From Aniconism to Bliss: Media art shows its Islamic roots

Particle bursts, mystical abstraction, and an intelligent suspicion of figurative images — these qualities of some of the most thrilling media art works have deep origins in the great arts of Islam. This program features film, video, and digital works from the 1960s to the 2000s that celebrate, knowingly or not, their Islamic origins. Mounir Fatmi and Peggy Ahwesh propose a sober aniconism (the shunning of, or proscription against, images) in response to a contemporary image-world of pornography and murder. In works by Takeshi Murata and Cory Arcangel, a giddy iconoclasm takes over. Doug Richardson’s analog vector experiments, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s insistent jazzy textualism, and Usama Alshaibi’s shimmying geometries celebrate the liberation from image-making. The pixelline universe twinkles in the works of Walid Ra’ad, Paul Sharits, and Gheith Al-Amine, and, finally, Eric Siegel’s analog abstractions take us into the blissful beyond of the image.

This program is presented in conjunction with the launch of Laura U. Marks’s book Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press, 2010), at Centre A on Tuesday September 21 from 5-7 p.m. at the Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, SFU Woodward’s, 149 W. Hastings St.

For book launch date and details, visit www.dimcinema.ca.

Laura U. Marks is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002), and the new Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010). Dr. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University. www.sfu.ca/~lmarks

Programme
Dieu me pardonne, Mounir Fatmi (8:02, 2001, DV, Morocco/France)
She Puppet, Peggy Ahwesh (17:00, 2000, DV, USA)
Untitled (Pink Dot), Takeshi Murata (5:00, 2007, DV, USA)            
Low Level All-Stars: Video Graffiti from the Commodore 64 Computer, Cory Arcangel and Radical Software Group, (21:03, 2003, DV, USA) 
Visual Piano (documentation of realtime vector display), Doug Richardson (1972)
Lotus Blossom, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (5:00, South Korea)
Allahu Akbar, Usama Alshaibi (5:10, 2003, DV, USA)            
Analytic Studies IV: Blank Color Frames, Paul Sharits (14:00, 1976, 16mm, USA) 
Miraculous Beginnings (in two parts), Walid Ra’ad (2:00, 1999, Video, Lebanon/USA)
Ungrateful Ode to Adel Fakhoury and Brion Gysin, Gheith al-Amine (7:40, 2008, Video, Lebanon)
Tomorrow Never Knows, Eric Siegel (3:10, 1968, Video, USA)