US-based artists of the Arab diaspora who have explored the interventionist potential of new media have often done so within the context of the American spectacle: a reality in which life is reduced to mere representation and social interactions and civic engagement are mediated through mass media and mass consumption. This reduction of life into a flow of imagery that renews itself as it permeates the public realm has been scrutinized in art since the 1960s, when the celebratory veneer of the post-war art scene began to crack as the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War activism overturned national discussions. Today, as the War on Terror is at the center of the spectacular order, artists such as Jackie Salloum, Hamdi Attia, Nida Sinnokrot, Wafaa Bilal, and Rheim Alkadhi have engaged evolving technologies to probe the effects of a militarized culture that is sustained at all institutional and socioeconomic levels. Through the use of new media, they strategically demystify and complicate the American culture industry’s dominant image.
In the early stages of the United States’ nationhood, art played a pivotal role in the formation of its official persona. Dominating the first two centuries of American art history are depictions of the military leadership that led to the establishment of the independent union of states, alongside portraits of settlers and their descendants who benefited from the development of the colonies and their transition into self-governance. Frequently within historical scenes, outdoor settings are shown as feral landscapes (or in some cases seascapes) that are tamed by Euro-American stalwarts. This initial projection of rugged heroism has remained a hallmark of state-sanctioned culture. With the strengthening of the republic’s political and business classes, such portraits moved from patriotic valour to representations of cultivated wealth without shedding concepts of power. While in some cases of paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries signs of individual success, pedigree and so-called high culture do not directly reference the nation’s steady militarization, they none the less allude to ideals that have been nurtured by an imperialist history.
Throughout the twentieth century and into the present, federal agencies (and the industries that drive them) have continued to advocate military chic, the normalization of violence and the fiscal, cultural and political support of the nation’s armed forces, effectively sustaining ‘the war effort’ through a mass culture that transcends gender, race, age, sexuality and religion, as it benefits from savvy, demographic-based marketing and corporate sponsorship. Within this spectacle society, popular culture and the mainstream art world are mutually informed — the former is the most visible platform of the spectacular while the latter’s investment in it is simply understated.
While art and empire have always gone hand in hand — patronage of the arts at the behest of ruling classes and their military exploits is as old as civilization itself — the United States has held an advantage in the modern era. By the end of World War II it had become a global superpower. In addition to breakthroughs in mass communication, manufacturing, and transportation technology, a booming war economy established the nation as a political center. Artists and intellectuals fleeing Europe’s war-torn cities flocked to New York and Los Angeles, bringing the impetus of modern art scenes with them. Recognizing this position, the American government exported a consumerist-oriented way of life that was marketed as an expression of twentieth-century democracy and innovation. Must-have products were designed by corporations with the aesthetic of advanced weaponry, embellishing a newfound sense of confidence while relating it to American military might; economy, power, and visual culture were thus linked like never before. Buildings, cars, household appliances and electronic devices, for example, were outfitted in chrome-trim shells, mimicking combat machinery. Fitting of the spectacular, mass media continued to recycle and tweak its basic mock-ups to address the emerging demands of modern social life. The transformation of the idealized woman from Rosie the Riveter, the icon that represented a generation of women working in factories during World War II, to the hyper-sexualized post-war ‘bombshell’ is but one illustration, as social constructs (in this case gender norms) continued to be politicized and geared towards consumption.
In order to carry out the influence of this public campaign in the arts, agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency launched a clandestine “cultural diplomacy” program that sought to further the United States’ image and undercut political competitors. This strategic use of the visual had an immediate precedent in the Federal Arts Project of the Great Depression, which Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented to relieve the cultural sector, jumpstart the economy, and boost public morale. Later, as the country entered World War II, the same artists who had been supported by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration were enlisted to take part in pro-war exhibitions and design campaigns for military goods packaging, army fatigues, and national defence advertisements. The anti-communism “Cultural Cold War” that was launched just a few years later employed government-sponsored organizations, institutions, publications, and an extensive network of writers, artists, curators, and filmmakers to promote mainstream American culture, specifically at home and in western Europe (its target audience) as an attractive alternative to what Harry Truman referred to as the “tyranny against freedom.” [1] The classification of a Cold War bogeyman (or enemy) as part of a mythical world stage was merely adopted from an age-old tactic.
A good-and-evil binary has prevailed throughout American history in innumerable media and discourses, constituting a sophisticated form of psychological warfare that exploits the desires and fears of a disaffected population. Since the dawn of American imperialism, when vast swathes of foreign-controlled territories were seized by force and annexed to the republic amidst the era of Manifest Destiny, notions of superiority against the supposed threat of external adversaries have shaped nationalist rhetoric. In the mid 1800s, the arrival of photography occurred just in time for the documentation of a series of wars that secured the United States’ economic and geopolitical interests in North America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Every military strike or conflict thereafter has been visually recorded and sold to the public through mass media, thus underwriting the national spectacle.
What distinguishes the US War on Terror from previous phases of militarization is the studied history with which American power now reinforces its hegemonic culture. With the evolution of the photographic image defining over a century of visual culture, advocates and agents of the War on Terror, and the Military Industrial Complex in general, have a clear understanding of how the binary of desire and fear can be worked into virtually every aspect of domestic life through the reclamation of tropes that are fastened in history but repackaged as contemporaneous representations of today’s world. While the culture industry’s major facets continue to operate under the sway of official political discourse, the increasingly interactive capabilities of new media have made for an ideal vehicle, ensuring public passivity with an emphasis on escapism and socialized phobias. As its many proponents continue to indulge in exceptionalism versus “tyranny against freedom” narratives, with Islam and the Arab world as the subjects of a post-9/11 “cultural Cold War,” artists have taken to turning the spectacle on itself by altering its myths through the various media that transmit them. [2]
In Jackie Salloum’s experimental short Planet of the Arabs (2004) an inundation of violence visually assaults the viewer as clips from primetime television dramas, Hollywood movies, and Looney Tunes cartoons are stitched together to form a fictional action film trailer. Allowing enough time in each scene for a specific stereotype to be revealed — Arabs as terrorists, as desert-haunting villains or as backward, nearly unintelligible buffoons — the artist spares no detail of the US entertainment industry’s long history of engaging a certain brand of pejorative imagery. Wars, hijackings, car explosions, and courtroom questionings provide the mandatory context; the presence of blonde damsels in distress and the boorish young American men (or mature machos) who will save them creates a counterpoint. Placed between these scenes are sobering excerpts from the satirical film Network (1976) in which actor Peter Finch plays a former broadcaster turned preacher who is on a crusade against television and its subduing of the masses.
The disturbing nature of Planet of the Arabs is derived from the sheer volume of such insidious (albeit absurd) portrayals in light of the perils of a plugged-in society described in Finch’s now cliched tirade. In their original form — as details of individual scenes in widely distributed movies and television programs — such racist images would presumably go unnoticed by most, yet the number of clips that are shown spanning decades and the speed with which they are delivered leaves the viewer with the impression of a daunting repository.
Salloum’s nine-minute trailer was inspired by Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001), an exhaustive study of 950 pre- 9/11 films in which Arabs are demonized. In contrast to the image bank that is recreated in Planet of the Arabs, the artist’s Arabs A-go-go (2003), a two-minute music video comprised of excerpts from mid-twentieth-century films, provides a glimpse into some of the ways that Arabs have portrayed themselves through their own film industry. In an accompanying statement, Salloum described this earlier short as featuring “footage of Arabs as you’ve never seen them before — unless you’re an Arab.” Clips from dramas, musicals, and romantic comedies, which show protagonists in light-hearted beach-blanket dance sequences, swinging-sixties espionage car chases and disco-era parties — all with the relative flavour of belly-dancing solos and dabke lines — also indicate the impact of globalization and the construction of modern identities through a popular culture that embraced an American aesthetic. Together, these two shorts reveal the set of representational politics that have been peddled in direct correlation to the United States’ double-dealing policies towards the Arab world, dating back to World War II when the nascent superpower was attempting to strengthen its influence (and that of its allies) in the Middle East and North Africa. Other examples of Salloum’s artwork, such as children’s war toys that have been modified and repackaged with facts about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and gumball machines filled with trinkets commemorating revolutionary figures or Palestinian refugees, similarly subvert the subliminal messaging of political and social norms in the seemingly innocent material of popular culture.
Salloum’s use of “naturalized” images of Arabs and Muslims in Planet of the Arabs exemplifies a type of artistic intervention that has cyclically resurfaced in American art over the past five decades, most intensely during periods of war. The Vietnam War era marked the first notable juncture in American history to witness a wide range of artists who questioned the mass media apparatus by emphasizing the dystopian links between art world institutions and the market, mass consumption and the spectacle of violence dictating American culture. Andy Warhol’s Disasters (1962–63) and Race Riot (1963–64) series, Martha Rosler’s Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful series (1967– 72), and the strikes and protests of the Art Workers’ Coalition are among a number of seminal works that radicalized American art and tapped into the sentiments of a simmering, sceptical society, as they questioned race, gender, and class divisions amidst the crumbling facade of dominant culture.
The 1960s and 1970s have also been identified with the rise of post-modernism and a notable shift in artistic practices in relation to the market, patronage, and the increased sway of gallerists. [3] The founding of the National Endowment of the Arts in 1966, which lobbied for the overt involvement of corporations and encouraged artists to develop careers as “professionals,” furthered the mistrust of cultural institutions and the mainstream art world that was gaining momentum in a move against the Abstract Expressionists and formalist warriors — such as critic Clement Greenberg — who were recruited as representatives of nationalist platforms at the beginning of the Cold War. Artists seeking to work outside institutional frameworks forged a renewed interest in the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and were commonly influenced by Fluxus, turning to performance, found objects, installation and video art when traditional art practices were deemed less effective in articulating the sense of alienation that, to paraphrase Guy Debord, is manufactured as one of the main goals of capitalist spectacle. [4]
Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle has since been critical to the development of media art, specifically its call for acts of detournement, which aim to destablize mass-media images by repurposing their essential components into new significations. Informed by Roland Barthes’ semiotic theory of the metalanguage of myths, Debord and the Situationists International (1957–72), a group of likeminded artists, intellectuals and activists, argued that a “parodic-serious stage” of “detourned” images could function as a collective sign of protest by negating the “previous organization of expression,” that is, the existing mythology that reflects and reinforces the spectacular order. [5] Post- 9/11 examples of detournement such as Salloum’s often take the significations of the War on Terror’s mythical language as their bases, overemphasizing their forms and concepts to the point of absurdity with scathing seriousness.
Similarly, Hamdi Attia uses the internet to appropriate sound bites, television footage, website screenshots, and news quotes in a series of video works underscoring the interchangeable lexicon of today’s neoliberal and neoconservative punditry. Search engines function as media feeds as the artist sifts through results for a familiar line-up of personalities, including former assistant US Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, pseudo Middle East expert Daniel Pipes, and well-known New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Attia is particularly interested in how such figures shape American political discourse as gatekeepers or producers of information by “translating” contemporary perceptions of the Middle East to the public.
In The Prince (2005), the artist takes the unravelling of Perle’s political career as his starting point, collecting online material to compose a portrait of the disgraced defence lobbyist. A scroll of the innumerable Internet images that are returned when searching Perle’s name is used as an opening sequence to the 11-minute video. A military-like soundtrack — which happens to be an instrumental version of the 1960s Mickey Mouse Club theme song — plays in the background, bringing to mind the embellishments of official pageantry. Various scenes of Perle arguing for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq, citing the growing threat of future attacks and expressing his support of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are stacked as a pyramid in one particular sequence, creating a mound of public appearances that were taped prior to the 2003 American invasion. Perle is calm, seemingly rational, and tends to have a command of his audience — characteristics that make for a certain appeal and the pronouncement of an authoritative voice. Yet Attia gradually takes apart the aura surrounding his persona as he incorporates a variety of clips with allegorical interludes, which are comprised of inconsequential images and reveal the general hubris of the pundit’s delivery of his “truths” du jour. Laughing tracks, race car scenes, and a tacky patriotic soundtrack also connect the American political landscape with examples of the lowbrow, readymade trappings that — although originally staples of “mindless” popular culture — have been procured as viewer stimulants in national news media. In the foreground of this rolling collage is a related news ticker of Perle’s talking-head arguments.
A key facet of Attia’s detourned media relies on what he identifies as “the instability of the authority of the text, the image, and sound, and the relationships between them.” [6] In the process of altering online news footage, television recordings, and filmed lectures, the artist searches for “openings” or slippages that expose the performative dimensions of the “translation” in question. In Two Performances.ram (2006/7), Attia juxtaposes Thomas Friedman’s persona with that of the Egyptian Muslim televangelist Amr Khaled. In addition to a striking resemblance — both are middle-aged men with moustaches, who wear suits — the two figures display parallel approaches to engaging their followers. The sequence on Friedman is titled Rehearsal Tape, alluding to the numerous times that the American columnist has given the same lecture on globalization at different venues using repeated inflections, catch phrases, gestures, and jokes. Throughout the rehearsed lecture, Friedman appeals to his audience (and viewers) by incorporating personal anecdotes and dramatics as he attempts to theorize the political economy of twenty-first-century interactions and the technology that has now forged an unprecedented dependency between today’s superpowers and so-called developing nations. With a degree of hysteria, he warns Americans of the growing threat of foreign work forces and an impending joblessness among the middle class as labor is outsourced to places like India and China.
From London, the companion piece to Rehearsal Tape, shows Khaled as he speaks to a large studio audience. Using a split screen, Attia presents excerpts from the preacher’s widely popular television programme alongside Arabic-language commercials for products and services such as Mecca Cola (the “Muslim” knockoff of Coca-Cola) and personal banking. The inclusion of Mecca Cola is an ironical nod to Khaled’s generic public image, which mirrors that of his American counterpart. As he alternates between speaking directly to the camera and addressing audience members, he employs physical cues that are reminiscent of Friedman’s mannerisms. He is at once personable and informed, citing scriptures and stories of the Prophet Mohammed while also speaking in the present tense about the greater Muslim community. Although his citations are vastly different from Friedman’s, the underlying themes of their talks emphasize the same standard of measuring one’s global citizenry according to the amount of effort that is put into participating in a competitive marketplace. Whereas Friedman urges for new American outlooks in the age of globalization, Khaled stresses the importance of involvement in the international economy as a promising path to fulfilment that not only correlates to the spiritual building blocks of Islamic theology but also has a precedent in the admirable international policies and actions of the United States. Both men speak with emphatic deliverance as their custom-made advertisement screens provide complementary visuals. Without Attia’s immediate reference to Friedman, it would be difficult to unpack Khaled’s methodology as an advocate of neoliberalist views. The “opening” that is exposed in From London also works against Friedman, who appears to have competition in his Egyptian stand-in — an outsourced ideologue in a post-9/11 political arena where Muslims comprise a key demographic. Additionally, Attia’s adjustments to these prominent figures include his own Arabic and English subtitles of their lectures, which are shown at the bottom of each video and take liberty in interpreting the terms and meanings of their respective performances.
While in The Prince Attia’s subversion techniques evoke a Situationist stratagem to disrupting mass media images, his comparison of Friedman and Khaled can be understood through Barthes’ proposal for dislodging mythical speech through visual equations that are capable of producing divergent significations. With Friedman’s lecture positioned as the form of neoliberalism informing Khaled’s concept of globalization, Two Performances.ram yields a new signification, one intentionally riddled with farcical indicators of propaganda.
When discussing this series of video works, Attia has observed that in attempts to critique such “structures,” merely countering them with “alternative representation” will fail to upset their basic makeup.[7] Nida Sinnokrot’s CNN/Al Jaz (2002) underscores this fact with a video installation of two international news sources that have taken deliberate roles in “translating” the events of the War on Terror. Using twenty-four-hour satellite feeds of CNN and Al Jazeera, Sinnokrot zeroes in on the similarities between the purportedly opposite brands of media. When launched in the late 1990s, the latter was championed as offering inaccessible coverage of political developments in the Arab world. With the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Qatari station obtained international repute when it frequently provided coveted footage from inside war zones. In Sinnokrot’s installation, live streams initially present the channels as competing outlets; after a mere minute of viewing, however, it becomes clear that their methods for mediating information through calculated text, sound, and imagery are the same. Despite a supposed effort to offset American representations of the Arab world, Al Jazeera adopted a spectacular model from the outset. With the periodic release of exclusive tapes from Al Qaeda and other associated operatives during its initial phase, the news network brought the spectacle of the War on Terror to dramatic heights, becoming one of its main conduits.
Al Jazeera’s debut occurred at a time when a comprehensive overhaul of American national news media had already been completed. Less than a decade before, coverage of the first Gulf War was issued with government dictates that outlined careful instructions on how to present the conflict to the public. The political fallout over the Vietnam War and the debacle of the Iranian hostage crisis were international embarrassments that US officials could not afford to repeat. The graphic elements of eyewitness accounts, photographs, and televised dispatches of the military’s disastrous intervention in southeast Asia is cited as having spurred the anti-Vietnam War movement as young men were drafted in large numbers. The Iranian hostage crisis only further tarnished the United States’ image. With a bloated defence budget under the Reagan administration, American forces ultimately focused on covert operations in Latin America and the Middle East, out of the public eye. In 1991 with the launch of Operation Desert Storm, the military unveiled its updated media wing with digital technology that served to provide long-distance aerial shots and recordings to American news outlets. As United Kingdom-based artist Jananne Al-Ani has noted, advanced weaponry such as reconnaissance aircrafts has allowed US forces to create an Orientalist rendering of Iraq as a desert wasteland outside civilization, from which Americans can maintain a distance.[8]
Wafaa Bilal examines this distance in interactive performances and installations that foreground the psychological dimensions of modern warfare. In Domestic Tension (2007) he lived in a Chicago gallery space for thirty-one days, where his every move was recorded with a live webcam. Viewers were able to communicate with the artist through a chat room on the project’s website and were simultaneously given the option to shoot at him with a robotic paintball machine that was installed in the gallery and could be virtually activated. Although relying on his audience to bring him food and to provide much needed contact, he also lived under their surveillance with the danger of being attacked with yellow paint pellets at any time. Responses from viewers were mixed, ranging from empathetic acts of kindness to violent, racist outbursts. Domestic Tension was inspired by a 2007 news segment on an American soldier who operated Predator drones from a command centre in Colorado. Bilal had lost his younger brother just three years prior to the same type of unmanned weaponry in an aerial attack that was directed towards a location in central Iraq.
The performance’s interactive aspects spotlighted the extent to which viewers were uninhibited in their actions in the absence of a social context that includes checks and balances. Many were openly xenophobic when communicating with the artist online and seemed to enjoy the sadistic exercise of operating the pellet gun without facing repercussions. At the center of much of Bilal’s work on post-9/11 militarization has been the sense of disconnection that arises from certain new media despite the simulation of real-life scenarios with grave consequences. Extending the line between fantasy and reality to its extreme ends, the artist places himself in the crossfire of such simulations to highlight the politicization of the body as it undergoes a process of “othering.” By recreating the experience of war from a civilian perspective, the artist collapses the zone of anonymity that is regulated through the tools of the spectacular, which have grown to include a range of high-tech military-themed media and are utilized to prepare generations of Americans for twenty-first-century warfare.
The application of “domestic” as a term with double meaning in the title of Bilal’s performance recalls Rosler’s Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful. Forty years prior, Rosler sought to puncture the perceived remoteness of military conflicts as filtered through the relative comfort of American consumerist culture and its concept of domesticity by carefully placing images of the horrors of the Vietnam War in advertisements from an interior design magazine. In the 1960s and 70s, images of massacred women and children amidst the setting of middle-class homes did not stray far from what was already shown in the pages of Life magazine, which often ran photo-stories from the frontlines of southeast Asia in issues that also featured profiles of Hollywood actors, popular musicians and sports figures. Bringing the War Home captured this normalization of violence at a significant point in the development of mass media and culture. Although war photography was countered in such publications with polished reproductions of the ideal American home and all its necessary items, it eventually proved too much for the average viewer.
Rosler revisited the series from 2004 to 2008 with additional photomontages that utilize the same cut and paste technique as earlier works to create analogous panoramas of the second US invasion of Iraq. This installment was produced shortly after the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs were leaked to news media. By incorporating images that were captured from the vantage points of American military personnel engaged in acts of torture, Rosler underscores the indisputable role that technology now plays in the lives of those who are forging the landscapes of war. As Susan Sontag first noted in “Regarding the Torture of Others,” the digital trophy snapshots that publically exposed American war crimes in Iraq are commonly distributed and traded online among soldiers, who emulate scenes from action films and pornography as they create virtual deposits of realized fantasies. [9]
Beginning in 2003, Rheim Alkadhi catalogued dozens of military images of the US occupation of Iraq, some of which appear to have been taken by amateur photographers, while others are credited to various news wire agencies. Alkadhi left nearly one hundred and fifty of these pictures intact, uploading them to a user account on Archnet, an online architectural platform that focuses on “the built environment in Muslim societies.” Organizing these found images according to such categories as “conflicted interiors,” “sites of expired markets,” and “destabilized structures,” she created a visual database of “the architecture of war from a psychological standpoint” with scenes of American soldiers searching Iraqi homes, close-ups of decimated public spaces, and anonymous portraits of maimed civilians.
In a larger interventionist project that was produced from 2007 to 2010, Alkadhi created a separate archive of corresponding imagery that can be accessed online under the domain name picturesclerk.com. Digitally altering these photographs, she created new narratives from the visual vestiges of ruin. Soldiers were regularly eliminated from settings, some scenes were combined, and pixelated details were generated to extend added captions or brief descriptions. Each entry occupies its own page, the titles of which are arranged in an “inventory” sidebar.
Charles Merewether has argued that while archives are neither forms of remembrance or history, they do, however, contain “the potential to fragment and destabilize either remembrance as recorded, or history as written, as sufficient means of providing the last word in the account of what has come to pass.” [10] In Alkadhi’s picturesclerk.com inventory, both text and image reflect (and persuade) a degree of intimacy with the artist’s anonymous subjects that is pronounced yet still somehow far from reach. The removed nature of the artist’s vignettes is in part due to the poor reproduction quality of her “pirated” images, an aspect of the project’s process that she welcomed as a confirmation of their pre-existing origins:
I worked with the sensibility of embracing pixels and comparable resolution; the crunchiness was a product of the specific approach, low resolution functioned to freely admit that I was reworking what was stolen or appropriated, in the same moment I believed that any copyright issues would prove moot, the pictures, the presentation of Iraq was illegal alongside the war itself, and so I felt this entitlement, especially as an Iraqi who has wanted to see the place with my own eyes after so long. The images then were from what seemed to me at the time, a military image “feed”; I was consuming then spitting back out masticated imagery. [11]
It is perhaps best to conclude an overview of new media and the spectacle of the War on Terror with Alkadhi’s notion of masticating visual culture, an apt description for the individual artworks discussed in this essay. The deployment of detournement strategies, the rearrangement of semiotic formulas of myths, and the facilitating of interactive performances or online platforms are but a few of the many techniques that artists in the United States have registered in attempts to thwart the updated inner workings of the spectacular. If in such work the present expanse of digital technology was initially acknowledged as an obstacle, ultimately it has shown to provide much needed leverage.
*Author's note, the above essay was written in 2013 and recently published in Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East, ed. Anthony Downey (London: I.B Tauris, 2014). It appears with permission of the publisher.
______________________________________
Footnotes:
1. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), p. 4.
2. The term ‘cultural Cold War’ is used with reference to Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New
Press, 2001), p. 4.
3. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 38.
4. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), p. 32.
5.Ken Knabb (trans.) (1959), ‘Detournment as Negation and Prelude’, Interationale Situationniste #3, Situationist International Online. Available at http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/detournement.html.(accessed 15 March 2013).
6. Kirsten Scheid, ‘Intervening in Translation’, ArteEast Virtual Gallery, 2007.
7. Ibid.
8. Jananne Al-Ani, ‘Acting Out’, in (eds), Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 90.
9. Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, New York Times, 23 May 2004.
10. Charles Merewether, ‘Art and the Archive’ in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 10.
11. Interview with the artist via email, 7 March 2013.