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Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East examines the role played by cultural institutions in producing present-day and future contexts for the production, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides critical contexts for a discussion that has become increasingly urgent in recent years—the role of culture in a time of conflict and globalization—and critiques the historical state of cultural institutions in an age of political upheaval, social unrest, exuberant cultural activity, ascendant neoliberal forms of privatization, social activism, and regional uncertainty. Future Imperfect draws attention to the ongoing demands and antagonisms that have affected cultural production across the region, in both historical and recent post-revolutionary contexts. In doing so, the book offers an in-depth discussion of how cultural producers have developed alternative institutional models to negotiate the constraints placed on their practices. How cultural institutions operate within the conditions of a global cultural economy, and alongside the often conflicting demands they place on cultural production in the region, is likewise an overarching point of reference throughout this volume. While the politics of contemporary cultural production and institutional practices in the Middle East can tell us a great deal about local and regional concerns, one of the cornerstone ambitions of this volume is to inquire into what they can also impart about the politics of global cultural production. This involves exploring the multiple ways in which contemporary art practices are being reduced, willingly or otherwise, to the logic of global capital. What is needed in terms of infrastructure for cultural production today and how can we speculatively propose new infrastructures and institutions in the context of current realities?

The Art of the Possible takes a hard look at the present play of forces in the Middle East. In full awareness of the historical, political, social, and psychological dimensions of the enmities of the region-and its most critical flashpoint, the Arab- Israeli conflict-it seeks realistic answers to the question ""What can be done?"" For each of the immediate foci of conflict, the author develops and proposes a workable plan: for the Sinai Peninsula, the establishment of a Sinai Development Trust; for the West Bank of the Jordan River, the creation of a Palestinian state; for the Golan Heights,

Research institutes and projects in the Middle East and recent publications from and on the region; 3 articles. Prepared in conjunction with the Regional Conference of Research Institutes in the Middle East, held in Cairo Apr. 18-19, 1993.

Weakening Washington's Middle East influence / Lee Smtih. - S. 3-10 Tunisia's morning after / Bruce Maddy-Weitzman. - S. 11-17 Egypt's Islamist shadow / Cynthia Farahat. - S. 19-24 The view from Syria and Lebanon / Hilal Khashan. - S. 25-30 Iraq weathers the political strom / Sterling Jensen. - S. 31-34 Mixed response in Iran / Ali ALfoneh. - S. 35-39

Future Imperfect critically examines the role played by cultural institutions in producing present-day and future contexts for the production, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa. It offers critical contexts for a discussion that has become increasingly urgent in recent years - the role of culture in a time of conflict and globalization - and an in-depth critique of the historical state of cultural institutions in an age of political upheaval, social unrest, exuberant cultural activity, ascendant neoliberal forms of privatization, social activism, and regional uncertainty. Based on collective input from numerous contributors and interlocutors, this volume brings together internationally renowned academics, critics, activists, filmmakers, artists, and other independent cultural practitioners to consider how new infrastructures and institutions can effectively emerge within such fraught and dynamic contexts

The increasingly complex, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, attentive to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations, is still helpful for addressing the local instantiations of capital's expanding frontiers of extraction. I am interested in tracing the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, and militarism. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in the realm of media arts that contest the aesthetic regime through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize its imperial logic and violence. My reconfiguration of cognitive mapping as countervisuality in Nicholas Mirzoeff's terms demonstrates that there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space across the Global North/ South divide.

On May 22, 1966, the eve of the first Tunisian census since independence, President Habib Bourguiba expressed as follows the objectives and uses of this census:
The methodical efforts we are making, within the framework of the Plan, to raise the standard of living of citizens are of necessity based on statistical data concerning the size and distribution of the population, its activities and its manner of life.…The census does not consist solely in just counting our population. Its purpose is to collect all sorts of information likely to help us draw our plans for economic and social development judiciously.The need for population data has undoubtedly provided an impetus for the collection of such data as well as for demographic research not only in Tunisia but also in other Middle Eastern countries. In recent years, an added impetus for demographic research has been the realization that, in some of these countries, population growth may be threatening social and economic development.