NAT MULLER

Nat Muller is an independent curator and writer. Her main interests are image politics and contemporary art in and from the Middle East. Recent exhibition projects include “Spectral Imprints” for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in Dubai (2012) and “This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time” at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and American University of Beirut Gallery (2014/15). She was also curator of the A.M. Qattan Young Artist of the Year Award in 2016 and was appointed curator of the Danish Pavilion for the 58^th Venice Biennale. Muller is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate researching science fiction in contemporary visual practices from the Middle East.

Mahmoud Darwish. Memory for Forgetfulness. August, Beirut, 1982. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Mahmoud Darwish remains, a decade after his death, Palestine’s national poet. Memory for Forgetfulness is the poet’s account of one fearful day in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of 1982. In this devastatingly beautiful prose poem, Darwish describes the horrors of war, such as the claustrophobia of being confined to one safe room in an apartment with no way out. But most importantly, this text is about how in war the everyday, the mundane and taken for granted, becomes a challenge, if not a sheer impossibility. Indeed, the brewing of a cup of coffee in the morning after a particularly heavy night of shelling becomes Darwish’ personal struggle to retain a sense of normalcy and his humanity. This is mandatory reading for anyone attempting to grasp the utter senselessness of armed conflict. Masterfully crafted, as well as viscerally painful, from beginning to end.

T.J. Demos. The Migrant Image. The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

I keep coming back to this excellent book. T.J. Demos has this ability, rare for an academic, to write lucidly about his subject and imbue it with a great sense of urgency. Published in the midst of the refugee crisis, this book shows which strategies contemporary artists (many from the Middle East) use—or for that matter refuse—to tackle issues of migration, mobility, exile and dispossession. As much about the politics of images as it is about the imagery of politics, this book is also very much a plea for the political value of the imaginary. If I had to recommend one book to point out the relevance and importance of art in our unruly times, it would be this one.

Lina Khatib. Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle. London: I.B.Tauris, 2012.

Lina Khatib is currently head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based think tank Chatham House. Having managed one of the oldest heavy metal bands in Lebanon, she’s also one of the coolest people I know. This book was written on the cusp of the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world and examines through country-by-country case studies, including Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Syria and Libya, how the visual is used by (dissenting) citizens and regimes alike. In her introduction, Khatib writes, ”Political struggle, then, is an inherently visual productive process. It is also itself visual to a large degree: It is a struggle over presence, over visibility.” The latter has become a guiding principle in how I think about the politics of representation in my own work.