Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

Archives are often viewed as ordered collections of historical documents that record information about people, places and events. This view nevertheless obscures a crucial point: the archive, whilst subject to the vagaries of time and history, is also concerned with determining 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 North Africa and the Middle East―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, are also highlighting a systemic and perhaps irrevocable crisis in institutional and state-ordained archiving across the region.