Fareed Armaly
Encyclopedia
Fareed Armaly is an Arab American
artist
, curator
, author
and editor
who lives and works in the US and Berlin
, Europe
. Starting in the late 1980s, his work introduced a focus on the open definition of contemporary artistic practice as the medium itself, well-suited towards rendering a contemporary syntax from issues pertaining to a politics of culture
, identity
and representation
.
His initial wider recognition came in relation to 'Kontext Kunst'|| a term coined by a 1993 seminal group exhibition/publication. Armaly’s work is unique in confounding genre, his focus on artistic practice is methodologically expansive, including a range of interdisciplinary-based exhibitions, collaborative projects as well the longer-term roles and positions within the art institutional framework.
A hallmark of these constructions is that a project 'identity
' emerges from a dynamic aggregate. The attention is drawn from what is 'exhibited' onto the correspondences between them, and renders the effect of perceiving these interweaved associations as the experience itself.
Graphical guiding systems, wall texts and resource publication operate as a dialog, suggesting the constant triangulation of the locus of the artwork. By offering analytical passages through, more 'situationist' than 'site', these construct rather than illustrate. Their new construction material is derived from a synthesis of programming codes, a script joining media, architecture
, computer
, working with historical material, archive
s, resource interviews as social histories. A description of the architecture housing the exhibition may instead reveal an alternate narrative, that shifts from the sense of a structure and materiality onto a social-political realm. As a strategy this re-coding enables to reintroduce the construction in mind as an interface to a particular institutional matrix. It is within this interface that the diverse, new productions for the exhibition are located, and which establishes the project’s contemporary spatial narrative.
and narration, by initially establishing key thematic lines of enquiry, which create a network of correspondences. These all offer expressions of the constant modeling of culture and society, and considers within that the attempts towards institutionalization of certain discourses and conventions that focus audiences and communities-of-interest. Key examples of this include the history of TV vs. music recording culture shaping national community vs. audiences; representation of the Arab
'Other' relative to US politics; the role of the arts
in society, as it appears in the convergence of experimental poetics in alignment to emancipatory strategies in culture and politics
, and in link to that, a relation between institution and institutionalization.
The first productions, self-published music/culture journals Terminal Zone and R.O.O.M. (1987–89), introduced a reflection of his US context in terms of recording media culture. It transposes a search for a contemporary art syntax onto a music/culture magazine, whose new hybrid format is generated in terms of a changing philosophy: sample, mix, cut and paste, d.i.y. cross-over, etc. The publication’s assemblage of archival material, essays, oral histories with seminal musicians reflects the artist’s generational identity politics, through positions that allow to be brought together in “thought-communities”, and link the everyday- and pop-culture through specific terms like 'nation' and 'narration'.
European invitations shifted the focus clearly onto art institutions. Works such as displaced passages (1988) or the solo exhibition (re)orient (1989) bridged the U.S. and Europe by reflecting on the shared institutionalization of an Orientalist, Western-based epistemology. That representational closure is exemplified in these works through collected artifacts, as ready-mades. Most entail a mistake-in-production that create “gaps” in the seamless logic, from which Armaly then initiates a new charting.
Larger institutional solo exhibition projects, such as Orphée 1990 (1990), and Brea-kd-own (1993) produce situationist archeologies' along fault-lines in the institutional foundations, revealing within layers of cultural connotations from cinema
, television
, architecture, music, text and design
. The narrative premise that guides this situation, mirrors the artist’s personal reflections on how to enter today into the space offered by these institutions. An access way develops through considering a spatiality of interrupted historical transitions. In these two examples of grand art institutional frameworks each project introduces a tenuous transitional space within. It works with the visibly evident remainders left of areas configured from post-May'68 cultural policies, to construct a perspective onto the current post-1989 transitional setting.
. This philosophy
can also be evidenced by the different roles and positions the artist has held within the art institutional system, including long-term artistic/curatorial advisory collaborations for large-scale institutional projects, such as Project UNITE (1993); ? / NowHere (1996).
By 1999 three types of large-scale projects are operating: Program (1998) configured a relation to a 'public' by intersecting three public
programs (university
, national television, and public art), and a TV work offering a recollection of broadcast media pasts that in turn generates passages through a contemporary character of transitional, post-1989 Germany. From/To (1999 Witte de With /2002 documenta11), the large-scale, institutional project series, combined exhibition, panels, screenings, and commissions from different fields, in order to materialize the speculative charting of paradoxical discourses generated by post-1948 Palestinian refugee
movement: a 'map unfolding in real time'. haus.0 (1999–2003) which drew together earlier experiences into Armaly’s four-year, international programming concept as Artistic Director for the institution Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, an artists-space founded in the 1980s and by 1999 in transition.
Armaly’s solo and collaborative works include his production of video, soundworks, architectural interventions, design, sculpture
, installation
, performative and event, as well as publications. Their overall interdisciplinary character and sense of process, continues further in projects including the artist’s first U.S. solo exhibition, Orient(n)ations (2004) and Shar(e)d Domains (2007) a commission by the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Geneva)
for their large-scale archaeological exhibition and new museum proposal, Gaza at the crossroad of civilizations.
A recent publication (2007) on Armaly’s practice by the art historian Helmut Draxler, aptly sums up
the works’ unique attitude and the artist’s overall sensibility by the books title, Coercing Constellations.
Arab American
An Arab American is a United States citizen or resident of Arab ethnic, cultural and linguistic heritage or identity, who identifies themselves as Arab. Arab Americans trace ancestry to any of the various waves of immigrants of the countries comprising the Arab World...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
, curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
and editor
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...
who lives and works in the US and Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. Starting in the late 1980s, his work introduced a focus on the open definition of contemporary artistic practice as the medium itself, well-suited towards rendering a contemporary syntax from issues pertaining to a politics of culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
, identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
and representation
Representation
Representation can refer to:* Representation , one's ability to influence the political process* Representative democracy* Representation, a type of diplomatic mission...
.
His initial wider recognition came in relation to 'Kontext Kunst'|| a term coined by a 1993 seminal group exhibition/publication. Armaly’s work is unique in confounding genre, his focus on artistic practice is methodologically expansive, including a range of interdisciplinary-based exhibitions, collaborative projects as well the longer-term roles and positions within the art institutional framework.
Method of Work
Armaly’s exhibition projects can be described in terms of how they draw together working fields and relations, that connect between different categories of enquiry and methods of exposition. Their subject is reflected within and constituted through each project’s particular type of scripted construction.A hallmark of these constructions is that a project 'identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
' emerges from a dynamic aggregate. The attention is drawn from what is 'exhibited' onto the correspondences between them, and renders the effect of perceiving these interweaved associations as the experience itself.
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
, computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
, working with historical material, archive
Archive
An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...
s, resource interviews as social histories. A description of the architecture housing the exhibition may instead reveal an alternate narrative, that shifts from the sense of a structure and materiality onto a social-political realm. As a strategy this re-coding enables to reintroduce the construction in mind as an interface to a particular institutional matrix. It is within this interface that the diverse, new productions for the exhibition are located, and which establishes the project’s contemporary spatial narrative.
Artistic Practice
Armaly’s methodology takes the open definition of artistic practice as the medium by which to render the dynamics operating within a politics of representation. He sets this in relation to issues pertaining to culture, identity, nationNation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
and narration, by initially establishing key thematic lines of enquiry, which create a network of correspondences. These all offer expressions of the constant modeling of culture and society, and considers within that the attempts towards institutionalization of certain discourses and conventions that focus audiences and communities-of-interest. Key examples of this include the history of TV vs. music recording culture shaping national community vs. audiences; representation of the Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
'Other' relative to US politics; the role of the arts
ARts
aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....
in society, as it appears in the convergence of experimental poetics in alignment to emancipatory strategies in culture and politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
, and in link to that, a relation between institution and institutionalization.
The first productions, self-published music/culture journals Terminal Zone and R.O.O.M. (1987–89), introduced a reflection of his US context in terms of recording media culture. It transposes a search for a contemporary art syntax onto a music/culture magazine, whose new hybrid format is generated in terms of a changing philosophy: sample, mix, cut and paste, d.i.y. cross-over, etc. The publication’s assemblage of archival material, essays, oral histories with seminal musicians reflects the artist’s generational identity politics, through positions that allow to be brought together in “thought-communities”, and link the everyday- and pop-culture through specific terms like 'nation' and 'narration'.
European invitations shifted the focus clearly onto art institutions. Works such as displaced passages (1988) or the solo exhibition (re)orient (1989) bridged the U.S. and Europe by reflecting on the shared institutionalization of an Orientalist, Western-based epistemology. That representational closure is exemplified in these works through collected artifacts, as ready-mades. Most entail a mistake-in-production that create “gaps” in the seamless logic, from which Armaly then initiates a new charting.
Larger institutional solo exhibition projects, such as Orphée 1990 (1990), and Brea-kd-own (1993) produce situationist archeologies' along fault-lines in the institutional foundations, revealing within layers of cultural connotations from cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
, architecture, music, text and design
Design
Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...
. The narrative premise that guides this situation, mirrors the artist’s personal reflections on how to enter today into the space offered by these institutions. An access way develops through considering a spatiality of interrupted historical transitions. In these two examples of grand art institutional frameworks each project introduces a tenuous transitional space within. It works with the visibly evident remainders left of areas configured from post-May'68 cultural policies, to construct a perspective onto the current post-1989 transitional setting.
Open Concepts of Networks
Armaly establishes an interplay between cultural fields and strategies, where each project is generated by a specific type of 'scripting of correspondences’ between. The approach links to a notion of a potential 'unfinishedness' implicit in the dynamic between culture and identity, from which to consider a politics of representation that constantly finds creative openings in the linking between art, culture and societySociety
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
. This philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
can also be evidenced by the different roles and positions the artist has held within the art institutional system, including long-term artistic/curatorial advisory collaborations for large-scale institutional projects, such as Project UNITE (1993); ? / NowHere (1996).
Public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individuals, and the public is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science,...
programs (university
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
, national television, and public art), and a TV work offering a recollection of broadcast media pasts that in turn generates passages through a contemporary character of transitional, post-1989 Germany. From/To (1999 Witte de With /2002 documenta11), the large-scale, institutional project series, combined exhibition, panels, screenings, and commissions from different fields, in order to materialize the speculative charting of paradoxical discourses generated by post-1948 Palestinian refugee
Palestinian refugee
Palestinian refugees or Palestine refugees are the people and their descendants, predominantly Palestinian Arabic-speakers, who fled or were expelled from their homes during and after the 1948 Palestine War, within that part of the British Mandate of Palestine, that after that war became the...
movement: a 'map unfolding in real time'. haus.0 (1999–2003) which drew together earlier experiences into Armaly’s four-year, international programming concept as Artistic Director for the institution Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, an artists-space founded in the 1980s and by 1999 in transition.
Armaly’s solo and collaborative works include his production of video, soundworks, architectural interventions, design, sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
, installation
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, performative and event, as well as publications. Their overall interdisciplinary character and sense of process, continues further in projects including the artist’s first U.S. solo exhibition, Orient(n)ations (2004) and Shar(e)d Domains (2007) a commission by the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Geneva)
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Geneva)
The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire is the largest art museum in Geneva, Switzerland.-The building:The museum is located in Les Tranchées, in the city centre, on the site of the former fortification ring. It was built by the architect Marc Camoletti between 1903 and 1910, and financed by a bequest from...
for their large-scale archaeological exhibition and new museum proposal, Gaza at the crossroad of civilizations.
A recent publication (2007) on Armaly’s practice by the art historian Helmut Draxler, aptly sums up
the works’ unique attitude and the artist’s overall sensibility by the books title, Coercing Constellations.
Selected exhibitions
- 2007 Shar(e)d Domains, in 'Gaza at the Crossroad of Civilisations', Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva, CH
- 2004 Orient(n)ations, ArtPace, San Antonio, USA
- 2002 From/To, Documenta11, Kassel, D
- 2000-01 Architectures of Discourse, 2001, Foundation Tapies, ES
- 1999-02 haus.0, four year program as Artistic Director, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, D
- 1999 From/To, Witte de With, Rotterdam, NL.
- 1997 Parts, Kunstverein München, Munich, D
- 1995-96 ?, (in NowHere), Louisiana Museum, DK, Curator Ute Meta Bauer, participation as Co-Curator / Artist
- 1995 Scale, Forum Stadtpark Prag, Prague, CR
- 1993 BREA-KD-OWN, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, B
- 1992-93 Project Unité, Firminy, F, Curator: Yves Aupetitalot
- 1992 Contact, Galerie Nagel, Cologne, D
- 1990 Orphée 1990, Maison de la Culture et de la Communication, Saint-Etienne, F
- 1989 (re)Orient, Galerie Lorenz, Paris, F
- 1988 Wechselkurse, Galerie Dürr, Munich, D
- 1987 Publications: Terminal Zone / R.O.O.M.
External links
- Shar(e)d Domains
- Documenta11
- Witte de With
- From/To
- haus.0
- Fareed Armaly
- Fareed Armaly, curator of the "Tawfik Saleh" cinema series at the MACBA, talks about Tawfik Saleh at Ràdio Web MACBA.
- "Some thoughts about the künstler in the haus: the haus.0 program (1999-2002) in Künstlerhaus Stuttgart", INTERVIEW, Künstlerhaus Wien, 21. Oktober 2010