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In this groundbreaking book, a range of internationally renowned and emerging academics, writers, artists, curators, activists and filmmakers critically reflect on the ways in which visual culture has appropriated and developed new media across North Africa and the Middle East. Examining the opportunities presented by the real-time generation of new, relatively unregulated content online, Uncommon Grounds evaluates the prominent role that new media has come to play in artistic practices - and social movements - in the Arab world today. Analysing alternative forms of creating, broadcasting, publishing, distributing and consuming digital images, this book also enquires into a broader global concern: does new media offer a 'democratisation' of - and a productive engagement with - visual culture, or merely capitalise upon the effect of immediacy at the expense of depth? Featuring full-colour artists' inserts, this is the first book to extensively explore the degree to which the grassroots popularity of Twitter and Facebook has been co-opted into mainstream media, institutional and curatorial characterisations of 'revolution' - and whether artists should be wary of perpetuating the rhetoric and spectacle surrounding political events. In the process, Uncommon Grounds reveals how contemporary art practices actively negotiate present-day notions of community-based activism, artistic agency and political engagement.

AbstractThe military rationale of a pre-emptive strike is predicated upon the calculation and anticipation of threat. The underlying principle of anticipation, or prediction, is foundational to the operative logic of AI. The deployment of predictive, algorithmically driven systems in unmanned aerial systems (UAS) would therefore appear to be all but inevitable. However, the fatal interlocking of martial paradigms of pre-emption and models of predictive analysis needs to be questioned insofar as the irreparable decisiveness of a pre-emptive military strike is often at odds with the probabilistic predictions of AI. The pursuit of a human right to protect communities from aerial threats needs to therefore consider the degree to which algorithmic auguries—often erroneous but nevertheless evident in the prophetic mechanisms that power autonomous aerial apparatuses—essentially authorise and further galvanise the long-standing martial strategy of pre-emption. In the context of unmanned aerial systems, this essay will outline how AI actualises and summons forth "threats" through (i) the propositional logic of algorithms (their inclination to yield actionable directives); (ii) the systematic training of neural networks (through habitually biased methods of data-labelling); and (iii) a systemic reliance on models of statistical analysis in the structural design of machine learning (which can and do produce so-called "hallucinations"). Through defining the deterministic intentionality, systematic biases and systemic dysfunction of algorithms, I will identify how individuals and communities—configured upon and erroneously flagged through the machinations of so-called "black box" instruments—are invariably exposed to the uncertainty (or brute certainty) of imminent death based on algorithmic projections of "threat".

This volume involved series of in-depth discussions with the artist and curator over a 3 month period. The essay sought to counter readings of Gowda's work, that often focus on its abstract elements, and reframe this apparent abstraction as a seismic yet imprecise measure of lasting social and political change, arguing, in turn, that the materials used in the work — despite their allusions to Minimalist sculpture — underwrites Gowda's non-didactic, open displays of repurposed material and allusive forms. This monograph essay also gave context to the larger exhibition catalogue for the Fondazione Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, and set out to provide an extended critical engagement with an eminent artist while also situate readers within a complex and challenging body of under-researched work.

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?

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East is an edited volume of essays bringing together over 30 contributors and a series of artist's works. Its main focus is on how artists, in producing archives (be they alternative, interrogative or fictional), are not simply questioning the authenticity, authority or authorship of the archive but also unlocking their regenerative, radical potential as political statements on the nature of historical archiving. One of the recurring issues across the Middle East, which has been further acerbated by the emergence of digital media, concerns the status and uses of archives. In this respect, Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East sets out to ask two over-arching questions: How do we define the on-going relationship between contemporary art and the archive and, crucially, how do we understand the suppositional forms of knowledge that are being produced by artist-based archival practices? Archives, as this volume observes, are often viewed as ordered collections of historical documents that record information about people, places and events. This view nevertheless obscures a crucial point: the archive, whilst subject to the vagaries of time and history, is also concerned with determining the future. Throughout Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, an original argument is made concerning the urgency of this point in modern-day North Africa and the Middle East, where the archive has come to the fore as a site of social, historical, theoretical, and political contestation. In addressing these issues, Dissonant Archives is the first book to consider the ways in which renowned contemporary artists — including Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Jananne Al Ani, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mariam Ghani, Zineb Sedira, and Akram Zaatari — continually utilize and disrupt the function of the archive and, in so doing, highlight a systemic and perhaps irrevocable crisis in institutional and state-ordained archiving across the region.

The contribution to medieval advice literature for future rulers, from the Turkic, Slavic and Uighur region, is seldom written about in terms of cultural practices in contemporary art. In its exploration of the modern day notions of self-help, wisdom, advice and good counsel, Slavs and Tatars: Mirrors for Princes re-animates the ideals medieval advice literature and proposes an expanded field of research within which to understand the 'mirrors of princes' genre alongside the present-day relevance of Yusuf Khass Hajib's 11th century text Kutadgu Bilig (which is to Turkic languages what Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is to Persian, Beowulf to English, or Nibelungen to German). A central component in this lineage of advice literature — of which Machiavelli's The Prince is the most widely known example — is the promotion of both self-grooming and the ideal of statecraft for the purpose of governance.The expansive context of the original genre of 'mirrors for princes', its universalist and yet esoteric import, is distilled in this volume into a number of objects produced by Slavs and Tatars which suggest both self-grooming and the elevation of statecraft throughout the Middle Ages. The texts in this volume, likewise, speak to both the unique approach of the artists to this subject matter and to the importance of Kutadgu Bilig in understanding the historical relationship between statecraft (dawla) and faith/religion (din). In doing so, both artists and writers produce further original research on what precisely this means in present day ideals of governance and statist forms of managerialism. For an audience encountering the artist's works, the relatively obscure objectives of tomes such as Kutadgu Bilig are given over to a permissive linguistic and conceptual practice that promotes the latter's relevance for today and brings its importance as a scholarly text to the fore. How, this volume asks, were forms of political writing, often called advice literature (or fürstenspiegel), shared by Christian and Muslim lands during the Middle Ages? And how are we to understand how the genre of medieval advice literature acted as a starting point to discuss fate and fortune, versus governance, and the translation of statecraft into its modern-day equivalent, namely, public relations and so-called spin doctoring, all being key themes in the artists' work.

Examining over 200 artists and 250 artworks, Art and Politics Now explores some of the most controversial and ambitious art projects of our time. Throughout the volume, themed chapters explore how, since the turn of the twenty-first century, artists have addressed real-world issues such as globalization, terrorism, conflict, the environment and knowledge, often using radical approaches and techniques to communicate their ideas. Being one of the first volumes to provide an accessible, jargon-free guide to politically engaged art of the 21st century, Art and Politics now focuses on how the increasingly political dimension of contemporary art has given rise to a number of important questions about the role it plays in society today and how it has been co-opted into discourses surrounding activism and political change. This volume examines the implications of what happens when artists engage with the politics of globalization, migration, labour, citizenship, activism, income inequality, injustice, conflict, terrorism, biopolitics, free trade, financial crisis, environmentalism and information technology, and in doing so critically explores the implications – for art and politics alike – of this development. A central feature to Art and Politics Now therefore involves a critique of the ways in which artists both address specific political issues and tactically engage with, negotiate, and examine the contested nature of politics. In terms of its originality, Art and Politics Now is also one of the first books to evaluate the impact of neoliberalism, alongside the development of globalisation, on contemporary art practices. In doing so, the volume brings together key areas of critical interest, including the debates surrounding issues such as labour, citizenship, activism, conflict, terror, history, camps, refugees, environments, economies, and digital knowledge production. A core consideration here was to invite a thorough re-evaluation of what happens to terms such as 'political', 'engagement', and 'activism' when they are co-opted by cultural debates.

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

Abstract
Bringing together artistic and scientific modes of inquiry, Witness statements and the technologies of memory examines the impact that digital technologies have on the substance of truth and historical facts. Hosted as part of Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey's online symposium, which was held in conjunction with Amin's exhibition When I see the future, I close my eyes, Chapter I (curated by Downey for the Mosaic Rooms in 2020), the panel discussed the legacies of colonial power and command, regimes of memory, and the ex post facto constitution of evidence from online archives. Drawing upon the diverse backgrounds and experiences of the panellists, which included Helene Kazan (Oxford Brookes University), Naeem Mohaiemen (Columbia University), and Susan Schuppli (Goldsmiths, University of London), Heba Y. Amin (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart), and Anthony Downey (Birmingham City University), Witness statements and the technologies of memory sought to more fully understand the impact of digital archives on historical records and evidence-gathering. Against the backdrop of indiscriminate expurgations of online material, we observe how the evidentiary potential of digital archives is compromised by the commercial imperatives of social media networks, censorship, and state surveillance. Among the many questions that arise here, the extent to which personal recollections are often presented as virtual artefacts of memory – a technology of recall or a mnemo-technics in its own right – remains central to the debate about the future of memory in our post-digital age.

"The Protest and The Recuperation is a survey of artistic perspectives on, and responses to, this global phenomenon of mass protest and of recuperative strategies of resistance. Essays explore the protests in a post digital age, the aesthetics of political dissent-specifically protests, and the work of ten artists participating in the eponymous exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery-Khalid Albaih, Lara Baladi, Sharon Chin, Chow Chun Fai, Rachael Haynes, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Oliver Ressler, Josué Rivas, Hank Willis Thomas, and Eugenia Vargas-Pereira"--