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About ARA-B-LESS?

Riffy Ahmed and Sarah El Hamed are pleased to present ARA-B-LESS?, a group exhibition and interactive performance event featuring the work of 12 established and emerging artists from all over the Arab world (MENA region) as part of this year’s edition of the NOUR Festival of Arts. 

 

ARA-B-LESS ?, designed in broad terms to explore notions of Arabness, and more specifically to explore the representation of women in these different cultures, is an essentially collaborative project, the result of a series of ongoing conversations between artist-curators, Riffy Ahmed and Sarah El Hamed. A unique and interactive experience, ARA-B-LESS? at the Saatchi Gallery will integrate live performance art with video, sculpture and installation work.

 

Operating in the interstices between reality and fiction and inspired by Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman, 2004, ARA-B-LESS? invites you to embark on a journey through three conceptually cohesive spaces each posing a unique challenge to current codes of conduct as well as questioning  the existence of multifarious stereotypes and framing devices. The result is an extensive yet playful investigation of the ways in which identity is constructed as well as the ways in which it might be deconstructed and reconstructed in the realm of the hyper-real. 

 

Ahmed and El Hamed’s project title, ‘ARA-B-LESS ?’ is a neologism born of a play on the word ‘Arabness’ (Arabism). Two designs hint at the meaning behind “ARA-B-LESS ?” the first emphasising ‘BLESS’ suggests that Arab identity is a blessing, while the second emphasises “LESS’, the ways in which what it means to be Arab have evolved over time, perhaps losing something along the way. ‘ARA-B-LESS?’, as a question, also focuses the artists’ thinking in terms of whether they feel themselves to be more or less Arabic for having been born and brought up in the West, albeit by parents from Arab countries.

 

A Prelude to this year’s ARA-B-LESS? event was held at the Galerie Talmart in Paris in June 2014. Ahmed and El Hamed have here selected works by artists which complement, counter and complicate their thinking about the representation of identity. ARA-B-LESS? marks a key moment in the development of the artists’ collaborative conversation.

 

The final product of this project will be the realisation of a short satirical film or video essay which will blur the lines between fiction and reality in animating their conversation about the nature of Arab identity. The artists will use themselves as vessels to explore ‘Arab’ identity as illustrated through stereotypes in film, art, literature, etc. Both artists and the roles they play will be ever changing as perspectives shift from the viewer to the subject to the critic and vice versa.

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