The Diary of an Artist in Interesting Times #53

Let’s rewind.

Even though life only really begins where your comfort zone ends, when the Venice Biennale chose the ‘May you live in interesting times’ theme for its 2019 show, I’m not sure the curator Ralph Rugoff and the Biennale committee thought that times would actually become this interesting.

Although the expression ‘May you live in interesting times’ sounds like it should be a blessing, it was supposedly an ancient Chinese curse which, according to some researchers, turned out to not even be Chinese at all but a modern-day Western saying. Since the ‘uninteresting times’ of peace and tranquillity are more life-enhancing than the difficult ones, what this so-called curse actually translates to is: may you experience much disorder and trouble in your life.

How experimental does our world still need to get before the dust settles again? Confinement, political storms, revolutions, tragic explosions, natural disasters, economic rollercoasters… Does life really only begin where our comfort zone ends? Amid this current situation that resembles a dramatic film plot, we reached out to our friends and colleagues, because we all live to tell the tale. Yet, too much has happened in our part of the world for us to just tell the tale of a mere change in routine caused by confinement due to the pandemic. We have all had to deal with one or more of the numerous events cited above. With this in mind, Selections dedicates its autumn theme to ‘The Diary of an Artist in Confinement Interesting Times’.

Identity has become increasingly complex to define amid globalisation, migration, and displacement. In this issue, we also invite our dear friend Basel Dalloul, founder of the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, to cast a light on Palestinian art in our Curated By section.

I hope that you find this issue ‘interesting’ in all the positive senses of the word.