Middle East and other futurisms: imaginary temporalities in contemporary art and visual culture

Abstract

This article focuses on recent contemporary art of Gulf Futurism and Arab Futurism with a specific geographical focus on the Near and Middle East. Still only occasionally addressed and analysed in contemporary academic discussions, these art discourses and practices can be understood as particular forms of counterfuturisms and cultural politics of imaginary times; they continue the earlier work of Afrofuturism in using an aesthetic repertoire to complicate normalised notions of time and technology but in an alternative geopolitical context. Some of the analysed works such as Larissa Sansour's films outline political questions about territories and architectures of control but these are also other contexts that address how experience of time is being infrastructured in material media culture. The article analyses these post-colonial artistic practices in dialogue with contemporary theoretical debate about cultural politics of time including the discourses about cancellation of future (Berardi) as well as the idea of counterfuturisms as a form of audiovisual practice.

Scry, the Beloved Country: Sinofuturist Forecasting and Accelerationist Aesthetics

“…The proliferation of futurisms (Arabfuturism, Asia-futurism, Gulf Futurism, Indigenous Futurisms, etc.) and the inclusion of sinofuturism among them demands careful analysis beyond the serialization of global futurisms as geopolitical aesthetics patterned on the experience of Afrofuturism (Parikka 2018).…”

The privilege of taken for grantedness: On precarity and mobile media

“…Over the past decade or so, major media studies scholars such as Jussi Parikka (2014Parikka ( , 2015Parikka ( , 2016, Sean Cubitt (2016), and others have brought attention to the ways in which digital technologies exist at the cost of exploiting finite planetary resources and the people used to extract them for the profit of others. TikTok is not immune.…”

Multiple Expressions of Contemporary Visual Art

“…The expression forms of visual art in different social environments are mostly based on cultural heritage and spiritual levels, exhibiting different intentionality and timeliness. Different artistic forms complicate the concept of visual art and demonstrate the activity of the spiritual level under artistic perception [6][7]. The above research has demonstrated the main functions of visual art in different environments, but further exploration is needed.…”