Middle Eastern Art, Hit at NY

What we see now at the Queens Museum of Art (founded in 1972), at Flushing Meadows, site of the 1964 World Trade Fair and the U.S. Open tennis tournament (taking place currently), are versatile depictions of art by 27 emerging and established artists. Titled ?arjama/Translation,?this diasporan feast from ArteEast created by curators ?Leeza Ahmady, Iftikhar Dadi and assistant curators Reem Fadda and Sarah Malaika ?focuses on contemporary art from artists who trace their roots to the Middle East and Central Asia.
The curators?backgrounds range from Afghanistan to Ramallah to Saudi Arabia.
The exhibition rearranges social, geographical, emotional boundaries through the innocent-sounding process of ?ranslation?for an international audience and in the process, introduces contemporary artists from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Turkey to all of us. Interestingly, many of these artists live or practice their craft in Western Europe or the United States.
Assistant Professor of Art at Cornell University, Dadi who teaches modern and contemporary art, says, ?ranslation includes the sense of movement and process, of marking multiple locationalities.?Art historian Fadda also from Cornell, asks, ?ow can the concept of translation become a threshold toward better cultural understanding? Can we escape racist discourses through mediation and translation? Can translation be understood as a conscious political act??
Global Milieu Stretching the Metaphor
Answers to some of these questions are obvious once you see the interactive exhibition. Included are touching videos of real-life and fictional incidents that took place or were imagined in languages of the region (soap operas in Arabic, for instance). One Turkish video records charming, fun-loving women indulging in their fanciful, hedonistic dream of letting their hair down. Born in 1946 in Ankara, creator G웞s웢 Karamustafa? The City and the Secret Panther Fashion is a kind of re-living what they perhaps could not accomplish in real life. The artist? five-cast ?emme fatale?of characters ?all dressed in panther patterns ?reportedly meet in secret, partake of pastries and shots, eat and drink as if there is no tomorrow. Interestingly, this is not to lure men, but merely to enjoy themselves. One wonders if this qualifies as art. It? merely a symbolic commentary on pleasurable narcissism.
Mata Hari with a twist perhaps ?made famous by the success of Sex and the City. 
Iranian artist, photographer and sculptor Farhad Moshiri (born, 1963), who has popularized soap operas by re-editing scenes, has sculpted for this exhibition, a series ?Sweet Dreams, Chocline ?that uses a cake-icing dispenser to create the figure of a dead body on canvas with thick, colorful, lifelike pigments in the form of cupcakes (normally served to guests in Iranian households). Displayed on the floor, this creative work dramatizes chalk-lined bodies used by cops.
Turkish installation artist Esra Ersen? I Am Turkish. I Am Honest. I Am Diligent is unique in that she works with groups of school children, one in a school outside Velen, M웢sterland in Germany and the another in Gwangju, South Korea. A mixed-media creation with video presentations, Ersen (born, 1970), who resides in Germany, made the children wear Turkish school uniforms for a week, and asked them to write down their activities and interactions which Ersen videotaped. The kids?experiences were then transferred to the uniforms ?an unusual educational experience for children from the other side of the globe.
Originally developed in 1998 for a secondary school, it was adapted in 2002 for the 4th Gwangju Biennial in Korea.
The United States of Palestine Times by Palestine-born contemporary artist, Khalil Rabah questions the format and autonomy of ?is?paper, and since it is his very own creation he has the freedom to navigate and investigate at will his own sense of satirical imagery
(a headline reads: Citizenship for Trees!).
Artists featured at this exhibition move between various points of departure and arrival to differing spaces and attitudes attempting to blend cultures, histories, societies and peoples. The media used by these artists is so varied and interesting that one needs more time to digest all that? going on in this Queens County where more than half the households are populated by people born outside the United States and where 160 languages are spoken. Truly, a global milieu that stretches the metaphor.

   Raj S. Rangarajan