Review
Fareed Armaly’s work confronts us with the question of what art is still capable of achieving in times of an exuberant media culture and intensified political conflicts. Since the late 1980s, the artist (born 1957) has created a body of work that engages in a variety of ways with the conditions of its own possibility within highly mediatized constellations of political conflict, without relinquishing its claim as art. This approach stands out from the abundance of post-conceptual, institution-critical, or activist practices insofar as it succeeds, with the help of a particular methodological rigor, in linking its own way of working, which can include journalistic and research-related, curatorial, advisory, and mediating activities, with a specific form of presentation in the sense of installative arrangements. By eluding any premature labeling—for example as institutional critique, context art, installation art, or site specificity—this work not only synthesizes many post-conceptual and representation-critical approaches since the 1970s, it also transcends the associated critical and artistic claim from the phantasmatic and hegemonic interiority of Western capitalism towards a global diasporic standpoint.
Armaly’s early work culminates in two exemplary exhibitions that clearly demonstrate his methodical approach. In each case, the aim was to understand the exhibition situation itself both as a space always already marked in terms of content, i.e. as a “positioning system” in Stuart Hall’s sense, and as the decisive medium for the artist’s own artistic stake. [The] (re)Orient, an exhibition that took place in 1989 at the Sylvana Lorenz’s gallery in Paris, linked the question of orientation within an urban context of signs and objects condensed in the gallery space with the critical definition of Orientalism in the sense of Edward Said. References to the imperial Louvre discourse were invoked here in a variety of media refractions, for example, as Letraset signs for the Venus de Milo or for Napoléon, or as a landscape card game invented in 1802, which Armaly adapted to the current realities of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). In the arrangement of the objects and signs and the implicit modes of perception associated with them, many artistic references were simultaneously deployed, ranging from Eadweard Muybridge and Jean-Luc Godard to Robert Smithson and Marcel Broodthaers, always appearing in a double determination as a symptom as well as a gesture of a possible practice of appropriation and self-assertion.1
In a similar way, Orphée 1990, an exhibition from 1990 at the Maison de la culture et de la communication (MCC) in Saint-Étienne, focused on the exhibition situation itself as an interface between urban, media, and institutional conditions, albeit with a significantly different thematic orientation. The MCC, created as part of André Malraux’s ambitious project in the 1960s to upgrade industrial production sites in crisis with the help of a decentralized network of cultural institutions, embodied the multiple contradictions between an elitist understanding of culture and the harsh realities of industrial production, between social struggles and a paternalistic cultural policy. Designed as a kind of virtual journey through the building, Armaly’s exhibition addressed the functioning of the institution itself in attracting audiences and leading them towards the inner core of canonized value production, the exhibition gallery on the 6th floor. However, this gallery was now locked by a glass door; only the free-standing frame of a three-part mirror was visible. As a recurring leitmotif of the exhibition, this mirror-frame brought to the fore the transition from one “world” to another, as embodied in Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, in which the poet passes through a mirror to the “other side.” A sequence of that film showing the decisive scene could already be seen on a monitor in the entrance area, and as a wall painting in the anteroom to the (locked) gallery space that accentuated the entrance to the framing room, where documentation of social struggles during the times of the building’s construction was to be seen. Additionally, several monitors were leading the gaze further into some of the functional corridors of the building.
The later works also tie in with this thematization of the intersection of material and mental infrastructures.2 Examples include Armaly’s work as artistic director of the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart (2000-2004) and the exhibition From/To, which took place in 1999 at Witte de With in Rotterdam and in a revised version at documenta 11 (2002) in Kassel. In both projects, the aim was to connect a spatial-institutional or historical-geographical structure with a program in the sense of including a broad field of cultural producers, who in turn interpret the structure in their own way and bring it to life in real time.3 In From/To, a project that took the absence of Palestinian history within dominant Western narratives as its starting point, the leitmotif is a stone that can not only be read as a symbol of the first Intifada, but rather, in a digital reconstruction of its rough surface, is interpreted as a network of points at which the transition from identity-based thinking in roots to thinking in diasporic routes manifests itself–with all the military and political consequences this entails.
Thus, Armaly’s exhibition-projects do not simply take place within institutions, nor do they criticize them from an abstract point of view; rather, they try to appropriate the institutions themselves in order to interfere into systems of media, discursive, and institutional representation and to work through them in terms of structural transformation and political change.
Footnotes
- On the occasion of the reconstruction of the exhibition, which took place at the mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (June 19, 2021-June 12, 2022), Armaly has published a book entitled The (re)Orient, which situates the exhibition in its multi-layered references within a broad discursive network, including texts by Derek Gregory, Akram Zaatari, Marianna Hovhannisyan, Sara Ahmed, or Robert K. Beshara. In general, for the early work of Armaly, see my book: Die Gewalt des Zusammenhangs. Raum, Referenz und Repräsentation bei Fareed Armaly = Coercing Constellations. Space, Reference, and Representation in Fareed Armaly (Berlin: b_books, 2007). ↩
- Following Marina Vishmidt’s suggestion to replace institutional critique with infrastructure critique, Sabeth Buchmann has made the point that Armaly’s work could always already be understood in such a critique of infrastructures on more than one layer. See: Marina Vishmidt, “Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Toward Infrastructural Critique,” in Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 265-270. Sabeth Buchmann, “Infrastructure as Diagrammatic Disposition. Fareed Armaly’s From/To (1999/2002) revisited,” in Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022), 29-42. ↩
- In Stuttgart artists and writers like Mel Chin, Norman Klein, Laura Cottingham, Hito Steyerl, Ruby Sinclair, or Isaac Julien were involved; in Rotterdam e.g. Rashid Masharawi, in whose filmic work the conditions of life under occupation became the essential feature. ↩