New York showcases Mid East art

A new exhibition displays work with a message from young artists from 25 countries.

Ziad Antar, a Lebanese photographer, is one of 50 artists whose work will be displayed at the New Museum, New York.

NEW YORK // Young artists from the Middle East are as eclectic as their peers, according to a new show, The Generational: Younger than Jesus, which brings together the work of 50 artists under the age of 33 from 25 countries. Inspired by the "networking proclivities" of the generation represented in the show, a worldwide group of more than 150 curators, writers, teachers, artists and critics selected about 145 pieces for the exhibition, which opened last week to much buzz in the art and media worlds.

Billing it as the only exhibition of its kind in the United States, New York's New Museum plans to make the survey of painting, photography, video, sculpture and performance art a triennial event, offering critics a yardstick by which to measure artists whose work stands the test of time. Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum's director of special exhibitions, summed up the artists, all born after 1976. "The artists in Younger than Jesus reflect a preoccupation with our future but also with history and tradition. Rather than forswearing their parents, they seem interested in imagining new communities and alternative families," he said.

"Their tactics range from role-playing to recycling, from identity tourism to technological archaeology, from a hysterical form of realism to an intimate, micro-emotional art." Ziad Antar, a photographer and video artist from Lebanon, along with Middle Eastern contemporaries from Algeria, Iran and Israel are represented in the show. Antar, a softly-spoken 31-year-old born to a Maronite mother and Sunni father, did not see himself as a spokesman for his generation, country or region. The various conflicts that have and still beset Lebanon do form a backdrop and give depth to his work, but it shies away from any overt political messages.

Two of his short videos are on view at the New Museum. Wa features his young niece and nephew, Nathalie and Mohamed Bsat, singing a song accompanied by a synthesiser. La Marche Turque shows a pair of hands playing a mute piano. A museum caption says they describe "moments of quotidian charm". "I make very simple videos taken in one shot and they allow the viewer to live an experience different to that which they might expect," he said. "They're not just representational but transformational. Representation is the work of documentary."

One of his earlier works became well known in Lebanon and obliquely dealt with the war waged by Israel against Hizbollah in 2006. One photograph showed some stockpiled cans of tuna bought by his father in Beirut. Another photograph showed a can of vegetarian spread left behind by an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon. "I made this minimal work because I don't think during a devastating war an artist has a place to make art. My true place is to help," he said. "After the war started, my father was saying there is no war but then a week later he went out and bought the tuna and it was a sign that the war had started. When it finished, I went south to Ayta El Chaab, where two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped, and found the vegetarian spread. This was a sign the war had ended."

He also photographed domestic workers stranded in Lebanon during the war. "A lot of foreigners fled after their embassies paid for their tickets, but people from the third world had no money and some of them gathered in my studio," he said. "They endured a double misery - racism and war. Racism has never been solved in Lebanon and there's a lot to be done yet." He was pessimistic about Lebanon's escaping further conflict in the future. "Lebanon is a country that lives in the short-term," said Antar, who divides his time between his home town of Saida and Paris. "No one can tell you what will happen in the long-term, even the politicians."

Antar, who studied agricultural engineering and cinematography, has championed the idea of bringing art to the streets. Two years ago, he held a photography workshop for teenagers in Ain al Hilweh, the biggest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Their work was then exhibited in the camp. More recently, he was at this year's Art Dubai festival to promote a book called Bereft Beirut: the architecture of the forsaken and map of the derelict. It contains text by Rasha Salti and his photographs of many uncompleted construction sites in the city. He would like to spend more time in Dubai photographing similar scenes.

While the artists in Younger than Jesus escape a common definition other than age, part of their common heritage is an absolute ease with new technology. Antar uses the camera on his mobile phone as a "digital sketchbook" and is planning to use these images in future works. The New Yorker review of the exhibition said if there were anything unique about today's youth, it was a "precocious alertness" to "rhetorical typecasting" by marketing departments, which came up with the phrases "Millenials" and "Generation Y" to describe their habits of consumption.

Antar, meanwhile, should continue to evade the critics' categories; he is casting his oblique eye on cases of potato tubers for his next photography project. [e-mail]