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.”
(Excerpt)