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.

It seems rather arbitrary to pick out the African artists from ‘The Ungovernables’, the New Museum’s triennial show. The first thing that appears (if, like me, you start on the fifth floor and work your way down) is a neat stack of Zimbabwean billion dollar bills, put there by Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong. The show brings together thirty-four different individual artists and collectives. All the artists were born in the 70s and 80s, but beyond this the curation refuses to place the diverse works in any categories. Two Egyptian artists were, for me, among the show’s highlights. Against much of the Egyptian contemporary art recently discussed here, this is art which scrupulously rejects ‘revolutionary kitsch’. I’d seen pictures of Iman Issa’s work before – colourful shapes like wild prostheses out of a Mondrian painting – which didn’t communicate much. But in the white cube gallery space (see above) the clear lines and planes of these inscrutable monuments have a peculiar impact. It’s difficult to know what to say about Hassan Khan’s film “Jewel” (still below) – which shows two men dancing to a Sha’bi soundtrack – it’s great. Seriously, hypnotically playful. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits achieve a drama which reminds me of Manet’s ability to illuminate darkness with a point of light. On the ground floor the work of the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project covers one wall. We are keen to see more of this ambitious organisation, recently established in Lagos. See their blog on OccupyNigeria here. In the same room, Nana Oforiatta-Ayim’s film ‘Nowhere Else But Here’ presents a writerly account of a roadtrip with the Invisible Borders group: http://vimeo.com/37006434

Last month the Daily Beast decided that Cairo had lost its voice. It reminded me of a New York Times article which renamed Cairo The City Where You Can't Hear Yourself Scream. It’s a city (or something), not a commercial for cough medicine. This seems to be a commonplace for writing about cities in developing countries; the overwhelming noise of the city, this truism dictates, has deprived its inhabitants the self-expression you see in the hushed sanctuary of a Western metropolis. Does this mean the sound of the traffic heard by the correspondent from on taxi journeys between the airport, hotel, meetings, dinner and airport. What about the suburbs which corral the city? This dramatises the Arab Spring as a deprivation - rather than an extraordinary realisation of - voice. This kind of writing has too often forgotten that cities in America and the UK have witnessed an array of diverse and innovative acts of police aggression against protesters. Now, the Beast has tried to characterise a 'threat to contemporary art' by Egyptian ‘Islamists’. They quote Weaam El-Masry, who is concerned, no doubt rightly, that her sketches of globular naked women will provoke negative reactions from conservatives. The suggestion, however, that these works are ‘risque by almost any standards’ is untrue. Dark allusions to potential ‘Islamist’ aggression does not serve the art community, who remain committed to representing themselves. Events in the last year have raised some important questions and some real challenges to art: can a vibrant community be sustained while self-expression is restricted by a political elite, education system, widespread poverty and conservativism? Since the revolution, the country – and Cairo in particular – has seen a significant influx of foreign journalists in search of artists. Things like ‘The Noise of Cairo’ – a documentary (which interviews some of the artists I've mentioned in recent posts) by German filmmaker, Heiko Lange, seem to celebrate 2011 as a new opportunity for artistic self-expression. And yet a widespread conclusion in the international media finds revolutionary art embarrassingly straightforward. The truth is probably more complex – although the best art of the post-Mubarak era has not yet been made, the revolution has posed some difficult and valuable problems which are already being worked through. Suggestions that making art is impossible in Egypt are unhelpful, and journalism that hears Egyptian self-expression as a stifled scream is deeply suspect.

Om Kalthoum, the late great Egyptian singer, stands in the studio of Khaled Hafez. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open in song or lament. There is not one of her, but six (including a shadow), laser-printed repetitively across a wide canvas. She has her trademark hair, evening dress, large earrings. One hand raised in emphasis. The other holds a curious flesh-coloured object. A stained shawl? A chicken with its neck wrung? ‘First as tragedy, then as farce.’ Khaled, one of the most internationally-celebrated Egyptian painters, is working through the visual clichés of her legacy. One of Kalthoum’s nicknames is Arabic for “the woman”, a word he says comes from Isis. For Khaled, the tension between her quest for a secular womanhood, and the old-fashioned elegance she represents, makes her an embodiment of independent Egypt. I visited Khaled’s studio in Heliopolis at the beginning of January to ask for his perspective on contemporary art and the situation in Cairo. “I was teaching in January [2011] and, for the first time, no students turned up. I said ‘Okay, we will arrange for another day.’ But the next week they said ‘are you coming to the protest?’” Khaled went to school with Gamal Mubarak (“we played soccer together”). This is perhaps partly why the revolution represented such a shock: “we were politically programmed. We were deceived.” Khaled trained as a doctor, and during the protests he revisited this profession; he and his wife visited Tahrir Square on alternate days, taking turns to look after the children. Khaled has, like many others, found it hard to make work in the last year: “After the revolution, I did not think I would go back to painting … I started work on a Tahrir Square painting then stopped. I founded it physically difficult … The work was too literal, too sensational. When I look at it I admire only the effort.” But eventually the work has recommenced: he made video diaries, three simultaneous videos of found footage. And he started painting again: “painting is like singing, dancing, squash, you must do it every day. Two months ago I started dripping and underpainting. It is the best thing in the world to do when you are not inspired." His studio is now lined with canvases, dripping with colour, destined for exhibition at the Safarkhan gallery. These are evidence of furious recent activity: 20 square metres painted in 29 days. Khaled tells me he wants to turn the gallery into a ‘tomb’, to make the viewer ‘suffocate’. His work before the uprisings was beginning to develop a visual iconography whose grammar originates in ancient Egyptian painting. The tombs at Saqqara, or that of Rameses III, he says, evidence the creation of ‘rules for painting: flat, floor-to-ceiling, organised from right-to-left and left-to-right’. These paintings have a ‘rigorous layout’ like that of modern advertising. Inspired by the collections of imagery and prayers in the ‘Book of the Dead’, this series is called ‘The Book of Flight’. Many Egyptian artists have decided to leave since the uprisings. Flight must be a temptation and a dilemma for the artist. To confront the situation or escape from it. The vocabulary of Khaled’s work is however, explicitly modern. Watching a child play with military toys, he realised the child knew all the correct names for the technologies, and decided he wanted to build a ‘new hieroglyphics out of military symbols … a new alphabet.’ This work was started in isolation during a residency at the McColl Center in North Carolina. Configurations of soldiers fill the canvases, tiny bodies arranged into what look, at a distance, like pure patterns. Khaled claims that in his paintings there are ‘no emotional gestures’. Modernist Western painting is a strong influence: Rauschenberg, Picasso, Klimt. Basquiat is “like a God”. I wonder if there is some antipathy in contemporary art towards painting. There are young artists in Egypt who “get together and say ‘Alain Badiou says painting is dead.’ **** Alain Badiou.” With the evocation of ancient iconography, I wonder, does this work represent the search for a pre-Islamic state? Do these visual archaeologies involve attempts to validate the artist’s work? He shows me a new painting, “my Sister Julia painting”: Julia Robert’s face emerges from a burka. This is a response, he says, to Salafi demonstrations against the reports that two Coptic sisters had been prevented from converting to Islam. Khaled also experiments in film, and his 2006 video piece ‘Revolution’, has been described as premonitory. “But,” he says, “it referred to previous revolutions of the 1950s and its promises …” Promises whose non-fulfilment led to last year’s uprisings. The screen is split into three, representing the splitting between the promises of revolution, its real motivations, and inevitable outcome. “I am always in search of déjà vu,” he reflects. This attitude manifests itself in the dialogue between the ancient and the modern which dominates his painting. Khaled is a student of iconography, passionately interested in the visual archaeology of symbols. The star of David, he tells me, reaching over to point at an image of a six-pointed star, is also found in ancient Egypt. This ‘cultural recycling’ is also present in the Bible: Abraham, Sara, Adam, all have their etymological origin in Egyptian mythology. Batman, he gestures towards a crouching, long-eared creature, comes from the Egyptian god Amun-Ra. Are Egyptians, then, the best pop artists? “Egypt invented beer, wine … the modern army,” he quickly responds, “does that mean ours is the best?” With some distance from last year’s uprising, if the violence of Egypt’s political transition does not pose greater problems, Khaled’s work will no doubt develop a sophisticated system for deciphering the present. He has four paintings in  "Hajj" at the British Museum and exhibitions coming up in Manchester, Kaohsiung, and Havana. Art in Egypt must be janus-faced. It contends with the past – not merely with last year's spectacular events, or the fifty years of independence but with the whole visual history of this civilisation – and looks towards a future populated with uncertainties. The establishment of a new government and writing of a new constitution may cause new tensions leading to years of conflict. Art has been challenged to justify itself as Egyptian, and popular elements of society are seeking its total alienation from national discourses; but Egyptian contemporary art is playing a more important part than ever before in the international conversation art is. And Khaled would surely want to remind us that Janus too was invented in Egypt.

Tunisian born artist Amel Bennys, who works between Tunis and Paris, has just had her first solo show at the Selma Feriani Gallery in London. 'Get Up - Stand Up' includes 'Fin de Partie', a series of heavy-duty mixed media works on canvas and a selection of sketch-books.

We can deduce certain trends about Egyptian painting and the nature of its buyers.