Orienteering

Cover Art:Annabel Daoufrom where to where (detail), 2010ink and repair tape on hand made paperaudio component a collaboration with Greta Byrumcollection of the artistPhoto: Bill Orcutt

OrienteeringDecember 12, 2010 - February 12, 2011XII International Cairo BiennaleOfficial U.S. representation organizedby the Arab American National Museum

© 2010 Arab American National Museum

All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced in any form without permission in writingfrom copyright owner and the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-9767977-2-2

Published by the Arab American National Museum,13624 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, Michigan 48126

Printed by Iris Design & Print, Inc.

Published in the U.S.A.

The official U.S. representation at the XII InternatIonal CaIro BIennale

has been organized by the Arab American National Museum and is presented

by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.

the araB amerICan natIonal museum documents, preserves, celebrates,

and educates the public on the history, life, culture and contributions of Arab

Americans. It serves as a resource to enhance knowledge and understanding

about Arab Americans and their presence in the United States.

The Arab American National Museum is a proud Affiliate of the Smithsonian

Institution in Washington, D.C. Read about the Affiliations program at

http://affiliations.si.edu.

13624 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, Michigan, 48126, U.S.A.

Telephone: +001.313.582.2266 • www.arabamericanmuseum.org

O n May 5, 2005, the Arab American community celebrated the inauguration of the first Arab American National Museum (AANM) in the U.S.A. The Museum

is located in the heart of the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. It joins other ethnic museums in providing the American public with a better understanding and appreciation of the diversity of our nation.

The AANM was established at a critical time for Arab Americans and for the nation. As the first and only museum dedicated to telling the story of Arab Americans, we recognize our responsibility to provide comprehensive exhibits and public programming that will help the American public to better understand Arab Americans, the Arab World and Islam. We also recognize our unique capacity to use art and culture to bridge some of the misunderstanding and mistrust that has existed between the peoples of the Arab World and the United States.

The Arab American National Museum is proud to participate in the 12th International Cairo Biennale and to present Orienteering, a visual arts exhibition by four prominent Arab American artists whose work has captured the attention of established museums and art galleries in the U.S. and around the globe. The exhibition reflects the AANM’s commitment to provide Arab American arts and artists the visibility and recognition they deserve. It also reflects the Museum’s commitment to offer exhibits and public programming that provide our audiences with stimulating intellectual, artistic, and educational experiences.

IntrOductIOnThe AANM’s core values embody our belief that the cultural heritage of all people should be preserved, celebrated, and shared with others. We value the arts not only as an aesthetic expression of our human experience, but also as a powerful tool that empowers people, instills community pride, and bridges some of the racial, ethnic, and global divisions that have separated communities and nations for too long. We strongly believe that the Orienteering exhibition will expand the role of the AANM as a catalyst for creating better relationships between the United States, our adopted country, and our ancestral homeland, the Arab World; a relationship that is based on mutual respect and understanding.

On behalf of the AANM, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to the four participating artists, Annabel Daou, Dahlia Elsayed, Nadia Ayari and Rheim Alkadhi and the exhibit curator, Ranya Husami, who worked with us under a very tight schedule. I want to also thank the Museum staff, especially Deborah Deacon Odette and Janice Freij, for their dedication and hard work, and Nimet Naguib in Cairo, whose help made working between Cairo and Dearborn easy and pleasurable. Special thanks go to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. Without their support, American participation in the 12th International Cairo Biennale would not have been possible.

Anan Ameri, Ph.D.Director, Arab American National Museum

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For the United States’ participation at the XII InternatIonal CaIro BIennale,

the Arab American National Museum of Dearborn, Michigan is pleased to

present Orienteering, a group exhibition featuring work by Annabel Daou, Dahlia

Elsayed, Nadia Ayari and Rheim Alkadhi.

Departing from the well-trodden theoretical terrain of Orientalism and seeking

to displace romantic conceptions about the diasporic condition, this exhibition

derives its title not from any specifically targeted counter-narrative, but rather

from an ambulatory and unpredictable structuring principle: the physio-cognitive

plotting and imminent precedence of course over discourse suggested by the

competitive sport of Orienteering.

Developed in late 19th century Sweden as a form of military training, Orienteering

is a combination of cross-country running and land navigation through rough and

unfamiliar terrain. Equipped with nothing other than a compass and a topographical

map, “orienteers” travel throughout a heavily wooded territory seeking out specific

flag markers referred to as “control points” that have been planted throughout

the given grounds by course officials. The object of the game is to locate the OrIenteerIng

dec. 12, 2010 - Feb. 12, 2011 Palace of art, Gezirah, zamalek, cairo

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“control points” and return to the starting location in the least amount of time—a

challenge that requires not only strong navigational skills and the ability to think

under pressure, but a strategic awareness of the imaginary lines that connect one

point to the next and the distance one has covered.

All somehow geographically removed from the “starting positions” of their

respective countries of origin Daou, Elsayed, Ayari and Alkadi are “orienteers”

in their own rights, to the extent that their agency depends upon their ability

to identify, traverse, and thereby transcend various pre-determined “control

points.” Plotted throughout a mercurial landscape of slippery identity politics and

complex cross-cultural encounters, these “control points” function as ostensible

checkpoints in an otherwise impenetrable territory. They take multiple forms:

neatly packaged ethnic and religious cultural categories; problematic ascriptions of

authentic or representative positions; institutional or capitalist pressures; visual and

conceptual artistic tropes, motifs, and clichés; formulaic framing devices; the false

comfort of linear narratives; and dubious notions of a homogenous Arab American

experience or aesthetic. Some newly contrived, others in place for centuries, they

are constructions based on paradigmatic dichotomies that appear increasingly

outdated: self/other, East/West, here/there, center/periphery, colonizer/colonized,

traditional/modern, private/public, fact/fiction, present/absent, real/imagined, male/

female. Various authoritative power structures—or “course officials”—reinforce

these reductive and value-laden oppositional pairs, relentlessly seeking to pin-

point and theorize the Arab World and its diasporas to the impediment of an Arab

World and diasporic community that simply wants to be.

What emerges in Orienteering, however, is not merely a critique of representation

and the limits of our taxonomies, but the positing of new structures to account for the

increasingly complex webs of relations that have come to define the contemporary

condition of post-modernity within the ongoing context of Orientalism, post-

colonialism, diaspora, and exile. Combining geographic, linguistic, and cultural

agility with a diverse array of artistic strategies, Daou, Elsayed, Ayari and Alkadhi

explore those sites that cannot be inserted into the orienteering map. Fleeting or

recurring memories, musings, desires, dreams, fantasies, and fears are excavated

irrespective of their pre-ordained correspondence to any tangible locality, position,

or time. Situated somewhere between the real and the imaginary, meaning and

senselessness, these sites resist being mapped onto the aforementioned binary

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oppositions. Proceeding from an awareness of that resistance, the artists in

Orienteering deliberately confront the sense disorientation that ensues from

constantly readjusting one’s psycho-geographical compass to correspond with

a world that is continually redefining what those terms signify.

annaBel Daou taps into this difficulty in from where to where, obsessively

summoning concrete markers of time and place, only to destabilize the spatiotemporal

foundations upon which she leans. A mesmerizing expanse of overlapping and

intersecting linguistic and verbal planes, the work resembles a large-scale makeshift

map—an abstract land-, mind-, and audio-scape in which any clear understanding

of geographical, psychological, or linguistic location is dramatically suspended.

Executed over a number of weeks spent between Beirut, New York, and ultimately

Cairo, this work is, from its inception to installation, profoundly nomadic. Daou

roamed the streets of the former two cities, stopping random strangers and asking

the questions, “Where are you going?” and “Where are you coming from?” while

recording her interlocutors’ answers on both an audio device and note cards carried

with her during her travels. Registered in both English and Arabic irrespective of

location, the responses interpret the questions according to no other psychological,

annabel Daoudetail, from where to where, 2010

ink and repair tape on hand made paper audio component a collaboration with Greta Byrum

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geographic, or temporal rubric other than the one spontaneously generated by the

specific encounter. Frequently clocking the time of day but not the date on which

a given remark is recorded, the question of “where” is answered with a precision

that simultaneously thwarts the possibility of grasping a coherent narrative.

While the refrain “I am here” conspicuously recurs in Daou’s own written responses,

an enigmatic chorus of voices echoes throughout the space, vacillating between

harmony and dissonance, flashes of clarity and arresting moments of sheer

ambiguity. The effect: the production of a palpable tension between the singular

and the plural, here and there, self and other, and real and recorded time—a

tension also indicated by the title of the piece, which idiomatically translates as

“how dare you?” (min wain la wain). Calling attention to the technologically-abetted

contemporary obsession with constantly broadcasting one’s psycho-geographic

“place,” the title also implies the existence of an underlying violence tied up with

the specific exercise of inquiry. The primary offense: the attempt to systematically

locate or “other” oneself or one’s interlocutor, seeking to reduce that which is

different, outside or foreign to that which is immediately identifiable, sizable,

quantifiable, or describable.

Invoking both a literal and proverbial house of cards, from where to where purports

to construct a sense of space even as that space threatens to collapse into illegibility,

revealing the flimsy quality of its allegedly concrete spatiotemporal mechanisms

of support. Tears and holes aggressively incised throughout the weathered paper

heighten this sense of loss, dislocation, fragility, and immateriality while at once

referring to and rejecting the myth of violence as a generator of artistic production

in the Middle East—just one of the many “control points” with which the artist

has had to tarry in this piece and in her greater body of work. Indeed, throughout

her oeuvre, Daou has demonstrated a keen awareness of both the existence and

inadequacy of such pre-conceived modes of viewership. Skillfully navigating the

areas between them in from where to where, she paves the way for new hybrid

structures to accommodate the infinite and ongoing exchange that occurs between

one’s “location” and state of mind.

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It is the limitlessness and immeasurability of the space in which this exchange

takes place that forms the impetus of the work of DahlIa elsayeD. Part emotional

flowcharts, part thought bubbles, part public signage, part social satire, part

postcards, and even part food journal, Elsayed’s evocative psycho-geographical

maps function not as a means to capture or measure public space, but rather

as screens upon which she projects the perpetual inventory produced by the

meeting of real space and her creative subconscious. As a result, conventional

forms of mapping are opened up into a world ripe with endless — not to mention,

undeniably charming — possibilities, invoking broader relationships between

individual and mass, meaning and meaningless, soul and statistic that course

powerfully through her art.

Painstakingly rendered and intricately veined surfaces invite the viewer in for closer

inspection. However, in place of the names of locations, the viewer is confronted

with incomplete phrases, fleeting impressions, and whimsical internal ramblings.

Adopting a quantitative schema for the qualitative, Elsayed stitches together linguistic

ephemera and verbal detritus derived from actual exchanges, conversations, and

signage to form a unified imaginary landscape. Ranging from the philosophically

Dahlia elsayeDdetail, The Dogged Pursuit, 2010

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loaded to the light hearted and comedic, the melancholic and nostalgic to the quirky

and flat-out absurd, incongruous terms associated with disparate psychological,

temporal, geographical, and linguistic spheres appear infinitely interchangeable:

fish tacos; recent histories; hot skies; fear of elks; oh genetics; and goosebumps; a

crowded bus; I’m a wreck; I’m a mess; jibber jabber; the dogged pursuit; minarets;

mangos; people who like France. Fragments and tidbits of transitory moments,

these words float off the tip of the artist’s tongue and land in a web of structure and

authority in the form of monochromatic washes of blue, green and gray adorned

with contour lines, flagpoles, pinpoints, and crosshatch shapes. Typically, such

symbols function as cartographical stand-ins for sky, water, land and various

depressed and elevated regions on a topographical map. In Elsayed’s universe,

however, they are material landfill for the component parts of her ever-shifting

psychological and emotional landscapes, temporarily filling in the gaps between

her perpetually floating and fragmentary musings and memories.

While Daou engages in a systematic dissolving of conventional spatiotemporal

models, Elsayed’s orienteering strategy, by contrast, involves leaving the cosmetic

structure of these models more or less intact. Emptying it of any real power to

contain, measure or identify, Elsayed deftly restructures her orienteering map so

that stable positions are articulated, yet ultimately retracted or compromised.

Diptychs, triptychs, and single-paneled works of varying sizes and compositional

tempos are arranged in configurations designed to read like open pages of a book

or comic strip registers, however fail to communicate a clear or coherent story.

Instead, an epic and sprawling diaristic narrative is obliquely suggested through

transient articulations of its component parts. Meanwhile, alternately poster and

postcard-sized paintings of solitary, untethered words function as palate cleansers

that at once connect and interrupt the flow between one panel and the next. Thus,

while Elsayed playfully tempts the viewer with the appeal of continuity and linearity,

they are tantalizingly withheld; devoid of any beginning, end, or coordinates, places,

sites, and locations dissolve within some larger unknown entity of no geographical

order. Tracing an imaginary journey which goes and returns to everywhere and

nowhere, the effect is one in which identity is asserted as both a unified entity and

collection of irreconcilable parts, infinitely dislocated and astonishingly fluid.

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While Daou and Elsayed focus on the spaces in between “control points” in

order to move past them, naDIa ayarI employs quite the opposite tactic

as she unhinges, exaggerates, weaves together, disguises, and even caricaturizes

ubiquitous clichés, formulaic motifs, and paralyzing socio-political tensions in

order to paradoxically reduce them, redefine them, and reclaim her authority

over them. Not only are these pictorial “control points” entangled within each of

her canvases, but frequently recur throughout her practice—albeit, each time

in a slightly different context or iteration so that it shifts, contradicts, or cancels

the role, charge, or signification it held in the painting before it. The result is the

continuous extension of an ongoing narrative featuring a strange yet familiar cast

of characters—a motley crew of glaringly incongruous imagery, shapes, colors,

and painterly techniques that can never truly be sized up or pinned down.

Confusingly cross-referencing yet contradictory, this set of characters and imagery

is mischievously dispersed throughout Camo, Wild Flowers, and Blue Domes,

each painting rendered with an irresistibly seductive treatment of both color and

paint that works to soften the blow of the acerbic subject matter it delivers. In Wild

Flowers, hyper-feminized, bubble-gum pink flowers mingle with macho layers of

naDia ayaridetail, Blue Domes, 2010

oil on canvas

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thick impasto, occupying each other’s domains with liberating disregard for notions

of propriety. Two burly, cartoon-like characters reminiscent of Philip Guston’s funky-

grotesque figures frolic in the strangely surreal and saccharine landscape. Their

machine-like snouts point towards the lash-less eyeball that floats portentously

above the scene—one that doubles as the personification of an all-seeing entity

or omnipotent and anonymous witness, and “I”—the id, ego, and superego that

make up our individual psychic apparatuses. Severed in half over the two panels,

this plurality is even further reinforced by the motif’s recurrence in the two other

paintings, multiplied and morphed into vaguely architectural forms in Blue Domes,

and attached to the body of a fatigue-clad figure in Camo. Although superficially

undivided, singular form in the latter work, this does not eradicate its association

with the co-existence of opposing terms; caught in a moment of lazy repose, the

Cyclops appears at once erect and deflated, eye literally wide open yet sunken in

a state of oblivion to the world. Same or similar shades of blue, green and brown

used to render the figure’s eye and uniform are diffused throughout the sky, trees,

and green that surround him, virtually camouflaging the camouflage so that an

utterly anonymous militaristic flavor subtly invades the scene.

Anonymity, of course, is a key mechanism employed by Ayari, allowing her to

be provocatively suggestive without assigning that to which she refers to any

singular or identifiable person, story, nationality, religion, or regime. Indeed, for

Ayari, the complex terrain of geo-politics is a point of interest that cuts across

geographic and temporal boundaries. Equal parts blunt and bewildering, politics

and poetics, serious and silly, redundant and unpredictable, pretty and ugly, her

paintings produce a disarming sense of absurdity and ambivalence—one that is

neither apolitical or nihilistic, but rather, in the tradition of avant-garde masters

and movements she refers to, boldly committed to the necessity of keeping

contradictions in plain view.

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It is a similar deliberate indeterminacy, courting

of the absurd, and dissolving of repressive

geographic and ideological borders that defines

rheIm alkaDhI’s orienteering strategy in her

two-part work, Domestic Floor Covering and

Conference of Flies. At once entirely dependent

upon each other and utterly irresolvable, the piece is comprised of two related

elements: the first, a large Oriental carpet that belonged to the artist’s maternal

grandmother, who is American. Scattered throughout its threadbare and worn

surface are circular holes, some overlapping and varying in size—representations

of loss, destruction, violence, removal, and displaced populations accurately

spaced, scaled, and concentrated to correspond with statistical information

related to locations in Iraq since 2003. The largest area of damage is of course

Baghdad, where the artist’s paternal grandmother, who was Iraqi, happened to

die just after the invasion in 2003. Obscured by layers of caked dust and dirt,

the carpet conflates the embattled desert floor with a symbology of middle class

aspirations—aspirations parallel to Iraq’s flight of the middle class in wretched

years of war and sanctions.

rheim alkaDhidetail, Domestic Floor Covering, 2010

sculpture/installation

detail, Conference of Flies, 2010sculpture/installation

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Based upon a statistical map that is not actually visible, representations of mass

destruction and civilian populations invade and erode the space of the personal and

domestic, rendering the legacies of Alkadhi’s grandmothers inextricably intertwined.

Borders, boundaries, and demarcation lines disappear as differentiations between

personal and collective, past and present, objective and subjective, and here and

there become absorbed into the fibers of the carpet like they do into the pores

of one’s skin. Cities in the north and south, geometric patterns and geography,

lovers and enemies, Baghdad and phosphorous, the basement, the floor, walls

and ceiling pervade one infinite and interstitial space, tangled in a web of ineffable

memories buried in the post-traumatic subconscious.

A symptom of the peculiar and disconcerting confusion experienced when

trying to wrap one’s head around the unfathomable experiences of physical and

psychological trauma, a hot, swampy air clouds any hope for clarity of vision.

Emerging from this impenetrable air is the second element of Alkadhi’s work:

Conference of Flies—material manifestations of this sweltering atmosphere,

smothered with uncontrollable “control points.” Cold statistical data that can

never come close to grasping the irreparable loss and damage they claim to

represent, these “control points” shroud and dwarf the flies with the precision of

their approximations. Thus, while initially offering the hope for a miraculous flight,

resolution, or escape out of the smog, the flies are ultimately nothing other than

the embodiment of domestic disturbance—an absurdist representation of the

perpetual state of indeterminacy that hijacks both public and private spaces. Flying

between “control points” only to be trapped in physical and ideological No-Fly

zones, fleeing from fetishized narratives of victim-hood yet the constant victims

of very real air strikes, their ability to navigate the infinite and interstitial spaces of

the carpet is swallowed, in a sequence of brief moments, by the consequence of

one fly swatted after another.

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Ranya Husami, curator

While each of the artists in Orienteering deliberately lingers in a similar state

of indeterminacy, this does not mean any of them offer to forfeit their game.

Instead, recognizing the absurdity of the entire premises of the sport—that is, the

attempt to create order out of chaos—each artist seeks to re-write and re-orient

the rules, tools, and goals of Orienteering. Start and finish lines are obscured;

markers and identifiers of place are dislocated; differences between the players

and officials are disintegrated; “maps” are created and/or used only to underscore

the feeling of dislocation underlying each of their practice. In this way, the artists

of this exhibition are able to interrupt conventional narratives and embrace a more

pluralist conception of identity—one fluid enough that so they can slip seamlessly

around “control points” and penetrate the substructures underlying them, exploring

and excavating the cultural, political and ideological hills, rifts, and ravines that

stunt their cognitive strength, agility, and flexibility on a macro level. Indeed, it is

their ability to shuffle not simply between here and there, but around and about

dizzyingly multi-axial and multi-directional strata that deems Daou, Elsayed, Ayari

and Alkadhi masterful “orienteers” of contemporary life in the 21st century.

ArtIst bIOs

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annaBel Daou was born and raised in Beirut,

Lebanon, and moved to New York in 1999. Her

recent and upcoming exhibitions include: On the

Mark: Contemporary Works on Paper, The Baltimore

Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Close Encounters

2 organized by Provisions Library at The Nathan

Cummings Foundation, New York, NY; Political/

Minimal, KW, Berlin; KNOT at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University,

Providence, RI; America at Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY; New York

New Drawings 1946-2007 at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente,

Segovia, Spain; and Creative Time’s Democracy In America at The Park Avenue

Armory, New York, NY.

A founding member of dBfoundation, Daou co-curated: Aporia at the EFA Gallery,

New York; Aporia:Aporia at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Disarmory,

a New York art fair and accompanying publication; CAFÉ at The Phillips Collection,

Washington, D.C.

from where to where, 2010ink and repair tape on hand made paper

audio component a collaboration with Greta Byrum

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DahlIa elsayeD combines text and imagery to create

visually narrative paintings that document internal

and external geographies. Her work, influenced by

conceptual art, comics, and landscape painting, is

informed by autobiography and environment, to create

illustrated documents of places and memories. Her

paintings, prints and artist books have been shown

at galleries and art institutions throughout the United States and internationally,

including solo exhibitions at Clementine Gallery and the Jersey City Museum.

Her work is in the public collections of the Johnson & Johnson Corporation, the

Jersey City Museum, The Newark Museum, Newark Public Library, New Jersey

State Museum, among others. Elsayed has received awards from the Joan Mitchell

Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, Women’s

Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The NJ State Council on

the Arts. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and lives and works

in New Jersey.

The Dogged Pursuit, 2010acrylic on paper

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naDIa ayarI moved from Tunisia to the United States

in 2000. She earned her MFA in Painting from the

Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been

included in Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East

at the Saatchi Gallery in London; and On Paper at

Monica De Cardenas Gallery in Zuoz, Switzerland.

Her second solo show opened in 2009 at Luce Gallery

in Turin, Italy. In February 2011, she will be showing recent work at Monya Rowe

Gallery in New York, NY, where she currently lives and works.

Blue Domes, 2010oil on canvas

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rheIm alkaDhI is an artist who engages a variable

practice. Her new media projects offer conceptual

exits from the frameworks of war and occupation.

Her sculptural projects confront the physicality of

art production in a trans-geographic context. Born

in 1973, she grew up as a bi-national citizen in Iraq

and the United States. Her early years in Baghdad

left her with the linguistic referents and aesthetic systems that inform her practice

today. As a result, her work is a visual engagement with war from a psychological

standpoint, and often through an absurdist lens.

Conference of Flies, 2010, above sculpture/installation

Domestic Floor Covering, 2010, belowsculpture/installation

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