Fareed Armaly: “The (re)Orient”

The (re)Orient, his second individual exhibition, situated the role of exhibition-making within an emerging postcolonial discourse. The exhibition is conceived as a positioning system, in the sense that “identities are the names we give to the various ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (Stuart Hall, 1989).

The (re)Orient (1989) focuses two seemingly-unconnected realities through its Paris lens. The recently completed Louvre Pyramid, the centerpiece of President Mitterand’s Grand Projects program of architectural monuments, aimed at reaffirming Paris as a world culture capital. As the public entrance in the Napoleon court leading to the new Denon wing, its glass architecture casts an unavoidable neo-colonial shadow over the entire program. Meanwhile, Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, a former French mandate and so-called “Paris of the East” was collapsing under a civil war (1975–90), which the fixed perception of Western media locked to the image of a timeless, modern ruin. The (re)Orient links these modern ruins and monuments by instabilities hidden within a legacy of institutional systems of representation, power, and knowledge. By creating spatial passages from these instabilities, the exhibition reflects the “Orient” as a narrative constructed through epistemic violence. Therefore a central work of the project is the exhibition guide, organizing around “Paris-site”, “Paris-cite” and “parasite.” The guide forms a critical navigator scripting relations of exhibition architecture with a collection of distorted ontological artifacts.

In 2021, for the Mumok installation, Armaly reconsidered The (re)Orient as now a collected entity itself. As the Beirut context had changed, the artist invited Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari into a dialog, resulting in a work that addresses photography, collecting practices and post-civil-war iconography.

Fareed Armaly is an artist and curator whose work, since the late 1980s, has introduced a research-driven methodology that draws guidelines out from selected roles and fields of inquiry and sets them into new correspondences “coercing constellations” (Helmut Draxler). Armaly considers the open definition of artistic practice as the medium for rendering a contemporary syntax from a politics that inscribes identities through representation and culture. Exhibition projects emerge as an aggregate identity comprised of different “scripts” at work. His first works, Terminal Zone and R.O.O.M. (1987–89) took the form of DIY music/culture journals. These signalled Armaly’s early interest in an emancipatory spirit of a recording-culture generation, postulated in link with nation, narration, and imagined communities—then-nascent postcolonial tropes, which recognize culture as a field of engagement while destabilizing the canon of history as “closed texts.” This initial position informs as it evolves with Armaly’s practice that calls into question the assumptions, roles, and conventions underlying the constructs that legitimize both the artist and contemporary art institutions.

Fareed Armaly has exhibited internationally in distinguished platforms such as Documenta 11 and institutions such as the M.C.C. Saint-Etienne; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunstverein Munich; Foundation Tàpies, Barcelona; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva; NTU CCA Singapore; and mumok, Vienna. Parallel, the artist has held various roles and institutional positions, including in the formation of Galerie Nagel (1989-1994), Co-Curator (? in NowHere, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, 1995-6); “haus.0” program (1999–2002) as Artistic Director for Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; and later contracts/commissioned projects include: Shar(e)d Domains Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (2006-7); Ramallah Museum project (2013–15), NTU CCA, Singapore (2015); Empty Fields, SALT, Istanbul (2016). More recently, in 2021, he revisited and updated his exhibition The (re)Orient (1989) for the mumok, Vienna.