future movements jerusalem, startlingly good review on babelmed

Shuruq Harb Wiki City 2010

“The highlight of this year’s Liverpool Biennial is the art from Palestine on show in Future Movements Jerusalem. It’s art made against the forcings of Occupation, about a city currently forbidden to most of the artists in the show.”

My piece about this excellent show has just been published here on Babelmed, a really admirable and completely independent ‘Mediterranean culture site’ based in Rome, which appears in English, Italian, French and Arabic editions.

Future Movements [curated by Samar Martha] is part of a very good Biennial [until Nov 28] that is apparently out of reach to journalists and critics, who complain about/weigh how London-centric big ‘national’ group shows and mainstream art coverage is -of which there is a mass of both right now. On the former, there’s an evident ignorance about who London is/whose London it is right now [which allies with an eternal horizon-shrinking of the establishment]. On the latter, perhaps it requires a breaching of your own frontiers and figuring it out/recouping later, if only because you know you ought to and because you believe in changing things. Ho-hum…

Here is an extract from my little piece;

“Artists from Palestine don’t need to go looking for subject matter and daily reduce complexity to concrete materiality in order to exist. Smart and sophisticated, already working against type, seasoned in circuitousness and daring directness, they’re delivering some of the most intriguing art of our times.”

Here is a link to the rest of my review and a way in to the wonderful world of Babelmed itself.

I posted earlier on Raouf Haj Yihya’s piece here.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s piece is an installation and very hard to capture visually but, meanwhile, I can link you to their London gallery Rose Issa here. [Speaking of whom, I’ve just written about another of her artist’s; Parastou Forouhar, who is showing at Leighton House Museum until November 6 here for Bidoun -of which more later. Meanwhile; run!]

Shuruq Harb’s web-based project, ArtTerritories, is here.

I don’t [yet] know where to direct you to see or get hold of Yazan Khalili’s book project Landscape of Darkness…