‘Shubbak’: A window on North African & Middle Eastern art

While the media focuses on the troubles that have become synonymous with much of North Africa and the Middle East, London recently hosted the biggest festival of contemporary culture and art from that same region. It was the third edition of the biennial festival which first launched in 2011 and is called ‘Shubbak’.

The programme was varied and included music concerts, exhibitions, poetry, talks and discussions, films and art. The Artistic director of Shubbak said: ‘We are immensely proud to have brought together an ambitious programme that invites artists to speak in a multitude of voices about what matters deeply to them. London is intrinsically connected to the Arab world. Shubbak amplifies these links through connecting Arab artists with audiences in London’.

Among the highlights was the work of the celebrated French Tunisian ‘calligraffiti’ artist eL Seed who painted a large-scale mural in the heart of London’s urban art quarter. Blending Arab calligraphy with graffiti techniques, eL Seed has developed a distinctive and striking style, fusing poetry and language with dramatic design to create large-scale work. His creations adorn a high minaret in the Southern Tunisian city of Gabes, a wall on the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, motorway underpasses in Qatar as well as walls in New York, Melbourne and Jeddah.

There was also dance: The Moroccan choreographer and dancer Radouan Mriziga performed his solo ‘55’. Exploring the body’s relationship to space through simple gestures and with quiet intensity, Mriziga gradually measures the space and creates an intricate floor pattern. Alexandrian born Nazir Tanbouli created large-scale drawings, starting from simple marks and gradually covering the ground. In the process of drawing it becomes a performance.

Another Dance I watched at the ‘Place’ in the heart of London, was called ‘When the Arabs Used to Dance’ by The Tunisian choreographer, based in France Radaoune El Meddeb’s. Inspired by the films, music and culture of the Arab world in the 1960s and 1970s - the heyday of popular Arab cinema - when women and artists in particular were freer than today, El Meddeb’s dance was almost a conversation between the past and the now. El Meddeb described his performance as “a play that uses the past to tell the present”.

The performance by four male dancers seemed to be punctuated at the point where one dancer removed his shirt and wrapped it around the waist of a fellow dancer, whilst his hips moved rhythmically in a belly dance. The first dancer then removed the shirt from his waist and instead wrapped it around the dancer’s face, first creating a hijab; then moving a sleeve to cover the lower part of his face as a niqab; and finally pulling the shirt entirely over his face.

This sequence seemed to be a metaphor for El Meddeb’s feelings on the past and present. He described it as “the violence of the world entering the cardboard scenery, bringing to the end a time that was an illusion, a sweet illusion”. It became clear, then, that El Meddeb’s intriguing title does not declare that Arabs have stopped dancing, only that they are dancing to a different beat, in a different time and a different world. ‘When Arabs Used to Dance’ is both a warning for the future and a celebration of the past and, for now, the Arabs are dancing on the precipice.

El Meddeb agreed with a remark I made about the dancers stopping at some point to mind the call to prayer. I asked whether that was to show the contradiction in the current Arab or Muslim way of thinking between the love of music and dance and the sense of guilt that came with it.

I also watched a play by the award-winning Tunisian actor and director Meher Awachri performing his first UK premiere of D-Sisyphe. D-Sisyphe (pronounced as in the French ‘décisif’, meaning ‘decisive’ in English) was an important piece of performance, both as a creative expression that fuses contemporary dance with physical theatre and as an insight into the kind of socio-political situation of Tunisians that ultimately led to the 2011 uprisings that began in Tunisia and spread across other parts of North Africa and the Middle East.

The piece offers a humanised perspective of one man, Khmais - a construction worker - with his own feelings of loss and desperation at what he sees as the wreckage of his life – loathed by his wife and son, rejected by society and having lost faith in God, he is alone and afraid.

Award-winning actor Meher Awachri developed D-Sisyphe as his final project at university, starting with a text he had written based upon ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by the French writer, Albert Camus. Awachri described how the book raised questions for him ‘about my life in Tunisia before the revolution during the time of dictatorship, about the problems within the Tunisian society and about my problems with society’. As Awachri’s character Khmais began to sense the true magnitude of his loss he began to realise that this also somehow brought him a sense of freedom and strength – with nothing to lose he found himself able to face his oblivion and rebel. Awachri added, “Inevitably he suffers the same fate as Sisyphus: Khmais is punished, rejected and perpetually tortured. However, this time the hell is his own choice.”

This feeling of having nothing to lose really does echo the feelings of the people during what’s called the ‘Arab Spring’, where people’s sense of dignity and self-worth were so low that there was seemingly little fear of the consequences of their protests. But D-Sisyphe is more than a simply nostalgic reflection on the roots of the ‘Arab Spring’. It is a piece that questions the ways in which the future is envisioned in Tunisia and how it can be achieved – it is about construction, both literal and metaphorical. Awachri explains:

“In Tunisia and many Arab countries we just build without thinking about what we need; there is a lack of vision. With this piece I want to push people to ask questions and contemplate on what we need. In my opinion, if we want this revolution to be a success, we need to ask more questions in order to formulate clear goals.”

Awachri agreed with a point I made about whether that applied to the time of the big protests in Tunisia in early 2011 when people went out on the streets in their thousands demanding a regime change but didn’t have a clear idea of the alternative . He added that his performance was a declaration and an invitation to his fellow Tunisians – there is a need to be more ‘D-Sisyph’.

* Mounira Chaieb is Tunisian journalist and writer based in London.

* THE VIEWS OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE PAMBAZUKA NEWS EDITORIAL TEAM

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