The Molten Notebook

An illustration by Kuwaiti artist Lara Baladi

When the elevator doors close, I step onto the terrace and into a colonnade of gilt arches. Birds sing. A bicycle bell rings, a horn honks. A muezzin in the distance calls the faithful to prayer.

Yet through the windows, the offices on the other side of the Potomac look as gray as always. I have walked into a soundscape designed by Alaa El Kashef for “ARABESQUE: Arts of the Arab World.” The three-week festival of performances and exhibits runs through March 15 at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Wandering into new spaces and engaging with cultures I knew little about — with how they’re presented, anyway — was the reason I’d come.

Presenters of “world” artists face a dilemma. The audience  often expects to see certain traditions  — the tea ceremony, whirling dervishes, and so on. To cater to this expectation is in some ways to depict

Fifi with a Shisha (Cairo); photo by Youssef Nabil

a culture as though it is frozen in time. Folk or classical arts may not accurately reflect newer trends, especially not a plotless modern dance that “doesn’t look Chinese.”

As with any product, the appeal lies in familiarity with a frisson of novelty.

One strategy is to present Country X’s version of a Western work, a Cambodian “Magic Flute,” a Chinese “Rite of Spring,” or, in the Kennedy Center festival, an Arab “Richard III.”

Another is to focus on living artists who are inspired by cultural tradition for their own reasons. They might test out different identities, critique their cultures, cater to a world audience.

Along with a 3D video on the Arab Golden Age — the medieval flowering of the arts and sciences — were exhibits by prominent, mostly young artists, several of whom live or have lived abroad:

• Kuwaiti designer Farah Behbehani deconstructed jali diwani calligraphy, curve by curve, in selections from The Conference of the Birds, a 12th century Sufi poem.
• Lara Baladi, a Lebanese artist, created a walk-in kaleidoscope in an installation  called “Roba Vecchia.” At the end of a mirror-walled, triangular tunnel was a screen projecting an ever-shifting collage of images. The artist uploaded some 2,000 images taken in Tokyo — Noh masks, manga girls, a technicolor Hindu god — and had them projected at random based on the dominant color like lime green and fuschia. The signs outside the exhibit compared the work to the act of of recycling everyday materials and putting them to new uses on the Cairo streets.
• Yossef Nabil’s sensual photographs had that soft-focus, hand-tinted look of 1950′s glamor shots . They gave us a cinematic Egypt of hookah pipes between impossibly red lips, a pouting beauty kneeling on a bed.
• An exhibit of exquisite jewelry designed by Azza Fahmy focused on the inspirations for her work:  “peasant” designs based on patterns like wheat, mud homes on the banks of the Nile, antique Egyptian jewelry, Arabic calligraphy. She interviewed Bedouin women and collected antique jewelry for ideas.

I like to think these artists are as curious about their cultural past as visitors to the exhibit are. Maybe this is stating the obvious, but the exhibits are a reminder that “culture” is not an object to be revealed or explained, but an ongoing process of interpretation that includes both outsiders and participants.

Not that outsiders and participants are mutually exclusive. Most of us probably think of ourselves as a little bit of both.

Postscript

All of this seemed neat until I told the Muscle about it.

The Muscle had been too skeptical to join me. Even if it was free, he argued, it had Putumayo written all over it. (He uses the name of the world music label as shorthand for what he calls “ballsless” music.) You want to learn about another culture, he said, visit the country. Go to Queens, shop at an ethnic grocery, make friends from abroad. Or rent a documentary and read a book. It wasn’t as though they had the only “Mona Lisa” or the hat Lincoln wore. To him, the whole project had a tail-wagging friendliness and a didactic air.

I wanted to refute him. I made some vague claims about the importance of presence and community, about using all one’s senses, but somehow I wasn’t convincing. Was the Muscle right?