| Cairo and Buenos Aires, despite their 7,350 miles in distance, are similar as two centers with rich art historical past, posed for changing and heavily characterized by artistic innovations. Each provides an example of the complexity of transnationalism, postcolonial identity politics, diasporic displacement, and geographic shifts. Each has a formidable history that evokes deep emotional attachments as well as profound divides. The production and presentation of art in these two cities reveal heterogeneous situations where contexts that may sometimes be antagonistic or conflictive. The visual history of both cities often documents a manner in which tradition co-exists alongside a refocused reality that plays off of exclusions—social, economic and political. |  |
Horace Brockington
Cairo and Buenos Aires, despite their 7,350 miles in distance, are similar as two centers with rich art historical past, posed for changing and heavily characterized by artistic innovations. Each provides an example of the complexity of transnationalism, postcolonial identity politics, diasporic displacement, and geographic shifts. Each has a formidable history that evokes deep emotional attachments as well as profound divides. The production and presentation of art in these two cities reveal heterogeneous situations where contexts that may sometimes be antagonistic or conflictive. The visual history of both cities often documents a manner in which tradition co-exists alongside a refocused reality that plays off of exclusions—social, economic and political. At a moment when concepts of center and periphery collapse into each other, artists in Cairo and Buenos Aires are rethinking both self and place resulting in an art that is inscribed with notions of value, difference, and desire. Theirs is often an art informed by an alternative visual language, simultaneously seeped in references the history and contemporaneity. Gerardo Mosquersa, however, has cautioned that the persisting disconnect between art theory and the site of artistic production, with the former being formulated in the West and the latter by artists in their indigenous spaces. The objectification of the artist is clearly indicative of the way in which he or she is viewed as a cultural commodity. The intense focus on the artist as a person, their childhood, their relationship with their country of origin, their religion, and their political leanings distracts attention from what should be the focal point: the work itself.
Often for artists from these two regions with rich artistic heritages, the question centers on issues of modernity and authenticity. Is it possible to be too modern, to be too influenced by the West and to therefore, be dubbed unauthentic, and not a viable representative? On the other hand, one can be too authentic or traditional, and is therefore, dismissed as folkloric, not fitting to our notion of contemporary art. The end result is one that reaffirms to Western audiences their preconceived ideas, satisfying their desire for the exotic, in a language they understand while relieving their guilt at having so long ignored the non-Western world.
Art from Cairo and Buenos Aires finds itself thrown into the arena of international art discourse today. The discourse is centered around how art should be viewed outside the context from which it originated, especially that which is based on non-Western-centered locales. The contextualization is not necessary without implications of exoticism and voyeurism. While stylistically the visual language and forms of the works of artists from these regions appear to utilize familiar codes or strategies of modernism and postmodernism, they do not detach the works from their place of origin. There is a need to look at the complex dimensions of aesthetics in relation to social and political situations operating within the context of these works.
Part of the problem of contextualization of recent art from Cairo and Buenos Aires revolves around a process by which viewers are provided with information enabling them to decipher the codes of a visual representation as alien to themselves. Knowledge of the socio-political circumstances, historical facts, and other explanations becomes necessary to provide the Western-centric viewer with codes to precisely understand these works. Art historical, critical, and theoretical analysis aimed at broadly defining art from these two distinct regions must continue to investigate the artworks’ form and content, and the multitude of connections.
Despite these concerns, an overview of contemporary art in Cairo and Buenos Aires uncovers existing codes that have been formulated outside the traditional domain, creating the possibility of alternative art, but equally less governed by strict Western approaches. The artistic activities in these two cities reveal a current moment loaded with potential for articulating new positions and function of art while based in Western strategies, but criticality attuned to their specific regional concerns. While Cairo appears on the verge of creating a firm contemporary art environment, in which recent art is contextualized through discursive debate, Buenos Aires has built a more established art scene, where institutional, academic, curatorial, and market structures are developed—Picasso is presented alongside Braque (cubism), Pierre Huyghe, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
The art arenas in Buenos Aires and Cairo are fresh, but complex. It is perhaps the lack of local theoretical contextualization intertwined with absence within the international academic and discursive debates that leaves these art scenes vulnerable to imposed contextualization and often misrepresentation. Artworks of young artists in Cairo and Buenos Aires are inevitably subject to similar historic cross-references. These young artists aim to address polemics of history and current events with views that are presented as both cultural fusion and commodifications through new post-modernist manifestations. In these re-invented art centers, confusion continues further emphasized by institutionalization of concepts of “otherness vs. national and ethnic identities.” Often these artists find themselves up against various cultural policies that tend to have a strong impact on cultural production. Their works are ultimately the re-contextualization of the residue of the rampant culture of “otherness” versus that of a new globalism.
