The ‘Gaddafi Archives – Libya Before the Arab Spring’, which opened this week at the London Festival of Photography is an embarrassment of riches. This exhibition of images recovered from the remains of Gaddafi’s archives and rephotographed by a team assembled by Human Rights Watch, opened yesterday at UCL. The first three rooms document official life in Libya from reign of King Idris and then, after the military coup in 1969, extensive images of the five decades of Gaddafi’s rule, including encounters with other leaders, from Nasser to Yasser Arafat, which give some suggestion of the complexion of Libya’s recent diplomatic history. [caption id="attachment_52222" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Colonel Gaddafi and Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Union, holding hands in Moscow, April 27th, 1981 (Courtesy of Michael Christopher Brown/HRW)[/caption] In the next room, television footage of the show trial of Sadiq Hamed Shwehdi in a Libyan basketball stadium in 1984. Shwehdi’s testament ‘admitted’ to being a member of the ‘stray dogs’ and collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to bring down Gaddafi’s government, until the audience – many of whom are children – scream for his execution, which takes place shortly afterwards on live television, an event remembered by many Libyans. In the same room are copies of letters from the CIA to Libya’s secret services, arranging the extraordinary rendition of terrorists to their control. More materials on display include images of military pageants, weapons stockpiles, the Chadian-Libyan conflict, pro-Gaddafi artworks from Sirte and a film explaining the context for Gaddafi’s murder. [caption id="attachment_52225" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Two people who were executed at Benghazi sea port. April 7, 1977 (Courtesy of Peter Bouckaert/HRW)[/caption] At the opening of the exhibition Peter Bouckaert, Emergency Director of  Human Rights Watch, explained that the images were collected at a time when Libyans were setting fire to Gaddafi’s government buildings in the belief that this would ensure he couldn’t return. It would have been interesting to see more evidence of UK collaborations with Libya before the NATO intervention but no doubt more of these invaluable archives will be available soon. The exhibition represents part of a vast project, which Bouckaert described as a contribution to ensuring a visual heritage for Libya’s future, and the photographs have been handed over to the National Transitional Council. More information on the ‘Gaddafi Archives – Libya Before the Arab Spring’ (open until June 29^th) is available here.

Here in London we have been having a lot of trouble with pageants. After the riots last August, the state is hoping that summer plans – the Olympics, the Hackney festival – will be distraction from the impoverishment of life and extensive violence done by the conservative government to the Welfare State. Last month the Queen floated down the Thames on a barge – we were assured that the world was watching – and the celebrations were welcome excuse for the Conservative administration to ensure that the city was millitarised and policed to an extraordinary degree. Half-way through her stately progress the barge passed underneath a small boat, perched high on top of the brutal concretes of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, an arts venue on the city’s south bank. The boat - a collaboration of artist Fiona Banner and David Kohn Architects, built by Living Architecture - is named after the boat Joseph Conrad sailed up the River Congo before writing Heart of Darkness and the project - A Room for London/Roi des Belges - seems to have been conceived in the spirit of this dubious tribute. We blogged about it with some incredulity when the news first hit the internet. Artangel, an innovative London-based commissioning body, invited a series of artists to inhabit the boat. The first of these was technologist and Conrad-enthusiast James Bridle, whose innovation was to set up a weather station and to create 'a ship adrift', a log-book for a fictional double for the boat whose movements, determined by weather conditions in London, you could follow on twitter, if you so choose. In February David Byrne spent a comfortable day in the boat, and compiled a rather appealing track from London’s noises. In March artist-curator Jeremy Deller invited a musician, Chuck, to play songs from the boat's stern to the passing crowds below. In May Fiona Banner invited celebrated British actor Brian Cox to read Orson Welles’s script for his great unmade film of 'Heart of Darkness' (the reading, all 157 minutes of it, can be seen here until June 30). Luc Tuymans, a Belgian artist, was invited by Artangel to produce a painting based on a scene from Conrad’s novel. Tuymans decided instead to base his painting on a still from 'The Moon and Sixpence', a 1942 film adaptation of a Somerset Maugham novel inspired by the Tahitian adventures of French painter Paul Gauguin:

The particular sequence I’m interested in comes at the end of the film. Strickland, the main character, is already dead. His doctor, who speaks with a thick German accent, travels to Tahiti to visit the village where Strickland used to live. He meets with the local wife of the deceased painter and enters his cabin, which was the working place of the artist. Up to this point, the entire movie is in black and white. But when the doctor enters the space, the film jumps into bright colour.

In Tuymans’s painting – Allo! – a man wearing a suit is seen walking past a large, generic painting of weirdly elegant women. The painting is of a photograph of a still image of the painting in the film taken by the artist from a computer screen. This confusing series of framing devices clearly attempts to deconstruct the image of the ‘exotic’ to the extent that it becomes merely an image of the artist himself: a head – reflected in the computer screen – is visible as an indistinct presence on the ‘surface’ of the painting. Tuyman's portraits of Patrice Lumumba practice a similar form of mediation, distorting the image through the accidents and subdued intentions of memory. The insistence that the framing device becomes a totalising subject of the painting – put more simply, how you look defines what you see – is a familiar one within academic discourses about travel literature. The decision not to paint an image based on a fictional text but a painting of a painting from a fictional film inspired by real paintings by Gauguin, inserts pastiche as a defense mechanism against accusations of exoticism. This seems sensible, except perhaps in light of Conrad’s own attempt to do the same. Though he had made a similar journey to the one his novel describes, Conrad decided to place the narrative in the mouth of Marlowe, who tells the story to an unknown narrator on board a ship at Gravesend, the last outpost of ‘civilization’ at the mouth of the Thames. Chinua Achebe’s famous attack on the novel describes this:

It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad’s but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his story. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow, but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person.

I don’t mean to suggest that Tuymans is making the same mistake: in his painting the artist’s own shadowy presence is no more socially determined than the blanched bodies of the women or the intermediate figure standing in the foreground. And, unlike Conrad, the painting is validating its obsession with an unknowable terrain through mediating figures. Tuymans’s painting is interested in the vague and distant exotic which is not known but created in paint; but, given that we in London still have relations with people in distant countries mediated by financial and erotic exploitation, such a deconstruction does not help to map out inter-continental violence. The most recent celebrity inhabitant was the Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle whose good-humoured account of the day was published last month. The article opens with Searle standing naked at night in front of Tuymans’s painting. Searle describes his approach to the painting on the wall of his cabin: “I sit and drink with it; dance around the cabin in front of it and get undressed with it.” 'Apocalypse Now', Francis Ford Coppola’s film relocation of Conrad’s novel to 1970s Vietnam, famously opens with the protagonist dreaming from his Saigon hotel room of forests destroyed by napalm, then freaking out and smashing his mirror. Again and again, these works serve as a mirror in which the distortions of the white male body are seen. Achebe's essay claims that, for Europeans writing about Africa, 'the abandonment of unwholesome thoughts must be its own and only reward.' Tuymans' painting does not confront the persistent problem of understanding other cultures but distills the image of the exotic into a pure vision of 'unwholesome thoughts'. Freud believed all dreams of flight - whether aviation or self-exile to the colonies - are fantasies about erections, a phallocentric vision of the unconscious which goes unchallenged here. Searle remarks that the room ‘is beginning to get to me’ and starts to have fun: “I dance about the cabin, waving my arse first in the direction of the Houses of Parliament …” It’s a shame this fitting tribute to English democracy need be induced by such luxurious detachment; if he were to do the same on the street, the journalist's expression would be swiftly policed. Searle’s identification with the painting produces an excellent analysis: “Approaching his subject, Tuymans keeps a distance, like someone visiting the sick, hovering near the door in case they might catch something.” He spoke to Tuymans before entering the room, and tells us that the artist “said his painting is his joke on modernism, dealing with fake ideas of the new, the exotic and the colourful.” This mock-mock-Gauguin painting, whose subject has disappeared into the abyss of post-modern self-reference and cannibalising tradition, disputes the idea that art can know anything outside the artist himself. This is a conclusion Achebe identifies in Conrad also:

[I]f his intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters.

Conrad, writing from ‘literary’ London, was unable to imagine an African subject with language or culture not imposed by imperialism but natural and universal. Achebe says that this is why he cannot consider the novel to be art. And Tuymans’s painting? Searle's article concludes:

Allo! is a weird thing to spend the night with. But then, so am I. The horror! The horror!

The final declamatory sentences, quoting Conrad’s famous slogan, confirm our original suspicions: this boat is not a special lebensraum for intellectuals but a theme-park attraction profiting from the cultural histories of European colonialism. Amadou & Mariam played a gig there and on BBC Radio 4 Mariella Frostrup had a conversation with some novelists about ‘literary’ London, but there doesn’t seem to have been anyone reflecting on the legacy of Conrad and London’s imperialist past (or indeed its imperialist present). If there’s a problem with Searle’s account, it isn’t lurid enough, and the organisers seem to have failed to invite a more skeptical approach to their project. Tuymans’s bathers belong in a painting but Gauguin was painting women; the distance doesn’t affect the fact of the violence at the heart of the image. The truth is, of course, that you can’t see anything from the boat that isn’t visible on the streets of central London, or at any rate, from the administrated transcendence of the London 'Eye'. As Walter Ralegh - the godfather of English colonialism, who spent most of his adult life by the river, sitting in a prison cell in the Tower of London - realised, to his cost, that the golden city of our daydreams is always around the next bend in the river, a paradise Ralegh died after failing to reach. 'Apocalypse Now' cuts out the initial scenes in the capital which frames Conrad’s narrative. Narratives which remember (after Sartre) that Hell is trying to occupy someone else’s country must recognise that imperialism starts at home. The site of conflict between the individual in London or Belgium and imperialism is not just in the museum or the gallery, and certainly not in 'literary' projects, but in the streets, at home or in the workplace. Last December, the UK’s Congolese communities descended on central London to protest against the contested elections in the DRC. Protesters demanded that the international community realise its responsibilities in relation to this conflict. Thousands gathered, protesters caused one of London's most important underground stations to be closed, private property was damaged, other members of the public threatened and 139 people arrested in one day. How could this recent history be admitted into the space? Sammi Baloji’s work, for example, measures the extraction industries in the DRC against the human body, a form of thinking which starts to expose the violence of global industries towards individuals and communities. And which artists and writers have been documenting the network of relations which continue to exact imperialist violence? It will be interesting to see what Teju Cole, whose novel novel Open City made a precise constellation of life and post-colonial history in New York and Brussels, says in his 'London Address' from the ship in August. Inter-cultural encounters do not happen because of lust for adventure or self-knowledge but as inevitable accompaniments to commerce and colonialism. The computer screen which gave Tuymans his image may well have contained coltan, the mineral whose illegal trade by global corporations has helped to finance violent struggle in eastern Congo. Recently, corporations based in America and London have been accused of endangering the precarious political situation in order to exploit the country’s natural mineral resources. As Achebe reminds us, ‘poetry surely can only be on the side of man’s deliverance and not his enslavement’. The real work of art has new maps of material complicity to contend with. * Photo credit: peripathetic.

The London Festival of Photography has opened, and one of its most appealing features is an exhibition of images by Steve Bloom – Beneath the Surface – a unique document of South African life in the 1970s. There are images of squatters camps, protests (and police violence) in Cape Town, the demolition of buildings in mixed-race neighbourhoods (later repurposed as ‘white areas’), as well as intimate portraits of people in their homes and close-ups of wrinkled and emotionless faces.

One image, above, simply called ‘Manenberg, 1977’, shows a bare-chested man standing in a room whose bare-brick walls we can see behind him. His face is half-turned towards a light source out of shot – a window, presumably – which softly illuminates his head and torso. In his arms a baby whose tipping head, open mouth and hand outstretched towards the viewer provide dramatic lines which off-set the man’s firm grip and solid stance. The baby’s stomach, a shocking white bulge against the man’s shadowed torso, feels like the focal point of the composition. The circumstances of the photograph are unclear: it doesn’t feel like a piece of photojournalism, doesn’t yield up a particle of pre-conceived meaning for the viewer’s consumption. Next to this, the theme is reprised in another photograph, also ‘Manenberg, 1976’, in which a wild-haired young child looks warily up at the camera. She is clutching a white plastic doll wrapped in light swaddling, pressing to its cheek against her mouth, its eyes unfocused and slightly insane, its arms stretched out with a pre-fabricated hunger for affection. These images – from a series taken in the township outside of Cape Town in 1976 (about which, incidentally, Abdullah Ibrahim’s classic piece had been written two years earlier) – are images of empathy and tenderness, found in closely observed moments of relation between light and dark bodies. This relation appears to be  the organising theme of Bloom’s work of this period. In an essay, published by the Guardian and distributed as a small freepaper at the gallery, the photographer reflects that “In the years that I lived in South Africa, I felt discomforted by the unearned rights assured by my white skin.” The work documents different times and places of South African life, the domestic and public existences of polarised demographics: a man sunbathing on Sea Point Beach, someone soliciting donations to a charity for ‘spastics’, women walking past segregated toilets. One of the unearned rights Bloom’s race permitted him was access both into the policed zones of white society and into exclusively ‘coloured’ townships, and the photographer used this to observe privilege and its opposites, juxtaposing images of the leisure of an affluent society and the suffering of an oppressed people. One series of images shows two children walking on a pavement consuming ice creams while, in the background, one man tends to a woman who appears to be injured. The caption reads: “Green Point, Cape Town, 1977; a residential suburb close to the city centre. The effect of apartheid was to engender feelings of indifference across the colour line.” The distance (and awful intimacy) between bodily suffering and pleasure in the same public place to which these images attest is coupled by an unerring tenderness. This is the gaze of the photographer, both removed from the situation and – almost embarrassingly – concerned by it. Bloom left South Africa in 1977, landing in London the day before Steve Biko’s funeral, and lent to the International Defence and Aid fund for Southern Africa, who used them to publicise and raise funds for the anti-apartheid movement. This prevented the photographer’s return to the country of his birth for thirteen years. The exhibition, at the Guardian Gallery, continues until June 28. Some more of these images can be seen here.

Pieter Hugo, the critically acclaimed South African photographer, has done an interview with Guernica (H/T Glenna Gordon) in which he seems to be taking issue with criticisms of his work, especially the "Nollywood" series: "It's quite scary when academics start dictating to artists that they should be politically correct or follow certain rules of behavior -- which means we have to start making dishonest work, which means it becomes didactic and propaganda in nature." In the United Kingdom (where I'm based), the only people who usually invoke "political correctness" are the right-wing press, clamouring about the censorship they would joyfully impose on their enemies, so we were surprised by Hugo's accusation. The direction and details of this outrage are worth close attention. (And we feel compelled to write back since we blogged about the Nollywood series here and here; those posts include comments by our spirited readers.) Hugo seems to reject the content and nature of academic art criticism. In fact, he dictates that we should reject this relationship. Academics must not impose their readings on artworks. It is curious that Hugo assumes that attention to his work by academics is hierarchical, as if, by reading his images, we become not only his judge, but his superior. Curious primarily as Hugo's work seems unusually committed to the idea of forcing his viewers to confront 'problematic' images. That he expects us to do so without being critical, judging the intent of the work according to its content and context, is baffling. No one takes a position of superiority in relation to this work, rather we occupy different positions in related fields -- chronologically different in time and place: he makes the images, we all 'read' them. The second assumption worth questioning is that the academics who criticise his work wield mysterious -- and, in his mind, unnecessary -- power. For an artist so riotously successful as Hugo, this is a strange complaint. (Even AIAC, from our lowly blog perch, has thrown flowers in Hugo's direction.) The main idea Hugo pushes is that this criticism seeks to force his practice into 'dishonesty,' 'didacticism' or 'propaganda'. This charge, in which the work's audience -- and more particularly the professional reader -- is singled out as the stultifier of the artistic ego, is remarkable, and deserves closer attention still. Hugo's anxiety, that criticism might induce the collapse of the integrity of his own work into 'propaganda' -- presumably from a racially 'correct' politics of the image which his work rejects -- is telling. For him, presumably, the artist demands the freedom of his (deeply political) images to be read un-politically. Which is to say that he asks us to imagine that his work couldn't have been different, that it is incapable of change. In making such a charge, the artist blames his critics for the doubt he feels:

I find that very troublesome, very problematic. It's taken me a long time to figure out why it affected me so deeply. It really upset me. It was never my intention in any way.

It's great to hear Hugo is sufficiently attuned to the world that he suffers the lash of the academic tongue with such intensity. Such sensitivity towards criticism surely marks the potential of a great artist. What is odd about the statement above is, however, that Hugo fails to specify what exactly it is that upsets him. Look closely and you'll see that Hugo's argument jumps from disagreement ('troublesome', 'problematic') with the dark forces of political-correctness-mongers to the self-pitying complaint ('it really upset me'). It seems Hugo is not upset by the fact that people think his work is potentially damaging, but the reactionary idea that the phantasmic armies of 'political correctness' are being mobilised against the heroic defenders of Art and Freedom. It is understandably upsetting to be accused of political incorrectness, but Hugo seems to have come full-circle: first, claiming to have performed a necessary and painful self-scrutiny, then passing over any resultant doubt or anxiety, then returning to criticise his critics with this attack. He has already banished the idea that his work might reflect and sustain desires within himself which others find unappealing; so why should the art, or the artist himself, consider change? To quote from Theodor Adorno at this point seems provocatively 'academic', and so be it. In Minima Moralia, the German philosopher claims that, for writers "[w]hat is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole." This Promethean task Adorno demands of writers must be no less extensive for photographers making work as sophisticated as Hugo would no doubt like to be. In view of this, the alternative to Hugo's melancholy, is doubt. Those questions he calls 'troublesome', 'problematic', 'affecting' or 'upsetting', should not induce 'dishonesty', harmful introspection or vulnerability to making (or becoming) 'propaganda'. Hugo must have searched for what critics see in his work -- he surely wouldn't have been so upset if he hadn't -- his scrutiny must have been insufficient. Until this artist can locate within his work that which his fiercest critics see, the whole exercise may be worthless.

Last December, when the Institut d’Egypte was burned down, I thought immediately of Edward Said. Napoleon’s expedition to Europe is described at the beginning of Orientalism, where it is a classic example of how academic and scientific discoveries anticipate and enable imperial conquest. The Institut was established shortly after Napoleon’s invasion, and remained a powerful reminder of that episode until it was set on fire by a Molotov cocktail thrown during protests between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and anti-SCAF protesters. The act, presumably the work of a pro-SCAF provocateur intending to libel the protesters (more on that here), seems to represent a revolutionary image of transition from a region which, in 2011, started to disseminate a mass of images to the rest of the world, images authored by civilians in those countries which demonstrated an assumption of political agency by the people, sadly absent today in the capitals of the ‘free’ world. In January, Al Jazeera published Hussein Omar’s forceful response to suggestions that Egypt was incapable of protecting its own cultural heritage. The  volunteer operation to order and restore the rare holdings of the Institut library after the fire is an important part of this narrative, as is the huge donation of books by Sheik Sultan al-Qasimi. In both instances the preservation of Egypt's cultural heritige is not a condition of Western imperialism, and in this spirit Omar wrote that:

More than ever, a deep engagement with Egypt's heritage will allow them to engage in the important and political role of questioning the totalising narratives that the Egyptian state has long attempted to impose.

The rejection of these totalising narratives appears to have been a consistent characteristic of the ongoing Egyptian revolution, in which state imposition appears increasingly legible, and undermined by individual acts of protest, graffiti, art. The imposition of a totalising dialectic which Said sketches out in Orientalism has receded in this mass of new images from North Africa. Shortly before his death in 2003, Said reasserted that the “orient”, in the context of George Bush’s Middle Eastern adventures, was still a potent political force: the “orient”, he argued, ‘that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century has been made and remade countless times.’ More recently, however, Hamid Dabashi has theorised the end of orientalism – and postcolonialism – in two books: The Arab Spring: The end of Postcolonialism (2011) and Postorientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (2008). You can watch a video of Dabashi discussing the Egyptian revolutions with David Harvey and Anthony Alessandrini, here, in which he claims that: “this is a book that comes out of a deep sense of belonging with this revolutionary moment … and contrary to what metropolitans call the participant-observer, I am not an observer in the Arab revolutions, I’m a participant …” This Thursday (one day after the first round of Egyptian presidential elections), Ahdaf Soueif – Egyptian émigré novelist and founder of Palfest, now based in London – will give the Edward Said lecture at the British Museum. Her title is “Mina’s Banner: Edward Said and the Egyptian Revolution”, which takes its name from “Mina Danial, the young Coptic activist killed by the military in Cairo on October 9, 2011, in the Maspero massacre.” Maspero, the building in downtown Cairo which houses the state television and radio station (and named after French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero) was where Soueif had her first job. In February, Yasmin El-Rashidi wrote about encountering the novelist in Tahrir Square:

I approached her myself when I too, realised who she was; she spoke first of women and their extraordinary role in the revolt, and then looked me in the eye and said that she had dreamt of this. “I had a vision of revolution. It happens in Tahrir – Liberation Square.” (Guardian)

Soueif’s book Cairo: My City, Our Revolution begins:

Many years ago I signed a contract to write a book about Cairo; my Cairo. But the years passed, and I could not write it. When I tried it read like an elegy; and I would not write an elegy for my city.

If it was Soueif’s presence in Cairo which enabled this departure from the elegiac vision of Cairo towards an conception of the city in the revolutionary present, it will be interesting to see how far she agrees with Dabashi’s theoretical sense that the conditions of ‘orientalism’ have vanished from contemporary political cartographies. * Soueif’s lecture, with contributions from Omar Al-Qattan and Jacqueline Rose, is on Thursday at the British Museum (more details here).

Bonhams must have employed some jokers to publicise their latest attempt to cash in on the buoyancy of contemporary African art in the global art market. The London auction house (est. 1793), which merged with rivals Phillips in 2001, have taken the opportunity to declare their position at the vanguard:

There has been an explosion of interest in modern and contemporary art from Africa, and Bonhams 'Africa Now' auction remains at the forefront of the market as the only sale of its kind globally.

By this, of course, they mean Sub-Saharan Africa; Bonhams, as most institutions in the art world, seem unconvinced that artists north of the Sahara have any relation to their southern colleagues. Almost half the lots (by my count, 79 of 215) are works by Nigerian artists. Not only this, but looking at the artists listed, you realise there is a distinct emphasis on the modern, and shockingly little idea about what the contemporary might look like in Africa. Heavy-looking sculptures and figurative paintings of women predominate. The ubiquitous El Anatsui features, as do several paintings by Ben Osaghae (‘Flesh Menu’, above, and ‘Oil Barons’), look particularly interesting. Bonhams is, of course, only involved in the secondary market for works whose value is established, and as such, their programme is entirely driven by an aversion to risk and a preference for conservative objects, but this auction does nothing to reflect the abundance of contemporary artists working on the continent. “Whatever it is,” someone remarked at the opening of the new exhibition at the Jack Bell Gallery, “it’s not Africa now.” * The auction is on Wednesday; if you're in London, perhaps see Sokari Douglas-Camp talk about "What Picasso knew" (details here).

The second Numbi of 2012 happened – with undeniable flamboyance – last Saturday, bringing a team of ‘Afropolitan divas’, and with them an influx of poetry and music from East Africa and elsewhere, to East London. Created in 1998 by artist and activist Kinsi Abdulleh (that's her in the image below with compere Diriye Osman), Numbi, named after "a kind of dance that happens in Somalia where one lets go of one’s inhibitions and gets free" is a platform for collaborations between Somali artists and others. The evening began with a performance from poet-singer Zena Edwards (introduced by Osman as "our number one soul sister"), and poems, most memorably on bad hair and the slave trade in Bristol (respectively), by Dorothea Smartt and Rosie Martin, who read to rhythmic support from several members of what would later become eleven-piece Afrobeat outfit Bronzehead. Following these, a quiet and beautiful set by Eritrean-born singer Miryam Solomon (pictured above) and an accompanying guitarist. Solomon's work seems to be, unfortunately for internet-dwellers, still totally unavailable outside Numbi. The climax of the whole thing was a performance by Somali singer Maryam Mursal who stood alone on stage, accompanied by a backing-track, her arms outstretched towards the audience in antique admonishment to sing her classic Somali u diida ceeb ('Somalia, don’t shame yourself'). Mursal – having effortlessly attained diva status with a life of breaking precedents, government suppression, asylum-seeking, collaborations with Nina Simone and Peter Gabriel – departed after only two songs. The night ended with some Afrobeat from the Bronzehead collective, and a dj set of Afropolitan classics by Bradley Zero. Abdulleh also edits Scarf magazine, which appears yearly, and has published some of the poets involved in Numbi, and diverse other artists, photographers, and writers of poetry, fiction, interviews, and essays. The new edition looks promising, including interviews with Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu (for whose medical sketches see here) and Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara, creative writing by Abdulrazaj Gurnah, and a recipe from Edwidge Danticat. The launch of this year’s SCARF is Tuesday 22^nd May at Rich Mix (details here). * Photo Credits: Cristine Leone.

The moderator received a text which said that the political philosopher was trying to find an internet café, then another saying Mbembe was trying to find an internet café with Skype, then another saying that he was trying to find an internet café with Skype in a part of the city where there wasn’t a power-cut.

"Coca-Cola Bird" stands facing the corner of the gallery, half-turned towards us in surprise or exhibition, oily red paint spun across the bucket cocked over her head, the same brash color on the feathered tutu winding around her waist. Her chest sprouts sparkling empty bottles bearing the famous label, and familiar labile curves.

Vanessa Branson stands, hands on hips, her loosely hanging skirt tails give her the figure of a Western women making modest concessions to the predictable inquisitive gaze of an Arabic polis. Her trainers are burnished gold -- a playful note -- and what you wouldn’t be forgiven for calling “ethnic jewellery” is slung around her neck. She has just organized the 4th Marrakech Biennale and looks proud of this achievement. Next to her, one of the young curators, Carson Chan, is dressed entirely in black, wearing statement glasses, with folded arms submitting mournfully to the publicity shot, any visible reluctance counterbalanced by a quiet confidence. It’s quite clear who has the money, and who already suspects he knows how this image will be read. Jamaa, a group of Moroccan and international artists who aim to make an intervention ‘for’ the biennale (but not necessarily ‘in’ it) have posted an excerpt of an email from Chan, who realizes that this photograph “encapsulates the many problematics of the biennale”. On the wall behind the two are posters which, Chan says, the interns assumed were ‘advertisement by the theatre royal’. This is a nice irony: they are in fact works from the exhibition itself. This raises an important question: who does this art speak to? The (local) participants who 'misread' this work of art as publicity? Or the photographer of this shot, who chose to shoot his subjects against this background to give it, as Chan ruefully identifies, an ‘“exotic” look? There have been internet rumblings around the biennale -- called Surrender -- which opened two weeks ago. The centerpiece is an exhibition -- Higher Atlas -- which runs until May. We noted some potential problems for the project just after it opened: the program looked self-defeating: an odd selection of Western artists, too few Moroccans, and one Cameroonian. Looking at the festival's brief history the determining factors for these priorities and exclusions become clearer. Established in 2005 by Branson -- entrepreneur and sister of Richard, Britain's cheekiest billionaire -- the festival publicity boasts it is the first trilingual festival in North Africa. Branson lives in London's exclusive Notting Hill, but travels often to Marrakech, where she owns a boutique hotel. In this interview, Branson admits that she still is an 'outsider' in Morocco, but cheerily adds that it 'gives you a position where you can see everything coming and going'. This is a useful summary of the poor assumptions of this project: that the insights afforded to someone who travels to a city for pleasure, in publicity stunts with the super-rich, or to establish boutique hotels, can achieve anything more than brief and partial. Branson first travelled to the country during her brother's famed (?) attempts to traverse the world in a large publicity balloon. The Branson family business is, it seems, hot air. The biennale was, she says, an attempt to single-handedly redress the 'social madness' which happened after 9/11: "I tried to replac[e] the balance a little bit by having the arts festival. I know that arts can be a wonderful platform to debate topics like identity, women's rights, freedom of speech. Free and creative thinking haven't been encouraged in islamic countries." This biennale, it seems, is Vanessa Branson's answer for Morocco’s -- indeed the wider Arabic world’s -- problems.

Q: Does the discussion feel liberating? A: Definitely. There is no tradition in criticism or in reading. The Koran was the only book that was read, the first decent literature was published in the late 60ies.

But who has been liberated by these discussions? Branson -- or the country of Morocco? The country, she seems to be suggesting, is feeling the warm glow of Western liberal democracy, thanks, in some small part, to this occasional program of contemporary art, literature and film. Perhaps Branson feels liberated by the idea that she is bringing the very concept of criticism to virgin lands (no pun intended). Who could have foreseen that Moroccan modernity would receive such a heroic transformation at the hands of a Western woman? Coverage of previous biennales has been similarly ridiculous, including this New York Times piece, entitled ‘Boldly Bringing Art to Old Morocco’. The transformation of Marrakech which the biennale apparently fostered, has made the city into a ‘creative hub’. This means Moroccan artists don’t ‘go and live in Paris and New York’. Such goals are surely positive, as the ongoing debate into African contemporary art and its diaspora constantly iterates. The organizers say real exchanges that take place at the festival are made possible through the biennale's relationship with the local university, whose students intern to help with the administration and whose families give resident artists real contact with local people. Branson explains the thinking behind this year's title:

Q: What says the 2012 title Surrender for you? A: We chose this title for [its ambiguity]. It shows the world how open minded Marrakech is as a city. To the Arab speaker Surrender means Open your mind. Surrender your self to new ideas and doesn't necessarily have a religious connotation.

The promises Branson makes for the impact of her festival are determinedly secular. As if religion should play a part in such 'cultural' conversations. As if Islam doesn’t represent an extraordinarily diverse and sophisticated critical and literary culture. If Branson celebrates the biennale's stance 'at odds with the world perception of anti Islamic feeling', it is because her Morocco is not Islamic. The imperative -- Surrender -- stands alone. This is contemporary art's entreaty to the citizens of Marrakech: surrender your critical judgments, your religious views, your cultural background, the narrow confines of your epistemic system, shed the habiliments of your lives at the door; enter and let International Contemporary Art give you its thoughts. Resistance is futile! Next, consider Carson Chan and Nadim Sammam, the two young curators of the Biennale's Main Visual Arts Exhibition. Both have impressive CVs which detail extensive work in European and American contemporary art, reproduced in most of the articles on the festival. Consider their impressive eye-wear, both avant-garde and practical! Chan is ying to Samman’s yang. Chan’s plain black robe and basic sandals represent a monkish devotion to the aesthetic. Samman wears a garment spotted with Damien Hirst’s trademark which makes him look like an outpatient at a ward for victims of post-modernity. His retro trainers, left diffidently untied, smack of weltschmertz. The building they stand in front of represents Morocco: bare and authentic, a wall for their art. The way perspective works means they are almost as tall as the building, their excessively large bodies obscure the door. This interview with Carson Chan is instructive. It smacks of the good intentions and political sensitivities behind the whole project. It turns out Vanessa met him at Art Basel in Miami, where he impressed her with an iPad presentation of his past exhibitions. She had met Nadim at an exhibition in London the previous month. Chan's reaction to his experiences in Marrakech mainly involve pleasurable surprise at the (presumably correct) responses by 'visitors that have had very little exposure to contemporary art'.

Q: Did the “arab spring” affect you curating this project? A: The so-called Arab Spring (no one here would ever associate any kind of political unrest as a problem relating to other countries…) was definitely on my mind when I started conceptualizing the exhibition. Before spending time at in Marrakech, all I knew of Morocco was what I read about in the media -- a politics biased reading if anything. The very fact that we made an exhibition of contemporary culture was a response to politic-heavy understanding of North Africa.

At Africa is a Country, we approve of skepticism to do with the ‘Arab Spring’ designation, but here it is misapplied. The suggestion that political unrest is unrelated to similar struggles in neighboring countries is obviously ludicrous. If anything the ‘Arab Spring’ proved that repressed elements in society are capable of identification beyond national borders. Not 'we want what they have' but 'we want what they want'. Equally ludicrous are the claims to representativeness Carson makes: ‘no one here would ever …’ But this is an exhibition, as he reminds us, which was ‘curated to appeal first and foremost to the senses’. We all have them, right? But can we say with any confidence that the senses transcend political determination? Just as Branson claims to sense Marrakech being liberated by her festival, these curators seem to think they have constructed a new sensual geography. Carson’s intuition that Morocco's representation in the Western media is politically determined is fine, but the suggestion that these two curators could somehow achieve a radically different cartography of Morocco’s position in the contemporary world picture is absurd. Lastly, his measurement of normality (‘[p]eople here’ are ‘just like everywhere else’) is worrying: Carson’s discovery that ‘[p]eople here’ are ‘just like everywhere else’ is founded on the fact that many Moroccans he has come across are active participants in global capitalism, identification through shopping or using the internet. The interview ends on an odd note: Chan notes that the ‘exhibition vernissage’ was for him the most stimulating part of the whole project. Is it cruel to suggest that this is telling -- that the curator’s favorite moment happened before the public entered? In response to an invitation to participate in the biennale, Jamaa formulated an intervention which manifests itself as a ‘Proposal. Statement. Interview. Conversation.’ (You can read it here.) It makes a series of implicit criticisms of the theoretical grounding of the biennale. Quoting from Chan’s essay in the exhibition’s bilingual (English and French) catalogue it seems the organizers are trying to be sensitive to the political problems they face. Chan seems blithely positive about the impact of such events, which “not only bring with them a diversification of how art is defined and culture disseminated, but the financial incentives from cultural tourism (i.e. increased hotel, restaurant, retail, and transportation revenue) and the suggestion of societal maturity [which will] have a visceral effect on the local economy and culture”. Post-colonial questions into the politics of this ‘maturity’ is, Chan believes, “like beating an old horse”. If this commentary has appeared gratuitously aggressive, it is because there simply has not been careful enough thinking into the politics of local and global, of how international contemporary art maps out the countries which it claims to be constituted by. This event could have staged conversations with the rest of the world which originated from within the community itself. Branson’s money could have been spent on a project which actually engaged the local culture, bringing it into a new conversation with an international community. For Chan, this exhibition took place in a country “like any other”, for an audience that isn’t “uniquely different”. These statements refuse to acknowledge that an exhibition of contemporary art constitutes a gesture always partly determined by the culture in which it is staged. The lack of thought about what this culture might be is unforgivable. The organizers don’t seem to really care. We must remember, after all, we have been told to surrender ourselves.

Nadine Hammam's work turned out to be “too risky” for Art Dubai. Her new exhibition, Tank Girl, opens tonight at the Gallery Misr (Cairo, Egypt).

The emigrants Céline Condorelli interviewed about their past lives in Alexandria, Egypt, often arrived at this conclusion: “Il n'y a plus rien [There is nothing left]." Condorelli, an artist of Italian and Egyptian descent currently based in London, found that Alexandria was experienced, even in the classical age, as a a city “that has been”. She sees melancholia in the architecture of a place which constantly figures inevitability of its destruction. This idea, she recognizes, has implications for the city’s current inhabitants. “There is always a shadow in statements like this, I wanted to look in the shadow.” This search resulted in a constellation of materials which Condorelli exhibited as Il n’y a plus rien, last year at the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum and Manifesta 8 in Murcia in 2010. There is something almost funny about this (over)statement; the city, the artist reflects, “hasn’t been bombarded … there hasn’t been an earthquake.” But this vision speaks to the reality experienced by those who are forced to leave the city in which they have built their lives. Condorelli spoke to exiles who had left the country in 1956. A large population of Italians, Jews and Greeks worked in the cotton production industry, and many immediately lost their livelihoods when it was nationalised. “They didn’t exactly have to leave violently, but became poor overnight.” The cotton exchange was also the stage for Nasser’s declaration that he had nationalised the Suez Canal Company. The cotton exchange was, with the Bourse, at the centre of Alexandria's commercial district, whose heart was Midan al-Tahrir (Liberation Square). Under the French it was called Place des Consuls, then renamed after the Ottoman governor Mohammed Ali. Condorelli's work attempts to recover histories of this space which have been overlaid by recent events, and examine how it is reproduced in cultural memory. She is, she says, looking for what is “embedded in the square”. These exhibitions present found materials alongside “semi-fictional post-cards”, new footage from the city, archival research into the cotton industry, and historical research into the former revolutions. With this, the project’s interest in history as repetition becomes clear. If there is a melancholia to this work, it comes from the idea that the revolutions of the present may, in the future, become the failed revolutions of the past. The first ‘movement’ of this project traces the journeys of ‘Egyptian’ cotton through India, Italy, and Lancashire. In the second, the painful journeys of the exile, constantly looking back at the ruins of a former life, is measured against the tireless movement of trade. * Part of this work can be seen at the Social Fabric exhibition at the Rivington Gallery in London (until March 11th) and then goes to Oslo.