A
RT OFR
EVOLUTION:
O
NLINE ART PLATFORMS AND PARTICIPATORY ARCHIVES INE
GYPT POST-2011
FATMA AMER [11310701]
Meester P.N. Arntzeniusweg 110, 1098 GT Amsterdam, Netherlands +31 6 85 53 97 46 fatma.amer@student.uva.nl fatma.mm@gmail.com SEPTEMBER 04,2017
Master Thesis Heritage Studies: Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Department of Media Studies Faculty of Humanities University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Mark-Paul Meyer (Senior Curator, EYE Filmmuseum, Netherlands) Second Reader: Annet Dekker (University of Amsterdam)
Table Of Contents
Introduction ………02
1. Chapter one: Art And The Power of The Archive ………..… 10
1.1. Art As A Site 0f Memory ………... 10
1.2. New Territories… New Memory ………...… 18
1.3. An Archive Of Ordinary People… Confrontation Or Accommodation With Neoliberalism? ……… 21
2. Chapter Two: Archival Art in The Digital Age ……….. 31
2.1. Informational Art and Information Technology ……….. 31
2.2. Art Platforms in Egypt ………. 33
2.3. Online Art Platforms, Remembrance and Revolution ……….. 35
3. Chapter Three: Case Studies Analysis ………. 42
3.1. Vox Populi ……… 43 3.2. 18 Days In Egypt ……….. 49 Conclusion ………..……….. 53 Bibliography: ………..…..…… 61
Introduction
[…] One cannot fully understand cultural practices unless 'culture', in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into 'culture' in the anthropological sense, and the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavours of food. (Bourdieu 01)
The aim of this thesis is to explore the social and political context of archival artworks concerning public memory of Egypt’s January 25, 2011 Revolution. It also aims to document the process of collective memory formation around this event; examining web-based participatory or interactive art platforms consciously embrace this mission. It attempts to answer a number of fundamental and pressing questions about
contemporary memory practices: how do archives occur when (largely) anonymous publics take part in art making processes? How do social, political, and economic dynamics and hierarchies manifest themselves within these platforms and affect the process of collective memory formation? Can Internet art meaningfully preserve an “authentic” public memory of the Egyptian revolution? Answering these questions requires a nuanced theoretical approach, but also careful analysis of specific case studies and artworks that adopt the medium of participatory web-based art platforms – a unique and evolving genre of modern art-making that will be considered in full scope through this text.
What is now referred to as the Egyptian Revolution took place when a series of protests broke out across the country starting on Friday, January the 25th, in 2011. By
February 11, 2011, after eighteen days of protests that spread across the country, President Hosni Mubarak, who ruled the country for 30 years, was toppled, a totemic event for observers of modern Egypt. According to a subsequent fact finding
tumultuous and heady events1. Despite the exuberant celebrations that followed the overthrow of Mubarak, captured by news media around the globe, and because protests continued simultaneous to celebrations and political uncertainty as to the fate of the country, the trauma and controversy surrounding the events of the revolution remains buried in collective consciousness. The Internet played a significant role in winning the revolution media attention early on, with participants and bystanders uploading materials constantly as events unfolded. This relay of information from the ground began well before the protests escalated, and before the nature and power of the unrest to affect dramatic change was thoroughly understood. For example, the Facebook page: We are all Khaled Said2, which was anonymously created, was believed to have sparked the initial protests in January of 2011. The page was in fact created in June 2010, in homage to Khaled Said, a 29-year-old Egyptian, who was tortured to death by the Egyptian police3. The feverish updating of Wikipedia pages on entries concerning the repression and protest in Egypt is another example of the early use of the online networks to annotate and preserve facts of political life in something approaching real-time. The article 2011 Egyptian revolution, on English Wikipedia was created on January 25, 2011, the very same day the protests started. During the events, it received an average of 135 edits each day. (Ferron and Paolo 2011) On Twitter, a study claims that the total rate of tweets about the events was 230,000 per day during the week preceding Mubarak’s resignation, compared with 2,300 a day at the beginning of the protests. (Tudoroiu 2014) However, information and narratives of such complicated and unstable event remained largely fragmentary and undirected online, despite that the notion of keeping the memory of these events was strongly present in the early days of the protests. Early on, it seemed, Egyptians
1 Fact-finding committee releases report on the January 25 Revolution, April 2011,
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/10374/Egypt/Politics-/Factfinding-committee-releases-report-on-the-Janua.aspx accessed August 5, 2017
2 We are all Khaled Said Facebook page, after three days of its creation, the page had over 100.000 members, and now it has 3.675.860 members, https://www.facebook.com/ElShaheeed/?ref=br_rs
accessed August 11, 2017.
3 See, Wael Ghonim, We are all Khaled Said Facebook page creator, in a Ted talk,
https://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_let_s_design_social_media_that_drives_real_change#t-141942 accessed: August 11, 2017
understood that archiving the revolution meant wresting the power of memory from the hands of an authoritarian government. Soon after Mubarak fell, however, a project to archive the revolution was announced by the interim government in 2011 and the historian Khaled Fahmy was asked by the head of Egypt’s national archives to oversee the project. But this noble idea ultimately did not have enough momentum and vision to create a lasting account of the revolution. According to Fahmy, the project aimed “to gather as much primary data on the revolution as possible and deposit it in the archives so that Egyptians now and in the future can construct their own narratives about this pivotal period.4” The project also aimed to collect recorded
testimonies from those involved in these historic events. One key reason for this project’s failure appears to have been rooted in public suspicion that any testimony provided could still somehow be used against them by the regime, besides the problems of accessibility of official state archives. There are many incidents
throughout the history of modern Egypt where the state has abused its power over the archive, not only by concealing it and cordoning it off, but also by intentionally destroying its contents, particularly during social and political struggles. Airbrushing the archive was often a method of covering up crimes of the governing regime in power. For example, after the Egyptian “bread riots” in 1977, president Anwar Sadat, ordered the burning of all state documents from the entire decade of 1970s5. In 1975 the state issued the archival law no. 121, governing the archiving of official state documents and access regulations. In this statute it stipulated that the state reserved the right to prevent access to any official documentation it produced for a period not exceeding 50 years, unless the constitution provides otherwise6. Even after the 50 years period, accessibility is very narrowly restricted and feasible only with security permissions. State security officials still effectively have the right to disclose the historical record, depending on whether or not one’s research’s subject is in line with
4 Khaled Fahmy talks about his efforts on archiving the revolution and the creation of the Committee
to Document the 25th January Revolution https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/15/struggle-to-document-egypt-revolution accessed August 11, 2017
5 Akhbar al-Adab (Egypt Arabic literary journal) edition about the state of the Egyptian archives, March 23, 2008.
6 Law No. 121 of 1975 concerning saving the state’s official documents and its publication, published
the political or even personal views of government functionaries. A further impulse to preserve the revolution, in this restrictive context, stemmed from a basic need to collectively make sense of events that form this peculiar public moment in Egypt, the memory of which lingers for many as an essential repositioning of their lives and a period of re-defining a sense of self and of the possibilities of citizenship and society. Following trauma and political exhilaration this can serve a cathartic as well as therapeutic function for many ordinary Egyptians. Archiving, therefore, emerges as a way of making personal sense of events through making public sense of them. So, archives, from the beginning, were construed as integral part of and eventual
palliative for revolution. There have many high-profile projects that have attempted to archive these events, such as the American University in Cairo’s project The January
25th Revolution Web sites, which provides “access to blogs, Twitter feeds, local and
regional media coverage, and other sites related to the January 25th Revolution7”. Its online catalogue includes other archive initiatives, such as 25Leaks.com,where the documents that were seized by the protesters from state security headquarters have been archived. Interestingly, the main website of 25Leaks.com - whose creators remained anonymous for their own safety – is publically defunct and its collection is accessible only through the AUC’s project. There is also a project by Bibliotheca Alexandria, to include materials on the revolution from across Egypt through its Memory of Modern Egypt project8. An esoteric event such as revolution certainly complicates the process of its archiving and documentation. But for an event that was globally known as ‘the social media revolution,’9 it is clearly imperative that the vast amounts of uploaded material be kept for future generations. Inevitably this huge media cache attracted artists intent on framing the memory of the revolution through their work.
7 The American University in Cairo’s archive for the revolution online catalogue.
https://archive-it.org/collections/2358 accessed August 11, 2017
8 Memory of Modern Egypt project is documenting the last 200 years of Egypt’s modern history
https://www.bibalex.org/en/Project/Details?documentid=1299 accessed August 11, 2017.
9 This is an especially controversial moniker for the Egyptian Revolution and remains contested. See, Egypt five years on: was it ever a 'social media revolution'?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/25/egypt-5-years-on-was-it-ever-a-social-media-revolution accessed August 11, 2017.
Various web-based art platforms emerged as a medium to document historical events over the past last decade. From the Iranian Green Revolution in 2009, researcher Amin Ansari created the Greens’ Art online platform to be an archive and online exhibition for the artworks that produced during the protests following Iran’s
controversial 2009 Presidential election10. Egyptian–American digital media theorist and artist, Laila Shereen Sakr, created R-Shief11, an initiative to archive the Internet posts from the Arab uprisings. The initial work started in December 2008, when war in Gaza had gravely escalated, and continued to include the events in the region up until 2014. (Sakr 364) The autonomous and rebellious character of these platforms allows for collective political expression and often opens up unique artistic spaces. The projects related to the Egyptian revolution, (the case studies of my thesis) have adopted and even co-opted many of these features by engaging the audience to contribute content and share authorship. In these platforms associated with well-publicized political and social events, art becomes a channelled outgrowth of dynamic social interactions. The characteristics of these platforms, especially their
participatory aspects, make them ideal sites of enacted memory (Nora 1989), where the remembrance of an event that affected such a large population, collectively can be built, in a public forum.
I have selected this medium as the main field of my enquiry because, in theory, it structurally mirrors precisely the main features of social revolution in the first place – as a non-hierarchal system of sharing and support that aims at presenting an alternative system of organization against monopolies of narrative (in the political sense stemming from an authoritarian regime) and because of the shared participatory and voluntarist elements intrinsic to both. I posit, firstly, that in order to explain the revolution as a collective experience, archival initiatives are justified in adopting collective memory-building processes. Scrutinizing this supposition and its ramifications through specific case studies will hopefully demonstrate the
10 Amin Ansari’s project Greens’ Art http://www.greens-art.net/?lang=en, accessed August 11, 2017.
applicability of this thesis to other projects that seek to preserve the memory of social revolution or movements. Moreover, extending the notion of archives, as a site of memory to include artworks, functions as a counter-tactic to what the state, through its institutional archives, tries to hide, destroy or manipulate.
In terms of methodology, I adopt a contextual approach, analysing the social and political context of artistic practices and specific artworks. The study of this specific subject merits this interdisciplinary approach simply because of its complex form as a social activity reflective of broader social and political processes. Art is produced, one must acknowledge, through various types of social interaction, and the works that I examine embrace and complicate this truism. As autonomous organizational frameworks, participatory web-based art platforms and revolution share many operating principles, often responsive to the dominant neoliberal market ideologies of the present. Simply existing as a web-based or a particular kind of a network, invites discussion of network cultures with its connections to the phenomenon of cognitive capitalism, a theory of valorisation very much in vogue at the moment. Historicising the rise of neoliberalism and various backlashes to this international order is well beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead I seek to highlight how the context of the revolution in Egypt, and artworks addressing it, offered opportunity for the stealth deployment of neoliberal logic within the art world and within the world of archives and discuss what ramifications this may have on how revolution is memorialized. With this rough agenda stated from the outset, I proceed to analyze specific case studies, locating each in the complex social and political context of revolution and counter-revolution.
This thesis engages with a body of prior scholarship, which can be broadly referred to as Middle Eastern “artistic archivism.” (Harutyunyan 2017) Previous writing focuses on artistic archival practices, which question and encounter the power of the archives, either by creating alternative archival models or archival artworks12. It also focuses on
12 This includes publications and platforms such as ibraaz http://www.ibraaz.org/ accessed August 11, 2017
preservation and accessibility as well as the anxiety of losing archival materials, and how the archive, in the institutional sense, is shaped by ideology. Ideally, this thesis expands scholarly encounter with the power of the archive to singular artworks (particularly those that address complex historical moments) as places of memory, while also presenting new social and political horizons for these artworks, in order to more thoroughly deconstruct the process of memory formation. This thesis also engages with previous scholarship that brought art into the context of a dominant neoliberal framework, in which neoliberal governing consensuses have ingratiated art as an ideological prop. (Gielen 2009, Gielen 2013, Alberro 2003, Möntmann 2006)
In the first chapter, I explore how ideological configuration of art in Egypt has affected the memories of ordinary people, where their images were omitted, either because they did not fit an elitist nationalist ideology or because they did not adequately feed into bourgeois nostalgia. I follow the formation of the collective memory in artworks, as places of memory (Nora 1989) and thus acquiring the power of the archives. In order to deconstruct the process of collective memory formation of the revolution, I explore what is known as “alternative art scene” in Cairo and its establishment since the mid-1990s, where artworks that addressed the revolution mainly emerged, thus its influence on the formation of the memory of the revolution requires unpacking. Finally, I must make some preliminary comments using the term “alternative art scene”: despite my reservations in using the word 'alternative,' I use it to refer to the art space that emerged in Cairo in the mid 1990s, and promoted itself as outside state-sponsored art-making practices. It also refers to an art movement that presents itself as counter to a perceived mainstream, providing alternative art spaces to the state-dominated institutional spaces. This includes foreign-financed and administered private galleries, art-focused NGOs, and individual artists who, though producing works independently, may also receive logistical, technical, and social support from this loose network of exhibition spaces. Almost all of these art spaces are centered in Downtown Cairo, even if the "scene" extends to other places. Thus
when one refers to the alternative art scene, the physical and social locale of Downtown Cairo is immediately invoked.
In the second chapter, I focus on the web-based art platform. I examine why this medium was chosen by artists to document and archive the Egyptian revolution. And I explore the systems that govern relations within the online platform, locating it in its political and social context. I analyze the features of art platforms in relation to the revolution and cultural production capital.
In the third chapter, I analyze two case studies: Lara Baladi’s Vox Populi
http://tahrirarchives.com and Jigar Mehta & Yasmin Elayat’s 18DaysInEgypt
http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/#/. My analysis focuses on the mode of interaction within each platform, and how public memory is formed through this dynamic relationship. It is based on: deconstructing the tool or the system that governs its interaction and structure, the process through which memory may be formed; and configuring these platforms in their political and social context.
1. Chapter One: Art And The Power Of The Archive
Lui: Tu n 'as rien vu a Hiroshima, rien Elle: J'ai tout vu, tout
Hiroshima mon Amour, Alain Resnais (1959)
1.1. Art As A Site of Memory
The concept of the archive within post-structuralist theory offers substantial
deconstruction of modern historiography. It suggests that history does not unfold in one coherent macro-narrative, but rather in multitudinous versions and forms. It also exposes the critical gap between the living or original memory of an event and its historical simulation. Thus, the notion of the archive as a pre-ratified and neutral site to keep memories is challenged. Instead, archives can be seen as sites to construct memory in keeping with historical narratives inflected by the authoring agency of the archive itself. Archives, in the bureaucratic sense then, are not the merely sites of constructed memory. The concept of “archive” as a field to construct memory can also extend to any fictionalised artwork, particularly those that consciously and self-reflexively pertain to historical events.
Pierre Nora in his study of Lieux de Mémoire (1989) considers archives as one of the most symbolic objects of modern memory. Lieux de Mémoire, as identified by Nora, are places where memory is artificially constructed and maintained, and because of its dependence on the technology audio-visual recording, “modern memory is above all archival.” (Nora 1989) Nora problematizes the notion of archival memory,
constructed to be compatible with historiographic projects, namely providing a representation of the past by intellectual and secular production, against the “natural memory” of autonomous social practice that is unconsciously in permanent evolution, and vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation. (Nora 1989) Jacques Derrida, in his most provocative deconstruction theory of the archive, traced the process in which artificial memory is formed, in Lieux de Mémoire. This process, which Derrida refers
to as archivisation, is fundamentally regulated by the power, political and social, of the archive. The power of the archive, Derrida notes, “gathers the functions of unification, of identification, and of classification,” which must be paired with the power of “consignation”. Derrida considers this, “the act of consigning through
gathering together signs, where it aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a
synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.” In doing so, an archive does not allow any “dissociation”, “heterogeneity” or “secret” which could hinder this unity or its cohesive form (Derrida 1996, 3) Thus,
archivization, pre-designating the archivable terrain, “produces as much as it records the events.” (Derrida 1996, 17) Concerning the relationship with technology, Derrida questions whether technologies of reproduction, such as audio-visual recording devices, affect archiving at root. On the one hand, these mechanisms create the impression that the event has been recorded in the most direct and original form. But they also offer further qualification of archivization as a practice. Technology
determines “the very institution of the archivable event,” (Derrida 1996, 18) In both this limitation and authority, archiving not only constructs artificial memory, but abuses its natural form as well. Memory is shaped, on the one hand, by a certain selective power, the ideology and bias of any archival-creator who decides which traces of memory are to be archived. In so doing, archivists always act destructively. On the other hand, the given limitations of technology and its rapid development affect the way events are documented and condition the context of their reception in ways archives cannot always pre-dictate.
The crisis of archivisation and constructed memory versus living memory famously unfolds in Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour (1956), cited above. Resnais, who was obsessed with time and memory, articulated the impossibility of objective documentation, and the ethics of archived memory that are associated with the power of the archive. In the iconic first scene, the female protagonist, a French actress visiting Hiroshima, claims of her knowledge of everything about Hiroshima. The claimed knowledge links to depictions of visits to a Hiroshima hospital, the Peace Memorial Museum (for four times), and a public square. The male protagonist, a Japanese architect, inherently disputes this rote claim knowledge, obtained only
through indirect experience, which for him, has nothing to do with the actual lived event. The film problematizes the notion of confusing living memory with archived memory, which is reduced only to the surviving objects deemed archivable. It also demonstrates how confusing and nonsensical living memory can be. Contrasted with archival memory, it not only falsifies reality, but also carries deep injustice, providing singularity or signification of each individual that shares this memory as a social practice, without having to construct or reinvent it. The female protagonist’s insistence on knowing everything about Hiroshima affirms the supremacy that the archive claims over living memory. In claiming, “I saw everything,” she denies the person who has experienced the event in real to remember it as it was lived. But the film also condemns the power of archived memory by abandoning living memory in the selected artworks presented in the scene in the museum. This implicit power of the historicized artwork exists not only because it is presented in the museum context, but also because it lives as a means of reducing memory to an object. This invokes Pierre Nora’s notion of Lieux de memoire, as the power of the archive on living memory is not limited to its bureaucratic sense but also includes any place, object or concept as a significant entity in popular collective memory, having a “symbolic aura.”
“Lieux de memoire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration.” (Nora 1989) Here artworks, particularly ones invoking historical events, are not completely innocent or plain speaking, but rather reflect institutional ideologies bound up with social class and exclusion.
In the Arab world, particularly before the advent of what is known as “alternative” art movement in Cairo in the 1990s, there were two overriding and interlinked factors that interceded into the sphere of formal memory production: art’s dependency on state’s institutional funds, or the artist’s social class. Art institutions’ dependency on state-administered funds constricted memorializing by state of censorship of art making. Artworks tended simply to reflect statist prerogatives. Looking back at other critical periods in Egyptian history, for example the July 1952 revolutionary coup, this same logic is evident. In this period post-revolution, statist priorities were quite
explicit and open. On August 8, 1952, forty days after the July Revolution, the first official statement was issued that set out a formulaic position of the new ruling party on art. This statement, entitled "The Art We Want," focused on the art of cinema and emphasized similarities between cinema and school. (Zakaria 9) While free education was accessible to people and indeed popularized following the 1952 revolutionary coup, freedom of art was another matter, and the new regime imposed control over art as part of a larger “national project”. Curiously, this notion of art serving state
ideology was similar in the pre-revolutionary regime, but merely valorised differently. The regime, after the 1952 coup, followed the paths of its predecessor, using art as a weaponized ideological tool. This was apparent since the establishment of the Egyptian Art School in 1908. Even the new regime’s statement about art, is not far from the former one. The prominent artist and the first Egyptian director of the first Egyptian art academy, Mohammed Naghi (1888-1956) called in 1931 for the use of art as a religion of the state. (Kane 21) The new regime statement was that art in the former era had been misused and the new leadership will not allow what happened in the past. The statement also spoke of the “responsibility” of artists to perform works of art embodying the “slogans of the revolution”. (Zakaria 10) In his study of Egypt's social image in cinema, Essam Zakaria argues that cinema after the July Revolution did not reflect Egyptian social life, but rather the state’s “anxiety of art”. The
government replaced the former regime censorship law in 1955, where the purpose of the censorship became to "maintain public order, security, and to protect public morals and the interests of the state." This law, however, did not present a clear definition of “security” and “public morals,” nor did it elaborate as to what was meant by the “state’s interests.” Interpretation of the law was left open to censorship
officials. (Zakaria 13) Although social realism as a genre was popular in Egyptian cinema during the Nasserite period, this realism was governed by censorship
standards. Images of poverty and corruption, for example, appear in relation to the old regime, presumably expunged by the Nasserite revolution. Furthermore, the lives of ordinary people were often erased, save those features that serve state interests. Social class intervenes as an obvious inflection of this agenda. In many ways as a consequence of colonial domination, an elitist idea of art pervaded modern art
production. However, this history of Egyptian art and its memory cannot be viewed linearly, without considering its ideological configuration and the political and social movements reflected in it. For example, a now obscure Egyptian Surrealism group destabilized the elitist art era in the 1930s13. This helped create a new generation of artists who took the representation of the popular classes’ daily life as the main subject of politically conscious art. Outside of the Surrealism group’s artists and their successors, Egyptian art in the early twentieth century was driven both by nationalist and elitist currents. In 1908, the ruling class founded the Egyptian School of Fine Arts, with entry only accessible for upper class families. Art from such institutions typically served the Nahda (Egyptian Renaissance) project, which buttressed the ruling class nationalist ideology, against the British colonization. The works of the prominent Egyptian nationalist sculptor, Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891-1934), who was amongst the first students of the School of Fine Arts, illustrate this ideology clearly. Patrick Kane in his study of The Politics of Art in Modern Egypt pointed out to this obvious reflection, about the elitist nationalist ideology in art during that era. Mukhtar’s most famous work is Nahdet Misr (Renaissance of Egypt) sculpture, in 1927, followed by sculptures of key nationalists figures, Saad Zaghlul and Talaat Harb. These statues are characterized by their magnitude and their use of expensive materials. Coupled with these megalithic pieces, Mukhtar also produced smaller sculptures representing ordinarily life of Egyptians. (Kane 31) In his Egyptian peasant woman sculptures, he represented the toiling masses in a highly romanticized way, making an icon of the female peasant who worked tranquilly in the field, suggesting a nature order that assented to allowing elites to conduct the affairs of state on her behalf. This image of “Mother Egypt” embodied in the image of Mokhtar’s peasant woman has been repeatedly invoked by subsequent ruling regimes since, creating a kind of nativist propaganda where the veiled peasant woman represents Egypt in her natural, stable, state.
13 This movement will be discussed in the second chapter, as an illustrative example of art platform
This patrician representation of ordinary people continued to evolve after the1950s, a time of national independence movements across the Arab world, necessitating incorporation of art into a purely nation-building project. Images of ordinary people appeared shorn of depictions of strife and poverty amongst lower classes,
unconcerned with different ethnic communities, more or less distorting the daily landscape and material culture of broad sections of the society. In most of these artworks, lower class lives recede into the background, as ruins that the artist weeps over or boldly resurrects as iconography. In his study of the falsified memory of the
Nakba in Palestine, Salim Tamari assiduously reviewed the documentation of events
by the nationalistic Palestinian intelligentsia entrusted with its memorializing. This often led to fetishizing the vision of a lost homeland from the accounts of actual living memory framed by the quotidian city life. In his essay Bourgeois Nostalgia and the
Abandoned City, Tamari deconstructs the process of documenting the events, through
works of art or literature, to create an “exemplary homeland” instead of “flesh-and-blood” one. (2003) He shows how most of these works of art and literature, which collectively constitute a rich body of discourse on displacement, are geared towards
reformulation of Palestinian self-identity following negotiations with Israel concerning the right of return in 1994. The shared theme of shock at the returnees rediscovering their homeland is central to this reformulation expressed as self-discovery of the dormant and the personal. Focusing his study on the city of Jaffa - because of its centrality to Palestinian culture - Tamari attributes this shock in documenting the Nakba on account of the first generation to have lived through the trauma of war and ethnic cleansing to a proximity to the lived events. He divides the formation of the fetishized image of the homeland into two phases. First there is the era of initial dispersion (1948–67), the vision of the homeland formed by Palestinians in exile. The most prominent feature of this vision is the agonized relationship
between Palestinians in exile and the dream to return, embodied in works by Palestinian painters like Ismail Shammout, where one observes replications of a “Paradise Lost” invoked by idyllic peasant landscapes. Palestinians who “remained” in what became known as “Israel” were wilfully excluded from this image, as if irrelevant or unworthy of any representation.
This exclusion of who remained, however, changed drastically after the war of 1967, where Palestinians still living within the borders of what had-been British Mandate Palestine suddenly became heroes in an abstracted sense – they were indeed
ingratiated in the diaspora as “heroes of return”, a term that previously had been reserved for Palestinian refugees living in exile. (Tamari 2003) Tamari further notes that ignoring the true conditions of those “remainder Palestinians” owed to the very image of them as marginalized people whose ordinary lives did not fit with the romantic nostalgic image of the homeland in the dominant works of middle class of intellectuals and artists. In this case the artworks acquire the power of the archive in forming a projected, unlived, archival memory. This, as Tamari helps demonstrate, is inextricably linked to the social class of artists. Memories of ordinary people are omitted from this representation, either because they are jarring to bourgeois nostalgia, or because they plainly hold no interest for the bourgeois artist who takes for granted the primacy of his own perspective.
Since the mid-1990s an alternative art movement began to emerge in Egypt, which is important to consider as pre-cursor to the period of revolution with which I will soon engage in more depth. New spaces were opened during this period, ostensibly giving artists different opportunities for freer expression and experimentation. This period also, curiously, saw archival art or research-based art become more prominent. Artists in this moment often challenged historical narratives that were previously dominated by the state actors and political parties. Despite the fact that the state in some ways supported the creation of such an alternative artistic sphere, (I shall address this point in a detailed manner later in this chapter), this art movement was promoted most vocally by those who considered themselves subversive or somehow resistant to state power.
In the following section, I will discuss this alternative art scene based largely in Cairo, and the subsequent emergence of “archival art” and the ramifications for current archival memory practices.
1.2. New Territories… New Memory
In Cairo, the alternative art scene that emerged in the mid-1990s grew out a number of intriguing converging of social processes. Foreign dominated galleries laid the foundation: Mashrabia Gallery, Cairo-Berlin Art Gallery in 1990 and Espace Karim Francis gallery in 1995. However, the Townhouse Gallery for contemporary art, founded in 1998, may be considered the first platform of its kind, representative of this new artistic moment, reflecting and interacting with the surrounding social and political conditions. It was followed by many other art institutions shaped in its likeness over the years. Because the location of these institutions and galleries in Downtown Cairo, where most of the art activities associated to this scene took place, this particular urban landscape became associated with the art from this period. These galleries arose self-consciously as alternatives to state institutions, attracting young artists and cultural producers and new mediums of art emerged in these spaces, such as multimedia installations, video art and conceptual art. Using new digital media, a common theme of much of this art was its research-based or informational character, counter to the monolithic iconography of older statist art. The role of the archive took greater precedence and earlier modes of artistic memorializing, loaded with the state ideology, were uprooted. Artists from this period began challenging nationalistic historical narratives and the power of the archive, presenting something akin to
counter-memory, either through archival artworks or by founding alternative archives. This was motivated also by the official status of the archives, and the state’s full control over these institutions. Artists and researchers’ stories of suffering within the Egyptian bureaucracy with regard to archives are legion. The state-run institutional archives usually do not liberally grant public access. Any prospective user has to go through a long process of attaining permits from different governmental bodies – civilian or military. Furthermore the interested researcher will almost always be confronted with cataloguing and organizational issues that impede research once access is granted. Thus most of recent historiography relies on materials found in
research libraries abroad or bought on the private Egyptian art and antiquity market or found in private collections.14
Still, there are many examples of artists exploring of the archives. The works of artists such as Hala ElKoussy, Rana ElNemr and Lara Baladi represent a small window in marginalized Egyptian histories. Questioning archived memory, their works not only offer unique historical encounters with that that has been displaced or overlooked by official narratives, but also present counter-memory to such discourse. The artistic practice of Lara Baladi, whose project to archive the Egyptian January 2011 Revolution (discussed more in length in the third chapter), can be located in this context. Baladi started her career as a documentary photographer, participating in the creation of Arab Image Foundation in 1997 and serving as board member in the foundation since this time15. In 2000, she created her first photo collage, Oum el
Donia (Mother of the World), an expression referring to Egypt as the “cradle of all
civilisation”, which can easily be located in the context of countering archival power, which, according to Baladi, offers a parody of the Orientalist post cards of old images of Egypt16. Here Baladi challenges stereotypical images of Egypt as an exotic land of pyramids and Bedouins – an image profitably crafted by European photographers of the second half of the nineteen century. In 2002 she moved to installation art, combining painting, photography, video and audio. She conceived her first installation, Al Fanous El Sehry (The magic Lantern), which was shown in the
14 See Mejcher-Atassi, Sonja., and Schwartz, John Pedro. Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World /. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012, especially Lucie Ryzove chapter: ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: Collector, Dealers and Academic in the Informal Old-Paper Markets of Cairo’, P. 93-120, and Emily Doherty chapter: ‘The Ecstasy of Property: Collecting in the United Arab Emirates’ P. 183-196.
15 Arab Image Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Beirut, with a mission to collect, preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora. See
http://www.fai.org.lb/Home.aspx accessed May 27, 2017.
16 Lara Baladi: Narrator of Invisible Things, Dior Magazine, n12, 2015,
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/550c93a2e4b0567de63a74a4/t/582cda1344024360dc3dc4f8/1479 334435875/LARA+BALADI.pdf accessed May 29, 2017
Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary art in Cairo17. According to the artist, the lantern, which invites viewers to circle around it, is a symbol of time, as a continuous succession of repeated, yet different moments. This closed circuit provides another take on the visual representation of the evolution of Man as illustrated in many schoolbooks. Thus in both works Baladi counters received historical narratives, be it that of the stereotyped image of Egypt by European photographers or the evolution of Man as depicted in schoolbooks. Although these works did not present a strikingly new vision on their own, they represent a clear re-questioning received
historiography. In 2008, she conceived Borg el Amal (Tower of Hope), a site-specific installation for the state sponsored 11th Cairo Biennial, based on extensive historical research into Cairo’s informal habitations and settlements, home to millions of people who often subsist without basic water or electricity – these subjects are off the map in the most tangible sense but unmistakably present right in the capital of such a highly centralized country as Egypt. The installation resembles the unfinished construction of these buildings, as red bricks set in concrete skeleton18. It successfully depicts
images of Egypt may have previously been censored in official art, giving voices to people hitherto neglected. However, one must note that the context in which this work was presented poses questions, simply because the Biennial theme was “the other” – suggesting an immediate distancing on behalf of the artist herself - “othering” the very people – her compatriots - on whose behalf the work was made. The installation reduced the image of the urban poor precisely to the exotic “other” deconstructed in previous work, alienating and even romanticizing a poverty that was very
geographically proximate to the artist herself. The notion of photogenic poverty or the romanticized images of people living through wars or revolutions in the ‘Middle East’ invokes Tamari’s study into bourgeois nostalgia, broadening the gap between the real image of a pined for homeland and its representation. While in the previous
17 Lara Baladi, Summer Autumn Winter and Spring: Conversations with Artists from the Arab World, 2015
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/550c93a2e4b0567de63a74a4/t/582cd42d9de4bb9b9e7e2079/147 9332920089/2015+Summer+Autumn+Winter+and+Spring.pdf accessed May 27, 2017
representation, the life of ordinary people was manipulated to match state interests, here it appears as exotically othered, misleading the uninformed viewer, despite the artistic claim to present a counter-image; the state, it would appear, by sponsoring this exhibition, does not seem to oppose the basic affect of this work.
Can one still speak of an alternative artistic movement tacitly endorsed by the state, or other actors and so bound up in class privilege? In this instance boundaries between the sate and non-state art spaces blur, despite affectations. The very power structure that influenced alternative art production is revealed as complex and adaptable. The salient question to raise here is: what was the common ideological conjuncture of these two worlds? Answering this requires understanding patterns of market
liberalization within Egypt in the 1990s, which in turn led to changing of governance strategies. How this relation influences the constructing of archival memory will be taken up in the next section.
1.3. An Archive Of Ordinary People – Confrontation Or Accommodation With Neoliberalism?
In her study of the power struggle between the Egyptian state and a
foreign-dominated art world covering the alternative art movement in Egypt, Jessica Winegar, deconstructs a budding art scene and its capital accumulation through a number of developments, arguing that it was driven partly by the changing nature of structures of governance. (2006) I extend the line of this study to include the relationship between the new domain and forms of constructing archived memory and the neoliberal economy, the current form of cultural capital and its fixation on research-based and informational art.
Cultural theorists have pointed to the ways in which the neoliberal-governing consensus has ingratiated art as an ideological prop. (Gielen 2009, Gielen 2013, Alberro 2003, Möntmann 2006)
This process was already underway when certain artists revolted against capitalist artistic institutions19, transforming art from being an object to be bought and sold, to ideas that could be circulated freely. The focus was on “the de-mythologization and de-commodification of art, on the need for an independent (or ‘alternative’ art that could not be bought and sold” (Lippard xiv) Ironically, this new art was eventually deemed inoffensive to consumer culture by multinational corporate thinkers of the 1960s and was eventually to become embraced and appropriated as a welcome supplement to new products and markets. (Alberro 2003) Capitalist production tends to be creative, flexible, and mobile in order to explore, invent and anticipate new consumer desires. The new creative system incorporated features similar to the characteristics of its cultural practitioners, being ‘creative’, ‘having fulfilling work’, ‘doing something interesting', 'expressing oneself', 'being oneself', 'breaking new ground.’ (Boltanski, Chiapello 2005) These changes were reflected primarily in the workforce, the labour in the new system required for acquisition of new skills, in order to compete in the new creative economy. Creativity, flexibility and
communication skills became generic assets. In short, skills associated with art practices became central to the new economic environment.
On the other hand, new art has been integrated into capital itself in the paradigm of idea-as-object, where information has become a discrete commodity in its own right. Following greater and greater commodification of art, art making itself has become substantially transformed, with the artist’s persona now thoroughly inextricable from a work’s ultimate appeal, replacing the object with the thinking process and the object of knowledge. Similarly, while the art field expanded, a terrain in which everything can be an art object in a certain context took shape. Art has thus become thoroughly interdisciplinary, even transcending the fixed idea of disciplines, intervening in numerous several fields of knowledge and autonomous discourses, becoming itself essentially a new field of possibilities. As a result, a major shift took a place in the public role of art institutions, acting as mediators between artist, artistic production and reception. Market ideology, or “marketability” started to play a more central role
19 See Lucy R. Lippard in her more detailed study about the dematerialized artworks, Six Years: The
in the art world. Terms such as ‘audience’ and ‘experience’ along with business terms such as ‘market research’ and ‘public relation management’ became more
commonplace in art institutions. (Sheikh 2009) With increasing capitalist expansion and the ubiquitous commodification of all aspects of social life, artistic value has become measured by routine capitalist metrics of profit and publicity. Accordingly, art institutions have become subjected to output, impact, and public outreach measures as a standard part of their production. Institutions thus have found
themselves chasing the demand of the market, highly attuned to economic trends, and continually malleable, as with fashions and seasonal slumps. These trends change according to often market principles, shifting public expectations, and institutional engagement with current events. Society and funders have expected art institutions to show some degree of engagement. (Gielen et all 2009) Thus art institutions and individual curators have sought out new social frontiers in contemporary art; as would any capitalist enterprise seek new out markets for goods and services.
Bear in mind that politically volatile regions have long attracted the curiosity of Western audiences – the most fiscally empowered consumer base in the global economy, broadly speaking. Since governments have become aware of marketing opportunities in this new creative economy, they have sought to brand their
municipalities as “creative cities”. Interestingly, oil-rich Gulf countries and nouveau
riche petro-states also expressed greater interest in cultural and artistic activities in the
past decade. This partly explains the Egyptian state’s interest in changing its
governance strategies and outward image, internalizing the global neoliberal logic. In the early 1990, Mubarak’s regime, under the pressure of IMF, started to take successful steps to liberalize the Egyptian economy20. Market liberalization affected all cultural industries, art as much as any other. State spending was cut in all sectors, including state support to artists. International corporations entered the Egyptian market and private exhibitions were held at Cairo’s five-star hotels for the new
20
IMF Working paper: The Egyptian Stabilization Experience: An analytical Retrospective.
September 1997. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/wp97105.pdf Accessed June 26, 2017. The paper assesses and draws lessons from Egypt’s success in macroeconomic stabilization in 1991-1997 through encompassing privatization, and trade liberation.
economic elite. (Naji 2015) Around this time, a foreign-dominated private sector art market emerged, with a number of NGO art institutions that receive corporate and private foundation funding. Parallel to this, the state has become aware of marketing opportunities in the new creative economy, and sought to brand its economy as innovative and untapped to attract foreign investments. The state took steps to put Egyptian art on the international art map, encouraging conceptual, abstract and installation art, as well as the creation of state-run art Biennale21 to show how
Egyptian art is keeping up with the international trend. This coincided with increasing curiosity and perceived need to better understand the culture of the ‘Middle East’ and North Africa in the West following the events of September 11, 2001, sparking interest among curators responding to and promoting the idea that this region can best be understood through its art. (Winegar 2006)
How does this current alternative scene control the creation of an “alternative” memory?
According to Winegar’s observations on Egyptian alternative art in the 1990s, there are two main factors that helped in the formation of an “alternative” scene and thus memory. The first is that the pioneers in the scene were mainly from Western-influenced elite groups with native command of the English language, mostly educated abroad or at the prestigious (and private) American University in Cairo. Foreign curators entered this new scene with the strategy of co-optation through privatization, with the aim to establish themselves in a scene outside the state’s dominance. This can be seen as a return of sorts to an extra-statist art scene such as that which had flourished before independence in the 1950s. Despite their intention to deconstruct previous historical narratives by focusing on marginalized groups and histories, the new narrative imposed simply a new, subtler, form of marginalization, which apparently did not seem to bother the state. Of course many artists of the period were not guided strictly by neoliberal tenets. Nonetheless the most prominent art from this movement can be viewed as enabling an essentially elitist memory.
21 Cairo Biennale started in 1984 as a state-sponsored event for artists from Arab-speaking countries
Neoliberalism is the central ideological pre-cursor for what Winegar refers to as namely the rise in NGOs acting as art institutions. Neoliberalism has been marked by an overgrowth of para-statal organizations in the developing world such as NGOs, which in Egypt are often managed by recognized cultural actors, attracting artists from different backgrounds. This is not to say that all actors in the scene were in thrall to neoliberal ideology always intent on bypassing state institutions, but in a country without production infrastructure, this was the only way to create a scene outside the state’s control. Private funders and foreign capital thus dominated, and came to characterize the scene. Most of these NGOs are subsidized Western governments and foreign foundations intent on “cultural diplomacy” and gaining political and social leverage on a key ‘Middle East’ state. The Townhouse gallery was founded by the Canadian curator William Wells, for instance, and was being funded by the Ford Foundation and other international organizations. (Marks 35) Despite that the funders’ prerogatives are never explicitly announced, they have imposed the creation of certain formulas of thought: if a Western audience is curious about a certain topic, the
funders and curators will privilege art projects that address this topic. This does not result in a form of external censorship only, but also self-censorship and competition amongst those most adept at playing the game of extricating funds for projects. Artists who were attracted to a new scene which offered new channels of exposure outside the state controlled sphere of art production, were thus obliged to work within founders’ constraints and thus address certain topics. Funders decide which aspect they see as most pressing in an artwork. (Marks 73-74)
Criteria are determined informally, as opposed more formally in the state-funded institutions. These criteria are also responsive to marketing strategies, with art institutions or curators promoting particular events to gauge audience attraction to various topics.
In parallel, the government has worked to make inroads itself into this extra-statist art world22, and both alternative and the state-funded artists became increasingly
22 The tension between the state and non state art institutions is explored thoroughly in Jessica Winegar’s study "Cultural Sovereignty in a Global Art Economy: Egyptian Cultural Policy and the New Western Interest in Art from the Middle East.
impelled by neoliberal metrics. (Winegar 2006) Artists may either face government censorship or slavish adherence to foreign funding imperatives, in both cases conforming to standards ultimately dictated by a neoliberal re-ordering of society. Neoliberalism has indisputably opened the Egyptian economy, including the Egyptian culture industries, to the global market, resulting in increased influence over artistic production in an insidious way because it is one small part of an all-encompassing project. Thus the cultural value of art as a site of memory has been altered without serious consideration of the ramifications.
With the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the Egyptian state, as a player in the alternative art scene, naturally diminished, leaving the field entirely to the NGO art institutions who had been in initially cultivating it. These institutions became the main source for funding artworks addressing the events of the revolution. The revolution helped the scene to gain a symbolic aura, as almost all of these institutions are centralized in Cairo’s downtown, close to Tahrir Square, which also gained a
symbolic aura of the revolution. Unsurprisingly, most of the artworks addressing the revolution focused on Tahrir Square, which became essentially synonymous with the revolution to the Western media. Just as the foreign curators had earlier attracted a small group of elite artists, due largely to language issues and ease of contact with a certain class of Egyptians, Western media also focused on the same social strata in its coverage of the revolution. Therefore, the memory of the revolution was constructed largely through this artistic social scene. And despite the good intentions of many of the artists who have taken responsibility for documenting and archiving a revolution that the state would never have attempted to preserve, the neoliberal inflection of NGOs and the alternative art world in Egypt emerged as the loudest voice of the revolution, at the expense of other, equally influential social movements. This privilege did not only include artistic production but also archiving of the revolution. Normally, these archives will reflect these voices, despite their affirmation of
archiving for the people. This affirmation is much the same in Hiroshima Mon Amour – the female protagonist’s insistence on knowing everything about Hiroshima is covering up as much as an exposition.
The key problem with this limitation of remembrance of the revolution in Tahrir Square is not only that its formation ultimately represent a skewed class memory of an intellectual caste of Egyptians but also that their physical relation to Tahrir Square has been occluded, such this site has become the overwhelming association with the revolution outside of Egypt. Also occluded is the complex nature of the new art scene and its centralization in Downtown Cairo. Thus there are many ways to problematize the creation of this memory, particularly in a collective process, which the medium of participatory art platform affords.
Tahrir Square, Liberation Square or Midan at-Tahrir is located in the heart of downtown Cairo, which witnessed a series of dramatic transformations since its creation in the late 19th century. In order to achieve a meaningful understanding of the area and its complex relation with the art scene, I follow Mohamed ElShahed’s
analysis and observations of the transformation of the area. (ElShahed 2007) Focusing on Downtown Cairo, Wist el-balad, ElShahed narrates the transformation of its
architectural creation, in relation to broader political, social and culture shifts. I expand on ElShahed’s analysis, relying on the discourse produced on the role of art in Downtown future gentrification, by suggesting that the employment of art by the neoliberal advocacies agenda in their interest in downtown Cairo offers a further “renovation” of Downtown, centred around Tahrir Square.
Downtown Cairo is the product of the rule of Khedive Ismail (1863 – 1879), inspired by his visit to the Universal Exposition of 1867 in Paris. His vision was to construct a modern Europeanized city employing the latest contemporary urban planning models, marked by wide straight boulevards connecting sumptuous public squares. Downtown Cairo was constructed as a residence for both Egyptian and European upper classes. However, much of the architecture in the area was built during the British occupation rule (1882 – 1936). British colonization, always focusing on a dually-oriented strategy of extraction and creation of new urban markets, led naturally to the building of apartment blocks, department stores and office blocks, which transformed the area into a financial and business center, as well as a site of leisure and a hub for the growing Egyptian middle class and intellectuals. Downtown hosted numerous English and French bookstores, tearooms, café, and art galleries. Until the 1952 revolutionary
coup, its residents included a substantial population of educated Europeans, who came to Egypt to fill high positions in administration and business, as well as the growing Egyptian middle and upper classes who associated themselves with European culture, occupying respectable bourgeois trades (doctors, dentists or lawyers) with their professional practices tied to this in the prestigious zone within the city.
Association of Tahrir Square with political struggles and clashes between security and the protesters first started during the Second World War, when Egyptians
demonstrated en masse against British colonization. Thirty Egyptians were killed by British troops during this period. This was the beginning of the third transformation of the area; on January 26, 1952 a great fire spread through downtown Cairo. In what became known as Black Saturday, four hundred buildings were burned and hundreds of shops and businesses were destroyed. Consequently, the wealthy Egyptian and non-Egyptian population of downtown Cairo began to disperse, many emigrating overseas. In the first days after Nasser’s rule, entire flats, shops, and private buildings were occupied by government companies, revolutionary military personnel and their families, while the wealthy buildings’ roofs transformed into squatter settlements for the poor. The square, which was named after Khedive Ismail, Ismailia Square, was given its new name Tahrir Square. Since then, the deterioration of the area from its original belle époque heyday was taken for granted. It would only be considered socially refurbished in the 1990s during the alternative artistic wave described earlier, as part of a larger process of gentrification. Hitherto, the area had been considered unworthy of maintenance and irrelevant to national heritage of independent Egypt. However after the 1992 earthquake, its deterioration became critical and many initiatives were undertaken by groups – both private and public - to maintain the damaged buildings. One maintenance strategy was to reuse old structures for new functions; such as reorganizing entire buildings that had previously been commercial or residential into art galleries. This coincided with Mubarak’s market liberalization policies geared towards ‘revamping’ Cairo. Investors and property developers turned their eyes towards the area, now billed as a re-encounter with a bygone belle époque. This coincided with a widespread mood of nostalgia amongst the Egyptian
intellectual period. (Abaza 2011) But Tahrir Square had never ceased to serve as the foremost site of clashes between political protesters and police: during the Bread Riots of 1977; in 2000 when protestors marched in support of the second intifada in Palestine; in 2003 when protests broke out against the US-led invasion and bombing of Iraq. This legacy never faded. The square continued to be key stage of protest, resistance and social demonstrations, heightened even more during the last years leading up to 2011, perhaps in part due the renewal of the area. As a result, the government increased its security restrictions in the area, targeting not only the protesters, who were basically middle class lawyers, judges, journalists, intellectuals and students, but mainly targeted the poorer masses. (Abaza 2011) The last thread in this story is the creation of Al Ismaelia Real Estate Investment, in 2008, with its mission to “to revive Downtown Cairo as a destination for all Egyptians to live, work, shop and socialize. The project is designed to revitalize the center of the capital city through preserving the architectural grandeur of Downtown while celebrating Cairo’s dynamic urban fabric.23” Al Ismaelia, whose name is referred to Ismaelia district,
after the original name of the area and its founder Khedive Ismael, has already purchased many buildings in the Downtown. While this company did not have any formal connection with the alternative artistic movement that had taken root around Tahrir Square, it is hard to imagine that such a large scale investment initiative would have been ignorant of this movement and its adoption of a Downtown base of
operations. And Ismaelia’s vision draws mainly from nostalgia for Egypt’s colonial past, which aligns with William Wells, Townhouse’s founder’s vision to “use the downtown area as a backdrop, a sort of late 19th, early 20th century backdrop for contemporary art.24” Intent on cultural gentrification and attentive to the importance of art as a selling point in the creative economy, Ismaelia clearly deemed the area well-positioned for development and rebranding, thus quite literally capitalizing on the commodity of art in the most abstract sense. The company owns and rents out
23 Al Ismaelia for Real Estate Investment http://al-ismaelia.com/, accessed August 14, 2017 24 An interview with William Wells during Cairo’s Nitaq festival, see Youssef Rakha and Nur Elmessiri in Ahram Weekly during the time of the second edition of Nitaq 2001,
many of the most prominent Downtown art spaces, including the Townhouse, and has helped launch the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF),25 in 2012. When the protests escalated in 2011, Tahrir Square continued to be center-stage, so to speak, showcasing the bloody battles between protesters and the police as well as artistic events that functioned as a sideshow to social unrest. With the immense media attention that the square acquired, state personnel struggled to contain the revolution in the square, and the celebrations following Mubarak only heighted this predicament. Ironically, neoliberal news coverage has successfully managed to contain the
revolution in the popular and global imaginary within the square, whose protestors were depicted as voluntarily having took responsibility themselves on behalf of their nation, the literal embodiment of change, not the forceful political demand for social revolution but an abstract personalized image of self-fulfilment and betterment in keeping with neoliberal exhortations to the individual.
This is perhaps why those projects that adopted the documentation and archiving of the Egyptian revolution, using the medium of web-based platform, inevitably focused on Tahrir Square as a symbol of the revolution.
In the second chapter, I explore more closely the relationship between art and technology, and its impact on archival memory, focusing on this medium – of web-based art platforms. It is clear that this mode of artistic production taps into certain revolutionary principles, but at the same time it also clearly piques neoliberal interest – exerting an important influence on archives and public memory, which must be understood in the paradoxical context.
2. Chapter Two: Archival Art In The Digital Age
The technical is political is cultural, each of these domains folds into the other and is fed back on itself; every layer informs, embeds, and models the others, distributing their particular power patterns throughout societal systems and their blurry zones of transfer. (Goriunova 8)
The immateriality of art, which is prevailing in the field of research-based and informational art, took a new dimension with the development of information technology and the web as platform of aesthetic conveyance. The web became not only a tool or channel, but an artistic medium in its own right. Since the last two decades, web-based art platforms emerged as an artistic medium not to produce art, as it was once understood, but rather to produce a model of interaction between art and society. Thus, the aesthetic of this medium is inherently formed through its
engagement with a larger social and political system. In this chapter, I attempt to analyze the social and political horizons of participatory web-based art platforms, as a medium chosen by artists to deal with archiving and documenting the Egyptian 2011 Revolution. As cultural artifacts that contribute to the memory of the revolution, I explore the power relations within these platforms, in order to understand how an archive happens when it accrues from people contributing piecemeal to a larger artistic work.
2.1 Informational Art And Information Technology:
The introduction of media and communication technology in the 1960s resulted in the emergence of the artistic involvement with cybernetics and systems design. With this advance art was freed from its material manifestation in a new sense. The replacement of industrial heavy materials in the manufacturing systems with softer materials, for example in the case of communication technology, data and media industries, mirrored this “new” form of art that replaced the material object with the process of producing and manipulating information. Artists could also challenge the political
hegemony of the new information economy by producing participatory/interactive artworks allowing a “deconstructive reflection on the system.” (Lillemose 2006) Artists engaged with this new organizational dynamic of information technology to resist, notionally at least, its control over the economic and social relations. The works of artists such as Dan Graham, Richard Serra, Hans Haacke, exemplify this impulse, as seen in the roster of exhibitions that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s within this context26. In these artworks, the object was not only transformed into an idea as a final end, but to the process of producing ideas, where audiences took part of this process. This process created a model of social interaction, where the barriers between art and lived experience blurred. Through this interaction, the
artwork not only challenged the way information processed, but also challenged its own power of constructing memory, liberating its archival authority through
producing changeable perceptions. With the introduction of the Web as platform, and its participatory aspect, the notion of art interaction with the social and political in the information system also developed. Since the 2000s, the technology of Web 2.0 has gained enormous popularity as a participatory model of information production. Through these platforms, large groups of people are routinely impelled to create collective works of greater informational magnitude than could be generated by the mere individual participant. These features have attracted artists as a new strategy to critique authoritative institutions, with their often skewed methods of constructing social memory. Through Web-based art platforms, new possibilities for collective narrative building are allowed, providing increased interactivity and democratic participation that make the dream of interactivity, flexibility and transparency seem more proximate. Web-based art platforms have certainly opened up a new field of impulsive participation, where memory is created through voluntarist social practices more about the formation of multiple, volatile perceptions of the past than static
26 The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, at the Museum of Modern Art MOMA in 1968 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2776 accessed July 25, 2017, Kynaston McShine’s exhibition Information, at the Museum of Modern Art MOMA in 1970
https://www.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/EAD/InfoExhibitionRecordsf accessed July 25, 2017, and Jack Burnham’s exhibition Software: Information Technology; at Jewish Museum, New York in 1970 http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/eve.php?NumEnregEve=e00000602 accessed July 25,
