Atteqa Ali - Collaborative Praxis and Contemporary Art Experiments in the MENASA Region

Cover design: eStudioCalamarCover image: Walls of Peace, I am Karachi. Organized by Vasl Artists Association and Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Involving artists, designers, students, and volunteers, Karachi, 2015. Photograph by the author, January 2016.['Walls of Peace, I am Karachi' needs to be in italics]

Cover image: Walls of Peace, I am Karachi. Organized by Vasl Artists Association and Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Involving artists, designers, students, and volunteers, Karachi, 2015. Photograph by the author, January 2016.

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The research presented in this book began with funds from Zayed University Research Office to support my colleagues and me in a cluster grant. The group accomplished a lot individually and collectively from 2015 until 2020. An offshoot of the cluster grant was a separate incentive fund that provided critical support for me to travel to view projects and organizations around the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia region, and have discussions with the people developing innovative initiatives. I have received intellectual and moral support from the administration and faculty in the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University.

All along the way, I have been encouraged and facilitated to do the necessary research and writing to complete this manuscript by my family, including my husband, who also inspired me with his artwork. My son, sister, nieces, nephews, parents, brothers, and in-laws helped me to pursue the research through accompanying me on trips or allowing me time to travel and write.

Finally, I am indebted to the great folks at Palgrave Macmillan, especially to Lina Aboujieb for her encouragement from our discussions through to the proposal phase and into the submission.

In February 2019, the organizing body for Documenta , the major international art event held every five years in Germany and, more recently, in another part of the world, announced that the artistic director for the 2022 edition would be ruangrupa , a collective of artists in Jakarta, Indonesia. In this gesture, such practices have reached the very top establishment. Ruangrupas assumption of the lead in the premier event illustrates the shifting artistic and curatorial practices that define art today, and indicate that collaborative practices will become even more significant than they are already, if for no other reason than the spotlight that will be cast on them when the edition of Documenta opens in 2022.

During the last two decades, collaborative art praxes , sometimes categorized as participatory art , relational art , dialogical art , social practice art , socially engaged art , community-based projects , community arts , and other related terms have become a staple of the global contemporary art world. Some might consider them the trending modus operandi in artistic practices today. As such, the Documenta establishment might have felt an urgency to address the universal adoption and interest in such communal activities.

Other recent developments signal the turn to collaborative, socially engaged practices. In this case, it is related to activism in art. In late 2018, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York that stages a prestigious biennial exhibition of important artistic developments in the nation faced an internal challenge made public. In the backdrop of American politics in which questionable practices at the United States-Mexico border were exposed, the Whitney board member Warren B. Kanders came under fire. The organizer of the action, Amin Hussain read aloud the letter from the Whitney staff.

Rakowitz, whose work is discussed in Chap. , was, at the time of the exhibitions opening, the only artist who decided to remove his work from the Whitney Biennial. In addition, the artist collective Forensic Architecture created a worka documentary film that musician and activist David Byrne narratedspecifically dealing with Warren Kanders involvement in the gassing of innocent civilians at the border of United States and Mexico as well as other areas of conflict including Palestine .