{"product_id":"9780857739735","title":"Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East","description":"The ‘archive’ is often viewed as a collection of historical documents that records and orders information about people, places and events. This view nevertheless obscures a crucial point: the archive, whilst subject to the vagaries of time and history, can also determine the future. This point has gained urgency in modern-day North Africa and the Middle East where the archive has come to the fore as a site of social, historical, theoretical, and political contestation.   Dissonant Archives is the first book to consider the ways in which contemporary artists from the Middle East and North Africa – including Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Jananne Al Ani, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mariam Ghani, Zineb Sedira, and Akram Zaatari – are utilizing and disrupting the function of the archive and, in so doing, highlighting a systemic, perhaps irrevocable, crisis in institutional and state-ordained archiving across the region. In exploring and producing archives, be they alternative, interrogative or fictional, these artists are not simply questioning the authenticity, authority or authorship of the archive; rather, they are unlocking its regenerative, radical potential. The result provides essential insights into the nexus between art and politics in the contemporary Middle East.","brand":"I.B.Tauris","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47119596880112,"sku":"9780857739735","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780857739735_p0.jpg?v=1763842203","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780857739735","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}