Transition , Flow , and Divergent Times

The Western academy’s growing interest in the contemporary arts in the Arab world illustrates the desire to map “Islam”—problematic as this term is—within the global history of cultures and to integrate it into “Western” models of the writing and documenting of the past. As positive and corrective as these academic approaches may seem,1 the notion of recording time—that is, writing history—is still firmly bound at the beginning of the 21st century to the idea of continuity, and the pattern of “Western”centric thinking imposes that notion upon contemporary artists and art historians. Yet the political changes and spontaneous eruptions that the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing, especially since the beginning of 2011, defy and resist conventional interpretations of historical processes and therefore demand a rethinking of the configuration of the past. It would be too easy to classify and explain the postmodern renaissance in the Arab world in terms of “in-between” periods and “threshold times,” thus integrating the Arab Spring into the idea of continuity and the linearity of time. Indeed, several contemporary artists from the Arab world today are addressing questions of temporalities, mainly by focusing on forwardor backward-looking aesthetics and calling our attention to terms such as tradition, authenticity, and future. Furthermore, the colonial ideology that so profoundly contributed to the making of the imagined Orient in our modern, postcolonial times creates a new dilemma—if not trap—into which artists might indeed fall as they reimagine and reconstruct the “Orient” today. As Walid Raad, a contemporary artist whose work is the focus of this brief discussion, says: