The New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition took place between 11 July and 3 September 2008 at the Bluecoat and Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool (UK) as part of the Liverpool Cultural Capital of Europe Programme, attracting over 16,000 visitors. The show was researched and planned in partnership with Zenith Foundation and curated by November Paynter.
 
In its inception, the show was based on research undertaken by Zenith Foundation on the theme of ’Arab Cities’. The Arab Cities Project sought the development of an exhibition which investigates the intersections of art and architecture within the particular context of Arab metropolises. We wanted to launch a conversation between architectural and artistic practices in order to consider how urban spaces are shaped, experienced and represented as cities moved from independence to developing their own multiple identities formulated through desires for the future, lessons from the past, and socio-economic and political contingencies. Bringing together sound, photography, moving image and installations, which respond to and resonate with the cities of Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Mecca, Casablanca, Gulf Cities, and cities of the Occupied Territories in Palestine, the project sought to explore the built environment in its historical and social complexities.
 
The Arab Cities Project lent itself in equal measure to a landmark high-budget exhibition that would have addressed individual cities with their individual trajectories and complexities, or to a smaller show that would do away with explicit city limits focusing instead on thematic areas. The latter was the approach selected for the New Ends, Old Beginnings show.
 
Instead of attempting to group or survey artists on the basis of their regional belonging or nationality, the New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition succeeded in linking artists through approaches in their work, engaging with their concerns on terms relevant to the themes of the exhibition, delineating sophisticated relations of subject, medium, narrative and aesthetic.
 
The New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition featured Cevdet Erek’s Timeline (2007) and 0-now (2007), Sharif Waked’s Jericho First (2002) – made on site specifically for the Bluecoat, Tarek Al Ghoussein’s Untitled (C Series) (2007), Lara Baladi, Diary of the Future (2007 – 08) – commissioned by the Bluecoat; and photographic series Surface of Time (2004-07), Can Altay, Deposit (Spring Deficit: After Dubai, After Hammons, and After the Politics of White Noise) (2008) – Commissioned by the Bluecoat; and Mirrorworld (2008), Ziad Antar, Mdardara (2007), Hrair Sarkissian, photographic series Unfinished), Randa Mirza, Parallel Universes (2006-08), Tarek Zaki, Monument X (2007), Michael Rakowitz Return (2006 – 2008), and Grounded (2008), and Chourouk Hriech’s Untitled drawings.
 

Mona Deeley Director, Zenith Foundation

New Ends, Old Beginnings presents a unique opportunity to engage with particular contemporary visual practices which reflect on urban landscapes and lives in the contentiously coined Middle East region. Organised in partnership with the Bluecoat gallery, Open Eye Gallery and Zenith Foundation, it is significant that the exhibition took place during Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture – a year when the city’s regenerated landscape receives critical scrutiny and when the global nature of its history is popularly investigated. In addition, the exhibition occurred in conjunction with the annual Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival. The festival is the only one of its kind in the UK, and celebrates local and international Arab culture through visual art, music, film, dance, literature and community events.
 
Featuring artists from Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, the United States, Syria and Lebanon who work and live in Beirut, Sharjah, Istanbul, Chicago, Paris, London and Cairo, the exhibition aims to give a personal, sometimes playful, sometimes political glimpse of the multiplicity of urban and everyday experience in the region. Instead of being identified as belonging to one geopolitical region, they were chosen for their work which reflects upon ideological, social, cultural and economic influences that continue to shape the contemporary cities in which they live and work. So it is without prescription that New Ends, Old Beginnings presents a timely meditation on some aspect of urban life in the Middle East and Arab countries.
 

Sara-Jayne Parsons Exhibitions Curator at the Bluecoat, Liverpool

Most transnational metropolises have embedded within them sites of ancient civilisation, as well as youthful and moving urban centres and peripheries. While Baghdad struggles in the midst of war to protect and renew its literary, archaeological and architectural heritage, Cairo attempts to balance political and religious tensions within a dynamic cultural life. In some urban centres, including Damascus and Beirut, the structures of future heritage have been overridden by rapid and incomplete development, and/or the devastation of war. Cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi are promoting a new urban cultural policy on a tabula rasa, by importing and creating spaces for the arts and housing a selection of international art institutions such as the Guggenheim and the Louvre within the Saadiyat Islands, for example.
 
New Ends, Old Beginnings investigates a number of artist responses to the complex strata of everyday life in these cities and the stories emerging from them. Some of the questions the selected artists raise are: What aspects of urban culture can be salvaged or shared? In what ways can legacies co-exist with current and future cultural practices? What constitutes authenticity both in general and in view of newly created cultural hubs? What kind of tourism is associated with or possible in the cities of the Arab region?
 
The exhibition attempts to make visible some of these issues, while considering the practices involved in perceiving, maintaining and re-evaluating heritage via contemporary art practices. Considering the questions above, the works included in New Ends, Old Beginnings reveal features of, and engage current responses to, the situation of cultural heritage in the Arab region. Works included in the exhibition have been carefully selected and commissioned to reference the specific themes of heritage, cultural industry and tourism, as well as the possibility for art to translate the daily realities of changing urban life. Hence, the title Old Ends, New Beginnings aims to signify a shift from habitual, linear ways of apprehending space, cities, and change.
 
Comprised of photography, drawing, video and sculptural installation, the exhibition was presented across two Liverpool venues, the Bluecoat and Open Eye Gallery. Artists Can Altay and Lara Baladi presented works in both venues creating a dialogue between the sites and allowing different perspectives for the viewer.
 

Can Altay’s Deposit (Spring Deficit: After Dubai, After Hammons, and After The Politics of White Noise, 2008) was commissioned for the exhibition following the artist’s research period in Dubai. Deposit is a vibrating, mirrored, circular-shaped sculpture which operates mechanically as a fountain that circulates sand instead of water. The intervention is referred to as a ‘Sand Fountain’, while the noise pollution coming from it is a cross between the sound of a power generator and a drill. In shape and materials, it creates an intensified experience of the urban environment. The use of sand references the basic building materials not just of buildings, but of human life being made of dust. It is both eternal and ephemeral. Being specifically concerned with Dubai, the sand evokes the not so distant past of the city as a modest place in the desert, as well as its contemporary metamorphosis into a built-up metropolis. The work refers to the historical and metaphorical status of the fountain and its gift of water, as well as to the abundance of oil in this region, but displaces these desired assets with sand, a symbol of drought. On another level, the work considers the new developments in the Gulf and their celebration of an urban ideal and of cultural forms taken from other locations. As the fountain strives to function, it illustrates and commentates, via a singular sculptural object, a current state of mirroring and mimicking that is the driving force behind the creation and development of the city of Dubai.
 
The Open Eye Gallery showed Can Altay’s photograph Mirrorworld (2008). This work captures life for Dubai’s construction workers. While Deposit refers in part to the affluence of the city, Mirrorworld presents the other side of the coin in the everyday existence of labourers in Dubai, urging one to pause and reflect amid the rampant clamour and buzz of development.
 
Can Altay (1975) is a Turkish artist living and working in Istanbul. He obtained his PhD in Art, Design and Architecture from Bilkent University in Ankara in 2004 after gaining a postgraduate degree in Critical Studies, and completing graduate studies in Interior Architecture and Environmental Design. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world since 2002, including his solo exhibitions at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2008), Spike Island in Bristol (2007), and Sala Rekalde in Bilbao. His group exhibitions include The Columns Held Us Up (2009) at Artists Space in New York, The 4th International Architecture Biennale (2009) in Rotterdam,and Day Labor (2005) at MoMA in New York.
 
In Zenith Magazine: A conversation between November Paynter and Can Altay

Mdardara (2007), Ziad Antar’s short video films hands from above following each step in the preparation of a traditional Levantine, rice and lentil dish called ‘mdardara’. Antar is concerned with the visual language of video and his reflections are translated into simple, few second or minute projections, often taken in a single shot. Filmed in Super 8, Mdardara‘s stylistic structure verges on an illustrated diagram, offering the image of a gesture of tradition, while using the language of video to comment on the very language of video. As in much of Antar’s works, there is a (most often anonymous) performer. Yet the protagonist is never the subject of the work, and the acts are neither documentary nor narrative role-play. Rather, the act itself creates a self-conscious response in the viewer by offsetting obvious expectations and encouraging humour, in order to ultimately convey a translation, in video, of Antar’s initial idea.
 
Ziad Antar lives and works between Saida, Lebanon and Paris. He graduated with a degree in agricultural engineering in 2001, and has been working in photography and video since 2002. He completed a one-year residency at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2003, and a one year residency at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. His videos include among others, Tokyo Tonight (2003), WA (2004), Tambourro (2004), Safe Sound (2006), Tank You (2006), Marche Turque (2007) and Mdardara (2007).
 
Also, in Zenith Magazine: Fatos Ustek interviews Ziad Antar

Lara Baladi’s Surface of Time: Diary of the Future (2007 – 08), an installation commissioned especially for the exhibition, is a large-scale, ceiling to floor composition of photographic panels, with each panel comprising an image of the traces and residues left inside Arabic coffee cups. After each cup of coffee has been drunk, then upturned and left to settle, the patterns of sticky coffee remains are read by a guest to describe the imbiber’s destiny. The reading of the shapes of leftover coffee on coffee cups remains a fortune-telling practice in many contemporary cities, villages and homes across the Middle East. For this installation, the images and accompanying sounds were collected by Baladi over the course of her father’s illness when friends and family paid them daily visits. During this very delicate period, she engaged in a complex personal quest of metaphorically and metonymically looking for answers about death, mediation, communication, popular beliefs and the ephemeral nature of time. Each image offers a subjective reading of the imbiber’s destiny, while the whole tableau tries to capture the language and spirit of the black coffee ritual. Another series of images develops further the daily condolence visits paid to Baladi’s family, linking, if only for a moment, each visitor’s destiny to her father’s, creating a sort of collective mythology. Baladi suggests that despite efforts to carve a unique path for ourselves, we are bound by a common language that speaks to our fleeting place within the enduring repetition of time, of the movement found within stillness. The future, which is dependent on the present, is redefined every day, perpetually producing different destinies and ultimately makes us vividly aware of the future’s uncertainty.
 
Lara Baladi’s work shown at The Open Eye Gallery features large photographic diptychs from her series Surface of Time (2004-07). This work questions the past, observes the present and projects itself into the future through her capturing of everyday objects that have been forgotten and weathered by the passage of time: “Through their physical relationship to time, these objects achieve a life of their own in Baladi’s photography, their derelict state alluding to a rusting image of President Mubarak and the inertia of the Egyptian political and economic situation”, (Lara Baladi, Surface of Time, B21 Gallery, 2008, p.6).
 
Lara Baladi was born in Lebanon in 1969 and is of Lebanese-Egyptian origin. She is an artist working essentially through a process of accumulating, interpreting and re- interpreting images – a broken fragmented memory, which “she tries to fix” in various media and forms such as installations, videos, collages, and tapestries. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the Middle East, the US, Japan and Europe, and is part of a number of contemporary art collections, including the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Museet for Fotokunst in Copenhagen, the Pori Art Museum in Finland and the Chase Collection in New York. Following a fellowship she received from the Japan Foundation in 2003, she exhibited one of her large-scale installations, ‘Roba Vecchia’, in Cairo in February 2006, in Art Dubai at the Sharjah Biennial in 2007 and in the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC, in February 2009. In 2006, Baladi was commissioned to show a 20-screens/projections installation along one kilometre of seashore on the opening night of the Image of the Middle East Festival in Denmark. She won the Grand Nile Prize at the 2008/09 Cairo Biennial for her ephemeral construction and sound installation Borg El Amal.
 
In Zenith Magazine: Lara Baladi: Domestic Excess and Recycling, by Lisa Skuret

Cevdet Erek’s Timeline (2007) and 0-now (2007) form a conceptual introduction to the exhibition. While these two works imply a fixed linear measurement denoting a complete period or retrospective, they do not set a single tempo. Instead, they correspond to a myriad of personal interpretations. It is significant that these works stem from a residency period spent in Cairo, where the rule of the ‘golden section’ was first mastered. This system of divine proportion is studied and applied in architecture, mathematics and music; disciplines whose fundamental elements hold a special place in Erek’s work. Timeline is the first prototype of the ‘Ruler’ series, which is being built by Erek to function as a collection of tools for interpreting linear time. This ruler shows a span of years from 1974 (a year that is coincidentally the artist’s birth-year, but can also be imagined as any other starting point) to 2007, in Arabic, with a scale of 1cm = 1 year. 0-now is the second prototype and shows a period of time from 0 to ‘now’, which can be used to interpret the span of a life, the span of time since it began, or any other collection of temporal events. The passing of 0 to ‘now’ takes 20 centimetres, without the connotation of a fixed scale nor unit.
 
Cedvet Erek was born 1974 in Istanbul where he currently lives and works. He graduated with a degree in architecture from Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul before completing an MA in Sound and beginning a PhD at ITU – Centre for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM), also in Istanbul. Erek was on residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2005 to 2006, where his installation ‘Studio’ was awarded the Uriot Prize 2005. Erek’s installations, videos and performances have been shown at 9th Istanbul Biennial, Platform Garanti, Stedelijk Museum, Extra City, Artists Space and others. His recent solo ‘A Few Retrospectives’ exhibition took place at Galerie Akinci-Amsterdam, and his artist book ‘SSS’ was published by BAS as a part of BENT series in 2008.

In the photographic series, Untitled (C Series) (2007), Tarek Al Ghoussein continues his exploration of themes concerned with barriers, land, longing and belonging, and focuses on ideas of transience. Al Ghoussein presents a series of medium-format photographs of blue tarpaulin – a material often used in construction – blowing in the wind in a desert setting. The bright blue tarpaulin, its ordinariness and flimsiness as it is knocked around by the wind, seems to contrast with the desert, with its vast expanse and neutral, sandy colours. The tarpaulin could be read as a commentary on the construction of cities or dwellings, which are ultimately ephemeral, leaving few traces in nature. They engender lives, as would an oasis in a desert, but do not last. As the viewer looks onto the tarpaulin site, it’s also reminiscent of the pre-Islamic poetic tradition of ‘Wukuf Aala Al Atlal’ (literally ‘standing over the ruins’ in Arabic) where every poem starts with the poet visiting the ruins of his beloved’s abandoned Bedouin dwelling as her nomadic tribe has moved on; a metaphor for ephemeral transience, whose relevance can be transposed across time and space.
 
Tarek Al Ghoussein was born in Kuwait in 1962 and is of Palestinian descent. He lives and works in Sharjah in the U.A.E. where he is Associate Professor of Photography at the American University of Sharjah, School of Architecture. He has exhibited in solo and group shows internationally since 1994. His more recent exhibitions include a retrospective of his work at the Sharjah Art Museum (2010), the UAE Pavillion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), and Tarek Al-Ghoussein, In Absentia (2009) at Gallerie Brigitte Schenk in Cologne, Germany. Al Ghoussein has spent the past 10 years considering how performance, interventions and photography can be used to explore what it means to be situated within a landscape. The anonymous spaces of the desert have served as a stage for investigating how political circumstances affect one’s relationship to a place through the propagation of myths and the creation of physical boundaries.

(Untitled) is a series of drawings by Chourouk Hriech highlighting the confluence of old and new traditions currently seen in the cities of Morocco. Her patchwork of Islamic patterns seems to scoop up elements of arabesque and modern architecture, nature scenes and cultural celebrations, featuring musicians, artisans and dancers. The drawings propose scenes of carnival-like celebration and optimism, as well as suggesting moments of urban friction. Each drawing feels likes a moodscape, or an attempt to portray a city bursting from within the limits of the page. Although executed in black and white, a sense of colour lies beneath the surface, as the topology is in perpetual motion. Akin to Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972) in which imaginary cities are described by a narrator, Hreich’s drawings show the fictional and the real spill over into one another, creating a social-historic fresco of urban improvisations.
 
Chourouk Hriech was born in 1977. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Lyon and develops work mainly in design and installation. Her research is based on observing changes in landscapes and navigation through the worlds open to them. She has exhibited in Spain, Italy, Morocco, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Norway and is currently invited to make 48 drawings of the work on the T3 tramway for the city of Paris.
 
In Zenith Magazine: The horizon is a circle

Randa Mirza’s photographs from the series Parallel Universes (2006-08) look at how we respond to media images of reportage from war zones, while acknowledging those elements within them which remain omitted, off-screen. Mirza questions how we continue to live in a world where daily disasters are endlessly broadcast, asking what responsibility does the availability of such knowledge bring upon us, the viewer. Do we simply observe the ‘pain of others’ from a detached position? Or do journalistic reports exoticise war, roping in viewers to the spectacle of war as if it was another form of televised entertainment?The work stirs these emotive issues, bringing into question the idea of a shared human existence.
 
Randa Mirza was born in Lebanon in 1978 where she is still based. Mirza works with digital photography and live video performances and has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions since 2001. This includes at The Finnish Museum of Photography (2008) in Helsinki, Finland, Orientations (2006) at Kunstlerforum in Bonn, Germany, and the International Biennale of Photography (2008), Breschia, Italy.

Michael Rakowitz brings together and reworks elements of two previous works, Return (2006 – 2008) and Grounded (2008). Return was originally realised in collaboration with Creative Time in New York, and aimed to import Iraqi dates into the U.S. The entire process was depicted including its planning, anticipated and unforeseen complications, routing issues and the final receipt of a small amount of dates. It was shown in Davisons & Co., a temporary shop set up for the duration of the project with the intention of selling the imported produce. While the desired outcome was to receive an importation of dates, the project was also launched to illuminate how the innocuous and mundane process of exporting a basic food product can be akin to a mission impossible after the end of Saddam’s regime and the official sanctions against Iraq. The logistical difficulties and convoluted methods of sending and receiving shipments from a country under foreign occupation and facing an uncertain future comes to light. In Rakowitz’s new manifestation of Return, a timeline outlines the first knowledge of wild date seeds existing in Northern Iraq and their importance in the food chain dates to 50,000 years ago. It then charts the consequent history of Iraqi date plantations and their international significance up to the present day. Also included in the display are date palms and products from suppliers in Liverpool that, while originally from Iraq, have been labelled otherwise in order to allow easy importation to other countries. Grounded presents another of Iraq’s assets and highlights a mode of transport which symbolises people and economic exchange, but has since become obsolete due to the ravages of war. A collection of 17 vintage, miniature Iraqi Airways planes purchased on eBay, along with an accompanying text, tell the story of the airline and how its entire fleet was flown out of Baghdad during the first Gulf War, only to be abandoned on airfields around the Middle East, where many still remain today.
 
Michael Rakowitz was born in New York in 1973. He lives and works in Chicago. He has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions since 1995. Selected solo exhibitions include The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own (2010), Tate Modern, London, Transmission Interrupted (2009), Modern Art Oxford, UK, and SAFE: Design Takes On Risk (2005), Musem of Modern Art, New York.
 
In Zenith Magazine: Ongoing: The Unfinished Tales of Michael Rakowitz

The selection from Hrair Sarkissian’s photographic series Unfinished of unfinished structures was taken in several cities across the Middle East. Indicating the changing nature of the contemporary landscape, his photographs present concrete structures or buildings under construction, or abandoned construction site, both of which could be seen as evoking the cold abandonment of a torture chamber.. These aborted projects, made of crude cement and rusting metal, are lonely, harsh, inhumane, and imposing, yet often go unnoticed.The most minimal images from Sarkissian’s photographic series were selected and shown together in the exhibition. The plain concrete surfaces as stark as they are striking, unfinished yet enduring, echo historic finds in their state of partial destruction, seeming like ready-made monuments for the future.
 
Hrair Sarkissian was born in Damascus and currently lives and works in Amsterdam, where he also studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In 2009 he participated in the 11th Istanbul Biennial where he presented his photographic series ‘Execution Squares’. This series was also presented at the Disorientation II, an exhibition curated by Jack Persekian on the Saadiyat Islands in Abu Dhabi. Works from his ‘Unfinished’ series were shown as part of solo shoes at the Kalfayan Galleries in Thessaloniki (2007) and in Athens (2008). In 2010, he presented a solo show at the Kalfayan Galleries in Athens which included works from the artist’s new series titled ‘Underground’, consisting of photographs taken in various metro stations in Yerevan, Armenia. In the same year, works from the series ‘Execution Squares’ were exhibited at the Photobiennale 2010/21st International Photography Meeting (organised by the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece). Sarkissian’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création, the Fondazione Cassa Di Risparmio di Modena, the museum of The Farjam Collection in Dubai, as well as in private collections in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, England, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon.
 
In Zenith Magazine: Hrair Sarkissian: In-Between Times and In-Between Spaces

Sharif Waked chose to produce a site-specific installation of his 2002 work Jericho First. It is a visually striking piece that takes over an entire room and consists of a bright red on white series of small computer-generated graphics produced by a mathematical formula fed into a software, culminating exponentially into one large graphic. Jericho is believed to be one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world, and is now under Israeli occupation in Palestinian territories. Waked takes a contemporary postcard depicting an 8th century Islamic floor mosaic excavated in the palace of the Umayad Caliph Hisham (Khirbat al-Mafjar) as inspiration and point of departure for 18 paintings and a wall mural. In the mosaic, a gazelle is being preyed on by a lion under the tree of life, while two nearby gazelles continue their grazing. Waked creates abstracted, minimalist images of the lion and the gazelle, progressively intertwining them across small format paintings that by the time the viewer reaches the final image, the lion and the gazelle form a unified ball with a tail being the only feature that makes them recognisable from the original drawing. Do predator and prey become one? Has the predator finally devoured his prey? Or is the predator in fact posing as the prey? The relevance of archaeological findings, their reading and conservation in this area of the world are loaded with political meaning and consequences. Waked’s reading of the image of a lion attacking a gazelle under the tree of knowledge while the others watch, clearly comments on the historical and ongoing state of occupation, as well as the obscured roles of actors and witnesses, predators and prey, and those who continue grazing regardless.
 
Sharif Waked was born in Nazareth to a Palestinian refugee family from the village of Mjedil. He lives and works in Haifa and Nazareth. Waked has exhibited at various biennials, museums, and art venues internationally. Waked’s works include Melancholia (1998), Zoom (1999), Jericho First (2002), Chic Point (2003), Tugra (2008), To Be Continued… (2009), and Beace Brocess (2010). Waked’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création (Paris), Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Australia, and the Barjeel art foundation (UAE), among others.

Monument X (2007) by Tarek Zaki, consists of cement sculptures laid out as if they were found in the show yard of a contemporary plasterworks factory which produces neoclassical sculptures and architectural items, or like freshly found archaeological remains, waiting to be identified, tagged and put on permanent display. There is the sense that this will never actually happen and that the parts – reminiscent of architectural components such as broken columns, and fragments of equestrian sculptures – will remain in an indeterminate state. A wealth of associations spring to mind as one looks at Monument X. One wonders about why the supposed archaeological finds reference Egypt’s neo-classical past, as opposed to its more commonly acclaimed Pharaonic or Islamic past, seemingly challenging Western essentialist narratives linking the classical world to Western cultural heritage. This association is fleeting as others take its place – when looking at Monument X, one is reminded of bourgeois neo-classical kitsch aesthetic equally widespread in the East as in the West, as well as of the coincidence that this aesthetic is also shared by the architecture of tyranny as represented in Italian fascist sculptures or in Saddam’s monuments. Through his work, Zaki questions the permanence and authority of monuments, as well as their claim to national and geographic ownership, by forming shapes and objects that we recognise, but cannot place. It is as though they have returned to the present (in contemporary Egypt or otherwise) from an unknown future and a lost past. As the sculpture installations merge into the surrounding context of the gallery, they appear, for a moment, to have found a home.
 
Tarek Zaki was born 1975, and lives and works in Cairo and New York. Tarek Zaki’s work deals with such themes as the passage of time, civilizations, memory and the representation of history and the past. By creating monuments, museums and artifacts (as sculpture installations), Zaki interrogates how contemporary and future generations read the past. The idea of a museum as an institution of historical facts is made ambiguous and blurred as the objects he exhibits are themselves often unclear. This lack of a defining truth leads the viewer to create stories and theories that are superimposed onto reality. Zaki uses polyester, plaster and concrete to create his objects and structures. His work is both monumental and detail-oriented. Zaki’s recent shows include: Mythologies at the Haunch of Venison in London; Collection Dubai at the SMART Project Space in Amsterdam; Museum as Hub at the The New Museum in New York; Monument X at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo; and Out of Place at Galerie Sfeir-Semler in Beirut. He has recently been shortlisted for a public art commission by Percent for Art in New York.

 
The Bluecoat and Open Eye Gallery would like to acknowledge the following individuals and organisations for their coordination in and assistance with the production of New Ends, Old Beginnings: November Paynter, Curator; Mona Deeley, Director of Zenith Foundation; Yuli Karatsiki, Kalfayan Galleries, Athens; De Appel, Amsterdam; Laila Binbrek, The Third Line, Dubai; Laila Nishikawa, Suntra Express, Cairo; Sébastien Gonnet, FMAC, Paris; Factum Arte, Madrid; A. Bliss, London; Michael Dyer Associates Ltd., London; Constantine Ltd., London; and Charles Anderson.
 
Zenith Foundation would like to thank Sara-Jayne Parsons, Exhibition Curator at the Bluecoat, the Open Eye Gallery, November Paynter, Curator, all the participating artists, and the Arab Cities Project team: Ayssar Arida, Mona Deeley, Malu Halassa, Lubna Hammoud, Ghalya Saadawi and Rana Salam.