Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East

The recent uprisings in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt were apparently spread via social media. Soon-to-become ‘iconic’, images of the events were captured on camera phones and uploaded onto Facebook live, as they happened. But looking beyond the ‘Twitter revolutions’, what role does social, or ‘new’ media, play in visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa? Featuring cutting-edge critical analyses and original, full-colour artists’ inserts, this is the first book to ask: what considerations do we now need to take into account when we examine the prominent role that ‘new media’ has come to play in artistic practices - as well as social movements - in the Arab world today? In this timely, groundbreaking work, internationally renowned and emerging academics, writers, artists, museum directors, curators, activists and film-makers critically explore how visual culture in the region has appropriated and developed new media. They also examine the opportunities presented in the real-time generation of new, relatively unregulated content. Uncommon Grounds challenges the assumptions we have and the buzzwords we use, when thinking about the role of new media in the Middle East and North Africa. In the process, it reveals the ways in which this media is now connected with art, as well as activism.