists, either directly or indirectly, seem embedded in political articulations of the region and the multifarious identities within it.
Chadi Younes, We Are All A Bit Arab (2013)
Picking up this theme, the exhibition’s closing event, Unveiled—comprised of performances and readings—depicts the Arab world as an explosive melting pot of identities grappling with the effects of ongoing political strife. Reflecting on events such as the war in Syria, Egypt’s post-revolution identity and politics, and the legacy of Lebanon’s civil war, today’s performances explore the complexities of life and identity in the Arab region.
With music and drawings, Hadi Eldebeck, Plus Aziz, Kevork Mourad, and Chris Carr highlight overlapping connections between Arab, African, and North American cultures. Ferran Martin and Rosalinda Gonzales take up the combative themes of destruction, protest, ritual, and religion in the Arab region, inspired by Mediterranean rituals and women protesters in Egypt. Parsha Radetzki gestures at hope and progress in Syria. And, reflecting the diversity of approaches to the Kafiye as a symbol in Beyond the Cloth, Igor Molochevski and Ella Averbukh musically perform the Kafiye’s graphic representation. Finally, Anthony Hayden Guest punctuates the performances with readings that explore complex intersections between these themes and collective postwar trauma in Lebanon.
Whitebox and Kaflab welcome you today to join the timely conversation on art that reflects on a turbulent, multifarious, intricately complex region.