1 - Aesthetics of Revolution and Infra-thin Critique

Summary

Chapter 1 focuses on art that explores the relationship between visibility and invisibility to resist essentialising perspectives of the revolutions in Tunisia or Syria or the wider, problematic idea of the ‘Arab Spring’. It develops the theory and practice of ‘infra-thin critique’ in relation to works that resonate with the dynamics of the infra-thin or that engage directly and ironically with Duchamp’s practices, or with those of his successors. This chapter addresses two particularly recurrent means of exceeding the iconic. Ambivalence between sensorial and dimensional elements is analysed with reference to work in video and installation by Nicène Kossentini and Mounir Fatmi. Alternative means of evoking the revolutions emerge in diverse manifestations of a ‘poetics of absence’ in installations by Safaa Erruas, Sonia Kallel, Aïcha Filali and Shada Safadi. I argue that certain art allows a reworking of the ‘Western’ modernist notion and practice of the infra-thin by drawing on, and developing, local or transnational practices and anchoring these in relation to specific contexts of revolution. These works of art call for a critical approach that is inspired by art theory and practice and that is transnational, as well as transhistorical and multidirectional.