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Whose Space Is It?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2014

Nada Shabout
Nada Shabout*
Affiliation:
Department of Art Education and Art History, University of North Texas, Denton, Tex.; e-mail: nada.shabout@unt.edu
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Extract

Designers and architects argue that interaction in public spaces is the product of relations between physical, cultural, social, and aesthetic components. As an art historian, my interest in and understanding of the production of public space is necessarily linked to its visual construction and to public art in particular. Urban planners have always included art in public spaces as a means of forming relationships between the people and the space. Governments have similarly understood the political significance of public space and its power to make meaning and have commissioned art accordingly. This essay reflects on the role of aesthetics and public art in the production and transformation of the modern public space in the Arab world by considering two examples from Cairo and Baghdad.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 163 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 An interesting and unique example of artists utilizing public space for resistance is the 1969 open-air exhibition at Jemaa el-Fna Square in Marrakech organized by the artists Farid Belkahia and Mohamed Melehi and their colleagues.

2 See Rabbat, Nasser, “The Arab Revolution Takes Back the Public Space,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 1 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/online_features/.

3 Vishaan Chakrabarti, “Writing the City, Liberation Squares,” 16 February 2011, http://urbanomnibus.net/2011/02/liberation-squares/.

4 Ibid.

5 Commissioned in the 19th century by the Khedive Ismaʿil, the square was known as Midan al-Ismaʿiliyya until the 1919 revolution, when it became unofficially known as Midan al-Tahrir.

6 Rabbat, Nasser, “Circling the Square: Nasser Rabbat on Architecture and Revolution in Cairo,” Artforum International 49, no. 8 (2012): 182–91Google Scholar.

7 It is also interesting that Midan Nahdat Masr was the site of the forty-day sit-in in by the Muslim Brotherhood.

8 Thus soon after the 2003 invasion, Nasb al-Hurriyya underwent a restoration operation, while Hassan's mural has been ignored despite threats to its condition and there have been rumors about its removal.

9 See Shabout, Nada, “A Makeover: Baghdad, the 2013 Arab Capital of Culture,” Middle East Report 266 (2013): 26–33Google Scholar.