Fareed Armaly

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Fareed Armaly (*1957 Iowa) is an Arab American artist, curator, and editor who lives an works in the US and Berlin, Europe. He became known as an important agent in the field of Context-Art (developed and influenced from Conceptual Art) during the 1990s through several major exhibition projects combining Installation / Architecture, Media, and Information Design.

His productions focus on a contemporary artistic practice linked to issues of culture, identity and representation in a range of interdisciplinary-based projects and various roles held within the art institutional framework. Furthermore the working field includes his involvement through advisory analysis for several projects specifically related to the broad field of media.

1 Method of Work
2 Artistic Practice
3 Open Concepts of Networks
4 Teaching
5 Exhibitions
6 Bibliography
7 External Links

[edit] Method of Work

Armaly’s work can be described as a conceptual conjunction of various cultural aspects which are brought together in an open architecture of information design for his exhibition and programming projects. These are based on a structural analysis, which is achieved by building connections through the apparent paradox of a sythesizing breakdown of cultural practices. His concept is devoted to building routes, which become new guidelines to reveal undisclosed dispositions. In a world structure, which turned increasingly discrete, his concept of 'breaking down, synthesizing, and interconnecting' establishes in the field of cultural practice, what Stuart Hall generally has analysed for cultural studies by asking for an exchange of the term 'roots' for 'routes' | (1). The resultant installations consider specifically spacial translations of media to dismantle cultural constellations and their complex impact on identity processings.

Recalling the importance of a discursive medium Armaly's art works establish an ongoing search towards a contemporary representational syntax that pertains a general creative 'unfinishedness' of cultural identity and contrives these embodiments onto changing institutional models. His concept draws a major parallel between this approach for a politics of representation that constantly finds 'openings' in the linking of art, culture and society, and the shift in understanding conventions of a [politics] that S.Hall relates to regarding globalization and new 'diasporic identity' (the move from 'roots' to 'routes'), where media plays an increasingly important role in or as culture.

[edit] Artistic Practice

In the beginning of Armaly's practice stand early productions in the US in form of the self-published journals Terminal Zone and R.O.O.M. (1987-89), which transposed the search for a contemporary art practice syntax onto a music-culture magazine, a format not existing at hat time. His magazines collected essays and discursive interviews with seminal musicians and instantiated a generational Identity politics of thought-communities linking everyday- and pop-culture through specific terms like 'nation' and 'representation'.

In the late 80s works such as displaced passages (1988) or the solo exhibition (re)orient (1989) reflected on the institutionalisation of orientalist, western-based knowledge discourses, in order to root out a contemporary media spatiality from 'closed' texts. The concept extended into large institutional exhibition projects, such as Orphée 1990 (1990, France), and Brea-kd-own (1993, Brussels, Belgium) to construct narratives that linked the remainders of post-68 cultural policies to the current post-89 transitional settings which destabilized the officially-sanctioned notions of representation, history, nation, and thus identity.

[edit] Open Concepts of Networks

F. Armaly defines his deliberate adaptation of artistic practice by the way of the interplay between different cultural fields and strategies, which unfold as a 'scripting' of correspondences of the between. A philosophy that shows also evidence in his different roles within the art institutional operating systems, as they include long-term artistic/curatorial advisory collaborations to develop new methodologies for institutional projects.

The complex interdependency of roles becomes especially apparent in the productions after 1998, like Program (1998), a university-based public art-TV program, then followed by From / To, a large scale institutional project (Witte de With, 1999 / Documenta11, 2002), which combined symposia, exhibition and media production to link the spatiality of refugee movement to modernity and media. This continued throughout the programming concept as artistic director of haus.0 (1999-2002), for the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, an artist’s space in transition. The framework here included architectural renovations, media production studios, workshops, discourse productions, which were introduced and connected to create unique interdisciplinary international projects defining the identity of haus.0 program.

The described methods were also deployed for the exhibition Orient(n)ations, 2004, at Art Pace, Texas, which established an orientation, that derived in part from the sense of the ' uncanny'. It set itself within a nation at a time of war, where the current combination of politics and broadcast-media networks reflect a worldview handled as if a corporate identity, along 'imaging' guidelines, was overlaid onto the self and / as the world. This method allowed the creation of new correspondences to provide nodal points, through which cultural productions thread together as passages mapping out this very project. That way the work reflects and breaks the implicated enclosure as the different passages suggest intersecting narratives, from which the project 'script' develops. This processing of the script manifests the intersections as links embedded within a spatiality that is informed by the notion of a ' social imaginary'.

Again the creative transformative character connected to representations in the everyday is multiform and fragmentary. As such, it leaves terms like 'nation', 'society', and 'culture', as unfinished constructs in play. The concepts of 'individual' / 'collective identity' provide the staging of these relations. Operating within these various dynamics, Orient(n)ations determines its site, by establishing three 'positioning agencies' - a 'compass', 'atlas', and ' radio signal' -, that together triangulate location.

[edit] Teaching

He has taught at several postgraduate programs in Europe. (CCC, Ecole superieure des beaux-arts, Geneva; Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht; Universität Hamburg)

[edit] Exhibitions

2004 orient(n)ations, ArtPace, San Antonio, USA
2002 From/To, Documenta11, Kassel, D (included films by Dir. R. Masharawi)
2000-01 Architectures of Discourse, 2001, Foundation Tapies, ES, Curator: Ute Meta Bauer
1999-02 haus.0, four year program as Artistic Director, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, D
1999 From/To, Witte de With, Rotterdam, NL.
1998 Program, Art in Public Space commission, Kulturbehörde Hamburg, Germany.
1997 Parts, Kunstverein München, Munich, D
1995-96 ?, (in NowHere), Louisiana Museum, DK, Curator Ute Meta Bauer, participation as Co-Curator / Artist
1995 Scale, Forum Stadtpark Prag, Prague, CR
1993 BREA-KD-OWN, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, B
1992-93 Project Unité, Firminy, F, Curator: Yves Aupetitalot
1992 Contact, Galerie Nagel, Cologne, D
1990 Orphée 1990, Maison de la Culture et de la Communication, Saint-Etienne, F
1989 (re)Orient, Galerie Lorenz, Paris, F
1988 Wechselkurse, Galerie Dürr, Munich, D
1987 Publications: Terminal Zone / R.O.O.M.