The revolution will not be televised: the changing landscape of film and video production in the Arab world

The situation of Arab cinema today, while it varies from Morocco to Abu Dhabi, is at an interesting turning point due to digital technology and political and economic events. In spite of censorship there are increasingly more film festivals and a burgeoning audience of cinephiles. The 2007 Cinema East Film Festival in New York celebrated independent film production: At a moment when mainstream news seems helplessly captive to global conflicts, the war on terror and the clash of fundamentalisms, independent cinema has come to be regarded as a substitute for representing people, places and their stories. Filmmakers from the region are the most enchanting human rights activists, the most playful analysts, the most imaginative historians but first and foremost, the most generous and emboldening artists.

More from this Issue

Economy

Anthony Kelly, Pilar Mata Dupont & Tarryn Gill, Bennett Miller, Tom Muller, Anna Nazzari, Mark Parfitt, Ric Spencer, Brendan van Hek (WA) Curator: Consuelo Cavaniglia PICA 1 - 25th November 2007

Thea Constantino

Chance encounters: Pamela Kouwenhoven and Peter McKay

Two South Australian writers work with discarded materials to make strong commentaries on contemporary life. Pamela Kouwenhoven uses old empty plastic car battery cases to make Rosalie Gascoigne-like collages of faded colour and worn histories. Like her signature works using malthoid taken from beneath rainwater tanks, they have a strong environmental agenda, drawing attention to beauty as well as responsibility. Peter McKay makes playful works with serious messages. At night he makes patterns in oil stains on the road with glitter and photographs them. These works collapse the infinite into the accidental as galaxies appear on the ground.

Melinda Rankin

Hyperlexic, desalinated but not scary

Separate performance works by The Collective (Alana Hunt, Sylvia Schwenk, Ingrid Dernee, Megan Brewster, Susie Fraser, Anna Williams), Tony Schwensen and Zina Kaye confront the complexity of the interlinked flashpoints of oil, energy, human rights, global warming, rampant flows of predatory capital and the war on terror with notions of resistance and how individuals can act. Schwensen was at Artspace, The Collective in Trajectories of Dissent at Little Fish Gallery and Mori Gallery while Zina Kaye in a Terminus Project at Westfield Bondi Junction broadcast her own comments on the massive LED signs hanging in the atrium of the mall.

Ann Finegan

Migratory Projects: The Drive Out Cinema

Andrew Sunley Smith Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) 6 December 2007 - 27 January 2008

Anna Bagshaw

World tree: sounds of a bigger picture. Alison Clouston and Boyd

Alison Clouston and Boyd use sound and sculpture in layered and immersive installations that draw attention to delicate and complex systems in nature and what humans have made of them. 2007 is the first year they have made an artwork with a formal carbon audit and offset. Their recent art-making has caused them to become vegetarian. They believe that Today we humans need to relinquish this deeply embedded sense that we will be saved by some force beyond us, we alone have to sort out the mess we have made of this planet Earth, our only home.

Clare Lewis

Conducting Mobility

Artists thinking and making work about fuel span the globe and delve into a wide range of ramifications. UK-based PLATFORM have done a multi-pronged report called Unraveling the Carbon Web on four oil-producing hot spots, Iraq, Nigeria, Russia and the Caucasus. Chicago-based Laurie Palmers Notions of Expenditure solicits renderings of exercise equipment and gyms redesigned for the production of electricity. Brian Collier wanders the edges of Illinois highways to locate thriving non-human life forms. kanarinka documented her running of the official evacuation route out of Boston while collaborators Kim Stringfellow, Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, Pond and Greenaction made an audio guide for a Californian highway drawing its military, residential and agricultural stories together.

Claude Willey

Writing images with words: an inheritance of ambiguous faces

Beirut-based artist and writer Walid Salek's book of essays, called Jane-Loyse Tissier, deals with stereotyping in art. He is concerned with the way the Third World is often treated as a cliche of constant emergency and crisis and not as a subjective and historical space. His essays reinterpret some canonical works of Western art by artists like Titian, Courbet, Ensor, Giotto and David. His claim is that all pictures and all interpretations are contingent and thus in defending the Third World's right to its own interpretations based on its own values the entire world is being defended.

Bilal Khbeiz

A rusty sign at the end of a bloody empire

At Magnet Gallery in Quezon City Filipino artist Norberto Roldans exhibition Oil goes beyond the local situation and deals with the theme of peak oil as the root of all geopolitical evil, with the United States of America as the primary agent of ill intent. Lourd de Vera vividly describes it as a deliberate exercise in propaganda and sloganeering. Roldan takes a broad historical view and reflects on US policy in the Philippines over time while the rusting Caltex sign embedded in the exhibition asserts a warning: no empire lasts forever.

Lourd de Vera

[the space in between] Book project

Curated by Tara Gilbee VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne 13 July -4 August 2007 Sidney Myer Work on Paper Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery 15 March - 13 April 2008 Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts 8 August - 14 September 2008

Simon Gregg

The error of our ways: Madeleine Kelly

Brisbane-based artist Madeleine Kelly's oil paintings approach big issues through precise depictions of incongruous narratives which draw on both personal and mythological sources. Her comments on global issues like oil and pollution, human folly and its consequences, are framed like dream scenarios that touch us all. Kelly came to Australia from Germany when she was two and the celebrated 19th century German childrens story Struwwelpeter written and vividly illustrated by Heinrich Hoffmann echoes in her imaginative paintings of cautionary tales and surreal spaces.

Timothy Morrell

Our Lucky Country - (Still Different)

Nuha Saad, Soda_Jerk, Ron Adams, Mimi Tong, Nana Ohnesorge, Liam Benson, George Tillianakis, Huseyin Sami, Adam Norton, Ruark Lewis, Maria Cruz, Elizabeth Day, Michelle Hanlin, Sarah Goffman, Anna Peters Hazelhurst Regional Gallery 8 December 2007 - 3 February 2008

Jo Higgins

Power and art in East Timor

Recent art made by East Timorese artists is contrasted with work by Australian war artists Wendy Sharpe and Rick Amor. Artworks made by artists from the Arte Moris Free Art School in Dili are full of passion and deep knowledge of the incongruities of war and the poverty of their lives while the artworks made by Sharpe and Amor seem remote and generalised.

Jennifer Phipps

View all articles in this issue