This short comic based narrative depicts the challenges to and climate of an alternative form of realism in the art-world as a new project for art's politics and construction. Determinism Noir, Realism and Its Discontents calls upon the classic genre of noir narratives to situate themes of agency, mastery, rationalism and metaphysics. These ideas and images are generated in the nihilistic climate of alienation, itself borne out through the machinic, technological and capitalistic forces of the Twentieth Century. The comic presents three parts: first we see the formation of a project base to insinuate a rational determinism: A world of cause that is unpredictable but nevertheless, a pragmatic working environment; second we see a report, based on real life events, showing arguments from politics and the art-world that continue to voice the fear that it is representation itself that has blighted art's real political purchase. The comic criticizes these arguments as having left art with either a naive commitment to an abstract and essential mythology of present-ness or an antirealist self-contortion that dispossesses it of power. The third part of this narrative re-joins the work of the epistemological detective work that is the exercise for this new realist project. Beech's abstract story gels painterly construction, philosophical argument and political diatribe to extend her ongoing work. Here she argues that art must surpass the egotistic self-consciousness that have wrongly subtended claims to realism, whilst condemning those that aspire to exit realism altogether.

“Graphic design” was not a proper term until the beginning of the twentieth century. This led to confusion in credits/authorship for book covers, typography, which was exacerbated by the fact that printers, in addition to being in charge of the production process of books, were also making decisions regarding their finishings. Venezuela presents an interesting chapter in the history of publishing in the world given the hybrid character of publishing in the country in which traditional national artists, illustrators, and publicists comprised a mix of European and North American immigrants. The lack of current bibliographic material inspired me, as a researcher, to make a timeline of the political and graphic history of the country through its colophons. Colophons, which appear at the end of books and thus are often ignored, are nonetheless providers of essential information—witnesses of our progress in authorship and as a society.

The Regime of Visible , in the form of a pocket map, introduces two ways of exploring Cannerberg, a small hill situated between Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Kanne, Belgium. One side of the map traces the ownership of land by mapping cadaster parcels and their corresponding buildings and underground tunnel structures. The other side traces varied sources from the history and geology of Caestert plateau with a focus on Cannerberg. From Neolithic times, continuous mining of flint nodules and later limestone created a complex network of underground tunnels around Maastricht, popularly called “the caves.” Flint nodules were used to make tools and weapons, and to build fire. For centuries, up until industrialization, limestone was extracted by hand and used in building infrastructure in the Limburg province. By the time of industrialization, underground mining in Cannerberg had already been exhausted. The maze of underground corridors left behind was regularly used by local farmers until WWII, when German troops re-purposed Cannerberg into a storage and assembly facility for V-1 rockets. A few years after WWII, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) rented out the same “cave” and used it as the headquarters for war operations during the Cold War. In 1992 the NATO headquarters shut down. The same year, the Treaty of the European Union was ratified in Maastricht, its twelve signatures memorialized in Cannerberg's “cave.” The Regime of Visible collapses the narratives of property and history through the superposition of Cannerberg's storylines. The Regime of Visible is part of long-term research on the Caestert plateau history, and it functions as an introductory work to “Portrait of the Mountain,” an upcoming video essay.

This project is part of my practice of resisting aspects of visual culture and deconstructing images that is partly indebted to 1960s conceptual text-based artists, letterism, and Situationists, but also correlated to orthodox attitudes towards the image. It examines restrictions that Israel places upon Palestinian telecommunications in the West Bank, such as the locations of radio masts placed within Israel, the height Palestinian networks are permitted to build their masts, and that illegal Israeli settlers living illegally inside Palestine enjoy 3/4G coverage while Palestinians receive 2G. These technological infringements inhibit the movements for everyone in the West Bank and Gaza where civilians can be more easily and cheaply monitored and arrested, which is reflected in the Israeli arrests of Palestinians for a range of alleged offences on Facebook or Twitter, particularly incitement. These restrictions affect the way we receive and disseminate information, which was felt as a tourist/gentile/interloper visiting Palestine for the first time, unsure how to respond to the paranoia of being monitored or being in the wrong place. The project was made during a period of forced abstinence of Facebook and Twitter due to the paranoia of working between Lebanon and Israel, and so is a manual version of Facebook's pin-dropped album where the geographical data and time-stamp has been pulled via a simple desktop application from each JPEG's file. The response I hope reflects an overwhelming urge not to overly rely on visual representation, and to instead state as minimally as possible what the work is and to simply provide the raw data of the image.

Lotus was a tri-lingual quarterly brought out by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association. Initially titled Afro-Asian Writings , its inaugural edition was launched from Cairo in March 1968, in Arabic and English, followed by the French. By 1971, the trilingual quarterly acquired the name Lotus . Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic funded its production. The Arabic edition was printed in Cairo, and the English and French editions were printed in the German Democratic Republic. The Afro-Asian Writers' Association (AAWA) and its over-arching affiliate, the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), both had headquarters in Cairo. In 1978, President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords and the Permanent Bureau in Cairo was deactivated. Lotus moved to Beirut despite the raging Civil War, where it was was granted home and hospitality by the Union of Palestinian Writers. Its offices remained there until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when it once again relocated along with the Palestinian Liberation Organization to Tunis. The journal was discontinued in the late 1980s or early 1990s with the dismantling of the Soviet Union. The Permanent Bureau in Cairo was reinstated, but the journal was not as such reactivated. The project outlines a partial biography of a forgotten magazine from a bipolar world and its interrupted historical networks. It considers graphic and textual elements from the margins of the magazine for evidence of its trajectory.

I generate diagrams with the purpose of understanding the narratives, form, and aesthetics of sociocultural and political structures. This leaves room for the production of artistic works that can be introduced into the machinery of everyday life. The idea of the diagram emerged almost at the same time as the idea of the machine, although we cannot really tell which existed first. However, it seems clear that both are intrinsically connected. Machines and diagrams can be seen as a representation of a narrative system that leads the process of the creation of knowledge. What they share is essentially narrative: we create machines using diagrammatic narratives, and with those same narratives, we create knowledge. Narratives are the real machines.

Trading Lines is a photo essay that tracks nearly twenty years of research within international museums as well as collecting and sharing photographs and objects. This research began in 1996 at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, where I encountered an Aboriginal skull from N.S.W. Australia —that was part of the active international Aboriginal human remains trade activated from the early 18 th century. This photo essay shares correspondence between myself and private and public collection managers and collectors. Some images are from actual installations where I have combined objects with artworks, as a whole, it is an attempt to draw lines between pure collection activities and legitimate anguish many people feel for not only their cultural heritage but also those of the human remains trade. Even though repatriation of human remains to Aboriginal communities in Australia has been an active endeavor over the last 10 or more years, many human remains, photos and other important documents are still being uncovered, repatriated and traded. The comparable texts and images explore the margins of both museum practice and community involvement and understanding of these actions and communications. I intend to present this photo essay as an archive that engages people within their own curiosity of access to a complex world of negotiations. Further documents, human remains and other materials are gradually and continually unearthed in museums and sold through private collections and markets. Reflecting on this, who owns their own culture and history, and how does a culture remember when they are not in receipt of their cultural materials. I hope to stimulate important considerations about the power of a public archive, noting the complex protocol tensions that can arise and how these lines or margins are negotiated, crossed, hidden or shared.

During World War I, a peculiar example of disruptive patterning was developed to adorn British and American battleships. “Dazzle camouflage” as it was known, did little to “hide” the vessels themselves. Rather, its function was to confuse enemy aim by utilizing chaotic black-and-white patterns. Vintage photographs of these ships provide startling visuals of a kind of graphical warfare. At first glance, the extreme angles and cutout shapes conjure everything from European Modernist abstraction, Russian Constructivism, and colonial ethnic and tribal patterning, to later forms of Op art and design. As an artist researching these images, I began speculating on the side-effects of their routes as global visual transmitters of conquest and empire. What if these patterns, likened to war paint and symbolic markers of dominance, were altered to show their transmission onto other forms, such as modern architecture, commodities, and trade/transit routes—a sort of cross-pollination of hybridity and influence across cultures and continents? How can these patterns be employed by unexpected “clients” of economic and cultural colonialism? How can colonized forms misappropriate this visual technique for themselves? Speculative Propositions: A Visual Pattern Sampler is the result of this exploration.

This project chronicles the significant changes in Singapore's natural and urban landscape. The images in this volume have been carefully selected to capture the changing face of this tropical island-state. They touch on issues of land reclamation, national boundaries, ecological changes, pollution, conservation and the ever-evolving skyline. The pictures capture an ongoing dialogue between the city's man-made infrastructure and its natural spaces and creatures. While Singapore architecture is documented in aerial views of the country's tallest buildings, and its ubiquitous public housing, there are also photographs the island's wildlife.

Olga's Notes is a script for a movie. This project tells a story composed of various collected notes, written mainly while reading Al-Hilal magazine (an Egyptian publication from the 1960s), thinking about the disciplined body, labor, and nation-state building through dance.

In Four Encounters with Sculpture , Rayyane Tabet combines found material and short diary entries to explore four encounters with places, objects, and events. The project attempts to question sculpture as concept and material.

Rat Diaries is a series of drawings that attempts to map the intensity of everyday life in Egypt intertwined with intuitive visual and verbal comments on art practice. The drawings are multi-layered juxtapositions of various forms and contrasting types of lines that move from controlled shapes to seemingly uncontrolled scribbling, from figures to abstract shapes. What this layering achieves is a proposition of form that is ultimately unattainable. With all their pretension to ground the subject within the given coordinates of experiential reality, El-Noshokaty's maps refuse to communicate daily life as objectively mapable. The grid that is supposed to provide a support structure for the map and accommodate the given spatio-temporal coordinates is overcome by an intricacy of lines. These lines cover the grid with a labyrinthine maze and refuse to communicate an experience. But the lines are not as out of control or accidental as they might seem. While reflecting emotional content, they are also critically operational “devices” in a sense that they render the tyranny of the grid and its silent objectivity obsolete. The drawings that are accumulations of traces from experiential reality (emotions, everyday impressions, banal listing of events) crystalize reality in forms that no longer refer back to their original context.

Chronicles from Majnun until Layla is a film project structured in three stages: 1.) The Museum of Modern Iranian History (2011–2013), 2.) Layla and Majnun (in preparation), and 3.) The Film (in preparation). Each stage bears its own approach, format, and mode of presentation. The first two stages are conceived as preparation for the third and final stage: the merging moment, which will be in the form of a feature-length, hybrid fiction/documentary film. The film depicts a couple, lovers, visiting a virtual museum of modern Iranian history. The lovers appear both as themselves and as “Layla and Majnun,” characters adapted from a classical Middle Eastern love tale. As they walk the museum, the couple engages in dialogue about their individual and collective stories, memories, dreams, rages, and desires. The lovers' affairs and conversations interact with the representations of the major historical moments of Iran being documented in the museum. In Stage 1, through the museum's architectural design and references to an official Iranian narrative taken from a high-school textbook, the various historical periods of Iran get transformed into Kairos (the Now), contradicting Chronos and scientific and analytical historiography.

“Transatlantic”—interdisciplinary project by two emerging Polish artists Radek Szlaga and Honza Zamojski presented in the FOCUS section at Frieze Art Fair New York from 4–7 May 2012 by LETO Gallery. First issue of the newspaper “One Hour Retard” was presented during the fairs.

“Black Sea” is a photo essay that consists of a series of vertically framed seascapes. The accompanying narrative text presents a “timescape” parallel to these seascapes; by bringing together pieces of memory and history, it tells the story of the people absent from the photographs — the Pontus ( “sea” ) Greeks who once lived on these coasts.

“Screen Play” is a collaged conversation that entangles complementary views on international politics during the Cold War, particularly in relation to Iran. The text is a direct transcription from the Longines Chronoscope television news program (1951–55), but the speakers' words have been edited to bring them in dialogue with each other, emphasizing the program's role in the manufacture of consent, as a sounding board for Cold War discourse, and as a precursor of today's infotainment.