Jayce Salloum


Shirin Neshat


Fouad Elkoury


Mai Ghoussoub

Assia Lakhlif

Ahlam Shibli

   Not Your Typical Fine Arts Auction
  New York group dedicated to popularizing Middle East heterogeneity hosts successful fund-raiser
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
 




  BEIRUT: When the 18-month-old arts organization Arte East selected the date for its first annual silent auction - a benefit sale featuring donated works by over 40 artists from the Middle East and its various diaspora communities - it had no idea it would end up going head to head with such heavyweight auction houses as Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips, de Pury & Co.

But Arte East's event, held at the New Space in Chelsea on Nov. 9, fell smack in the middle of auction week in New York, when the city's most powerful art-selling firms hold blockbuster sales of contemporary art.

Arte East couldn't possibly offer lots to compete with the Warhols and Rothkos on the block elsewhere. Nor could it hope to reap such revenues as the $93 million made at Sotheby's or the $92 million made at Christie's. But Arte East nonetheless managed to gather a hearty crowd of about 200 people, including a number of prominent collectors and gallery owners. And by the end of the night, 25 pieces sold for over $26,000. All of this, as executive director Livia Alexander suggests, constitutes a real "vote of confidence" for a young group undertaking the formidable task of promoting the visibility of contemporary Middle Eastern art and culture in the United States.  

Arte East was established as a New York-based non-profit in March 2003. A group of filmmakers, artists, and educators came together to build an organization capable of supporting cultural initiatives in New York, with the potential to travel elsewhere in the country. The point is to expose a wider audience to the work of artists and filmmakers from the Middle East. Unlike other such organizations focusing more intently on national or ethnic productions, Arte East emphasizes the broadness and heterogeneity of the region.

"We had a lot of debates before starting out," says Alexander, in reference to the opposing impulses to particularize or generalize, "and we decided that it's a catch-22 either way. We didn't want to do just Arab or just Arab-Iranian. There are so many ethnicities in the region, and what we're trying to do is turn that on its head. We cannot talk about one homogeneous region. I think, especially in this country, because people have such an oversimplified notion, [Arte East] addresses that particular need and this particular time. ... A lot of communities have programming that caters back to those communities, but we wanted to create a dialogue."
In September 2003, Arte East staged the first of its a twice yearly film festivals called "Cinema East," held in collaboration with New York University's Department of Middle East Studies. In October 2004, the organization mounted its first visual art exhibition, "Near," at New York's Elga Wimmer Gallery. On Jan. 5, Arte East plans to launch a virtual gallery online.

The auction, then, marked both an opportunity to expose a wide range of artists, and a necessary event in the organization's evolution. All the artworks were donated either by the artists in question or by the galleries that represent them, and all the proceeds were funneled back into Arte East's programming.
"We have a film program that's established at this point," explains Alexander. "We just had an art exhibition. We did the fundraiser to be able to develop our programming further. In order to be able to develop a strong, sustainable organization, we have to develop slowly.

"We've only been around for a year and a half. We're building our fund-raising profile. In ten years," Alexander adds with an inshallah, "maybe we'll be like the Institut du Monde Arabe. But you have to remember, there's no government funding here for such projects. Here, we have to fend for ourselves."

Among the 44 artists who contributed works to the auction were such well-known talents as Shirin Neshat, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mona Hatoum. The starting bids were set according to remarkably affordable rates, starting at $300 (for Lebanese-Canadian painter Marwan Sahmarani's "Before Plastic Surgery," a composition in oil stick on paper that was much more political than the Francis Bacon-inspired nudes he exhibited in Beirut this past spring) and capping off at $2,400 (for Lebanese-American painter Nabil Nahas's diminutive, star-fish embedded golden acrylic canvas called "Drifting East," a new work from 2004).

In between, the auction gave bidders the chance to pick up such works as a bromide silver print of the pyramids at Giza from photographer Fouad Elkoury's "Suite Egyptienne"; a sculpture of a dancer made from aluminum, plaster, and resin by the multi-talented writer Mai Ghoussoub; a striking C-print of Beirut circa 1992 by similarly media-savvy filmmaker Jayce Salloum; or an archival inkjet print called "I was overcome with a momentary panic at the thought that they were right" from Walid Raad and the Atlas Group's sprawling visual performance project, "My Neck is Thinner than a Hair."

There were also a number of works being offered by lesser known artists, giving the benefit sale a sense of real discovery. Photographer Ahlam Shibli, who is currently pursuing an MFA at Tel Aviv University, donated a color-rich photograph entitled "Bread." Assia Lakhlif, a 20-year-old student at Cooper Union in New York who was born in Morocco, contributed a moving, abstracted photograph called "Bahlam Beek (Dreaming of You)."

What was so striking about the works being sold by Arte East was not only the aesthetic range but also the geographic distance on view. "One of the important things for us was to bring artwork from the Middle East and Europe," says Alexander, "not just from the States."

So how did Arte East assemble such broad selections? "We did a lot of research," Alexander explains, stressing every word. "It was a major production."

Everyone involved at Arte East, all of whom work on a volunteer basis, drew from their personal networks and professional contact bases. The results were an intriguing mix, including an Iraqi artist dividing her time between Sweden and Denmark (photographer Maha Mustafa) and a New Yorker born to an Afghan father and Lebanese mother (multimedia artist Mariam Ghani).

"We raised a nice sum," Alexander says by way of conclusion. Although $26,000 may not sound like much when compared to New York's more venerable auction houses, "it's fantastic" for a New York-based non-profit. It guarantees Arte East's existence for the near future, and in terms of encouragement, the response is unquantifiable.

Arte East's first online exhibition begins on Jan. 5, 2005. For more information, check out www.arteeast.org.