Sharjah Art Foundation explores Middle East, Latin America links

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Sharjah Art Foundation has announced Genealogies in the Middle East and Latin America, an online screening programme featuring 21 video and film artists and collectives from the two regions. Taking place June 1 – July 11, the project explores historical and contemporary relationships between artists in the two regions, in order to consider their shared histories of colonisation and the close links developed through several cycles of migration over the last 150 years from nations such as Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq to countries in South America such as Peru, Chile, Mexico as well as Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.

The impact of the shared history on their respective cultures — although the circumstances varied historically and regionally — is reflected in the transnational territorial outlooks of many of the participating artists and their work. Jointly organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and curator Anna Goetz, the project examines influences that have shaped artists in the two regions over the years. Goetz invited the artists to reflect on what has shaped their thinking and ways of working. What were the societal relations, the everyday living and working conditions and the sources of inspiration that have shaped them and their practice?

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Over 21 days, the project will release one video or film work every day. Artists were invited to nominate other artists with a work of theirs, following the playful format of a chain letter. Thus the programme’s threads unfold along narratives revealed by the artists’ personal accounts, which provide their perspectives and insights. Many of the artists chose to nominate works that were influential early in their careers. The chain begins with Alia Farid’s Theater of Operations (The Gulf War seen from Puerto Rico, 2017), which reflects the artist’s biographical and artistic background rooted between Latin America and the Middle East.

Farid will launch the series by proposing two works from these regions, which have left a lasting impression on her practice. The video works will be presented consecutively, with each of the respective artists inviting the participation of another artist to follow. Farid (born 1985) is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican visual artist. Through videos, drawings, installations and public interventions, she explores contemporary urban life against the background of the complex colonial histories of Kuwait and Puerto Rico, her two countries of origin.

Artists taking part in the project include Mounira Al Solh, Francis Alÿs, Claudia Aravena Abughosh, Arias & Aragón, Guillermo Cifuentes, Alia Farid, Gilda Mantilla & Raimond Chaves, Óscar Muñoz, Enrique Ramírez, Elena Tejada-Herrera, Maya Watanabe and Akram Zaatari, among others.

According to the Arab American Institute “Latin America has the largest Arab population outside of the Middle East and is home to anywhere from seventeen to thirty million people of Arab descent. That is more than any other diaspora region in the world.” (Saliba, 2016).

A great number of Arabs migrated to Latin America, specifically México, from Lebanon, after the devastating collapse of its commerce following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which facilitated the trade between European industries and other competitors.

Arabs who emigrated in the early 1900s from the Ottoman province of Syria, part of which is now Lebanon, to the Yucatán, then a poor area of Mexico, had primarily come from poor villages themselves, and like their compatriots in the other parts of the Americas, began their lives in the New World as peddlers.

Today, about 30 per cent of Mérida’s (city in Yucatan) commercial life is controlled by the descendants of these early Arab immigrants - though the vast majority have totally assimilated into Mexican society and retain virtually no connection with their Arab past.

According to a Saudi Aramco World report in 2011, the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Arab World is in Brazil, which has nine million Brazilians of Arab ancestry.

Of them, six million are of Lebanese ancestry, making Brazil’s population of Lebanese equivalent to that of Lebanon itself - though the figures have been contracted.

It is estimated that there are over a quarter of a million Colombians of Arab descent, almost all tracing their origins to Syria, Lebanon and Palestine (Al Jadid, A Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts, 2000).

A huge Syrian migration to Venezuela took place during the oil boom of the 1950s. They scattered throughout the country and are the core of today’s 400,000 Syrians living in Venezuela. According to another Saudi Aramco World report of 2001, although there are no official statistics, it is generally agreed that between 150,000 and 200,000 of Honduras’ six million inhabitants are of Arab descent, and of these, the great majority are Palestinian.

Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin who made the film The Last Moon on Palestinian immigration to Chile, says that “the largest number of Palestinians living outside of Palestine are in Chile; in the central valleys, Valparaíso and Talca, there are almost 500 thousand descendants of the first and second generation of Palestinians who have their roots very much alive, maintain cultural ties, music, poetry, literature, food, the sense of family …” Goetz is a curator and writer interested in artistic strategies that challenge governing societal hierarchies, narratives and structures. Parallel to her curatorial practice, she has been writing for various international art magazines such as Artforum, Frieze and Mousse, and teaching at various art academies and universities. She also works between Basel, Switzerland, and Mexico City, researching on conceptual, collective and participatory practices in Mexico during the 70s–80s.