• Re-imagine the Horizon for the Algerian Artist: BOX24

• • Art for Progress
• 5 years ago
• It was social critic Edward W. Said who termed Orientalism as the post-colonial tendency to personify the "Arab and Eastern cultures as exotic, distorted, uncivilized and at times dangerous." It is through this faulty lens that the Eastern and Arab cultures continue struggling to legitimize their position in social structures of acceptance and understandings from the West and Eurocentric cultures. Regretfully, although one would like to assume the art world as tolerant of "others" in its reich; evidence proves otherwise, displaying very little or vague opportunities for artists residing in the East ( dominantly Arab ) to exhibit their work on US soils. This year, in 2018, marked the first-ever solo exhibition of a self-taught Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine (1931–1998), at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. Back in Algeria the struggle to be seen outside the Orientalist perspective continues with a swath of renegade artists and curators: searching for ways to break the stereotype artforms and infrastructures by conducting new alternative run spaces and bridging communications with foreigners. These quads not only present the art of local contemporary artists but rather invite international voices to coexist in a place that offers a compound exchange of ideas, open forum, and cultural exchange with Algerian artists working on the edge of their medium. One of those spaces, BOX24, now in its ten-year anniversary is lead by its founding visionary leader, Walid Aidoud. [...]
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