1. Middle East and other futurisms: imaginary temporalities in contemporary art and visual culture
- Author
-
Jussi Parikka
- Subjects
Cultural Studies ,Focus (computing) ,History ,Middle East ,Sociology and Political Science ,05 social sciences ,06 humanities and the arts ,060202 literary studies ,Visual arts ,Contemporary art ,Temporalities ,0602 languages and literature ,0502 economics and business ,050203 business & management ,The Imaginary ,Visual culture - Abstract
This article focuses on recent contemporary art of Gulf Futurism and Arab Futurism with a specific geographical focus on the Near and Middle East. Still only occasionally addressed and analysed in contemporary academic discussions, these art discourses and practices can be understood as particular forms of counterfuturisms and cultural politics of imaginary times; they continue the earlier work of Afrofuturism in using an aesthetic repertoire to complicate normalised notions of time and technology but in an alternative geopolitical context. Some of the analysed works such as Larissa Sansour’s films outline political questions about territories and architectures of control but these are also other contexts that address how experience of time is being infrastructured in material media culture. The article analyses these post-colonial artistic practices in dialogue with contemporary theoretical debate about cultural politics of time including the discourses about cancellation of future (Berardi) as well as the idea of counterfuturisms as a form of audiovisual practice.
- Published
- 2017