Natasha Gasparian

In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess, the first comprehensive study of the work, Natasha Gasparian weaves together a social art history from the artist’s writings, exhibition reviews, guestbook comments, personal correspondences and testimonies, as well as social, political, and aesthetic shifts, particularly as they related to the debates on commitment (iltizam) in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. By attempting to reconstruct this history of the artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around it, Gasparian exposes the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. She argues that the oversight in the reception—the critics’ and audiences’ inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.

The Changing of Horses

Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref el-Rayess

Paolo Colombo

Tamara Chalabi

Commissioned by the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq and published on the occasion of the 58th Venice Biennale, Fatherland presents the work of Kurdish Iraqi artist Serwan Baran and his investigation of the concept of ?fatherland? as opposed to what we traditionally understand as ?motherland.? Mixing curatorial texts by Tamara Chalabi and Natasha Gasparian with a series of poems and original letters from the 1980s written by Iraqi soldiers and collected by the artist during the years, Fatherland is both a reflective document that echoes Baran?s work and a commentary on the masculine and paternalistic dimension of the political culture in Iraq, a country dominated by men who have often enacted oppressive ideologies. 00Exhibition: Iraqi pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (11.05.-24.11.2019).

Natasha Gasparian

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