The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Oraib Toukan’s multifaceted, participatory projects involve interventions that test ideas of memory, history and institutional establishments. With ironic wit, she offers divergent readings of reality — ‘when absurdity is or becomes the form . . . Or when reality becomes a performance in and of itself that can only be digested with humour’. 1 White elephant 2011, for example, walled off a small area of the Art Dubai art fair. Wasting high-end ‘real estate’ by shaping partitions into a void, rather than maintaining the ‘white cube’ of the gallery space, she exposed the commercial underpinnings of the art world. She similarly manipulated the conventions of the art establishment in Displaced 2011, where an entire gallery partition was moved to reveal the unpainted wood beneath. In an homage to literary theorist Edward Said, They nicked my favourite penguin scene and made it a curatorial concept 2010– echoes the sentiments of Said’s famous quote: ‘Appeals to the past are amongst the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present’. 2 Recalling Jean-Paul Sartre’s invitation to Said to an improbable forum on ‘peace in the Middle East’ at Michel Foucault’s apartment in 1979, Toukan republished a Said essay and email about the ironic occurrence, distributed a fake invitation from Sartre to Said and also excavated the conference proceedings. 3 The social and political concerns of the Middle East are central to many of Toukan’s works. As a US-born Jordanian of Palestinian descent, she approaches these concerns with an informed, critical and mischievous eye, interrogating issues of local and global relevance. In a critique of retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters’s re- mapping strategy to create a ‘New Middle East’, she proposed her own interactive installation entitled The New(er) Middle East 2007, in which cut-outs of countries, reshaped without their colonial topographical lines, could be configured with magnets into fragmented re-mappings. 4 In the Middle East, recent decades have seen significant shifts fuelled by war, economic development and trade, the battle for control over resources, contested land ownership and the circulation of dubious media portrayals. These are often underpinned by political rather than ethical motivations, and by the representation of stereotypes rather than the reality of a region of multifarious histories and cultures. Luxury development projects such as The Palm Islands and The World in Dubai are testament to the resource-driven wealth in such areas of new economic strength. The failure to realise these projects fully, however, proves their inability to withstand international financial change. Similar vulnerabilities are revealed in Toukan’s works, which are replete with distinct regional quirks and nuances. The Equity is in the Circle 2007–09 offers Middle Eastern nation states for sale in a package of 100-year leasehold options. One version of the installation of the project resembles an office environment, and features a corporate logo, auction catalogue, promotional posters and video. Under the fabricated company name Nayruz Holdings ( nayruz is the word for Iranian New Year) — and with a logo that references Arabic calligraphy and the shape of The World development — Toukan has created a complete pastiche to produce a compelling advertising, real estate and public relations campaign. 5 The work originated with the artist allegedly sending the recently-opened Dubai office of the Christie’s auction house with a branded Christie’s catalogue which replaced Middle Eastern art with satellite images, art work captions with information from the CIA’s World Factbook , starting bids with value estimates of nation states, and art work provenance with a history of colonial ownership. The video component, titled Talking Heads , features a series of actual professionals promoting the commercial viability of the fictional venture: a media strategist, an economist, a diplomatic advisor, a financial strategist and a Middle East affairs consultant. Speaking the respective vernaculars of media jargon, corporate strategy and diplomatic rhetoric, they pitch the ‘selling points’ of unpopular areas, like Ahvaz in Iran and Kabul in Afghanistan, which could be offered as ‘one package’. In addition, they contemplate splitting Iraq into safe and unsafe areas to attract buyers; suggest that customers for Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish areas could reclaim some of their heritage; outline China’s ‘strategic interest’ in the region; and address Iran’s ‘image problem’, where reassessing the national dress may be a necessary marketing strategy. 6 Manipulating familiar corporate, diplomatic and media languages to present a comprehensive discourse, Toukan invites us to speculate about the nature of the exercise — is it a humorous, hypothetical set- up or an economic and political possibility? The scenario indicates the potential of this reality and bespeaks the wider ramifications for our own societies — political, economic and social implications, as well as, ultimately, the market value. Between paradigms of reality, industry, imagination and memory, Oraib Toukan parodies organisational, informational and value systems from within, composing a persuasive proposition to sell the unsellable. Tarun Nagesh 1 ‘Oraib Toukan: Q & A with Christine Takengny’, Oraib Toukan , see <http://oraibtoukan.com/Documentations.html >, viewed 27 June 2012. 2 Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism , Chatto and Windus, London, 1993, p.7. 3 Oraib Toukan, email to the author, 3 July 2012. 4 ‘Oraib Toukan’, Nadour , see <http://nadour.org/artists/oraib-toukan/> , viewed 22 June 2012. 5 Oraib Toukan, ‘Talking Heads and/or Other Matters’ [lecture], Serpentine Gallery, London, 17 October 2010, see <http://vimeo. com/25789760>, viewed 10 July 2012. 6 Oraib Toukan, see the Talking Heads component of The Equity is in the Circle 2007–09. ORAIB TOUKAN A piece of the Middle East 250