Lebanese Archive project by artist Ania Dabrowska is inspired by the previously unknown, personal collection of photographs belonging to Diab Alkarssifi, a former photojournalist from Lebanon. The collection consists of his work, family albums, and photographs from studios in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo and covers over 100 years of cultural and political history of Lebanon and the Middle East. It documents his student years in Moscow and Budapest, the Lebanese Civil Wars and local events in his home city of Baalbeck, close to the Syrian border.
Since 2004, Bidoun has filled a gaping hole in the arts and culture coverage of the Middle East, pioneering a distinctive voice that is intelligent, critical, and original. From the beginning, Bidoun has served as a platform — for new questions, images, and ideas about the Middle East. Bidoun’s activities fall in three primary areas: publishing, educational, and curatorial. To date, our projects have included a range of pursuits: curatorial initiatives, educational programs, artist commissions, talks, tours, performances, books, an itinerant library, and an online archive of avant-garde media.
These are images that urban black working- and middle-class families had commissioned, requested, or tacitly sanctioned. They are left behind by dead relatives, where they sometimes hang on obscure parlor walls in the townships. In some families they are coveted as treasures, displacing totems in discursive narratives about identity, lineage, and personality. Continue reading Santu Mofokeng→
Concreta surge de un deseo compartido y de una carencia: el deseo de construir una plataforma desde la que contribuir a la reflexión contemporánea sobre la imagen, a través de la publicación de una revista semestral y de una serie de libros de artista; y de hacerlo desde un lugar preciso, una comunidad marcada durante los últimos quince años por la desaparición sistemática de la infraestructura cultural dedicada a las artes plásticas y visuales. Esta situación local de crisis cultural se suma a la actual situación de colapso global del capitalismo financiero, que apunta hacia un cambio de paradigma en muchos aspectos, no solo a un nivel macroeconómico sino también, y sobre todo, micropolítico, anunciando un oscuro futuro para la cultura y las artes.
Part of his series on sex workers in Lourenço Marques (published in the 2004 book Our Nightly Bread) was included in the 1996 exhibition In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to the Present at the Guggenheim Museum. In these extraordinary images, made in the 1960s and ’70s, Rangel’s sensitivity to his subject matter and his affection for the city of his birth are clear. In the nightclubs of Lourenço Marques it seemed possible to put aside the constraints of life in a repressive society. Sailors from international vessels docked at the port made their way to clubs like Casablanca and the Ritz, where they mingled with locals, soldiers, and holidaymakers from apartheid South Africa. Experimenting with fast film, Rangel shot without flash in the clubs, unobtrusively making images that would represent a pivotal moment in the history of Mozambique, between the death of colonial rule and the civil war that followed independence. This work cemented rangel’s reputation as the foremost documenter of Mozambican life, demonstrating his formidable aesthetic sensibility and the humanity that underpinned his images.
Contemporary Photography Index 