Aya Johanna Danielle Durst Britt wrote a thoughtful review, in Flemish, of the exhibition in Amsterdam I curated – and which recently finished – in Al Arte Magazine.
Mehreen Murtaza, from The Dubious Birth of Geography series
Searching for Ancient Arabia: the magazine, with contributions by Rahel Aima, Amal Bsiss, Liane Al Ghusain, Ahmed Makia, Mehdi Sabet and yours truly.
A protest during the 2011–2012 Yemeni revolution. Photo courtesy of the Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository, as used in the article Yemen Hip Hop
This year I asked my students, of the course ‘Contemporary Art and Geopolitics in the Arab World’ that I teach at the international Master program of the Paris School of International Affairs, to write a Wikipedia article instead of a normal end paper.
The process was a bit more complicated than I first thought, because I had to gain course instructor rights from Wikipedia, follow a tutorial, write a course page and correspond quite a lot with Wikipedia volunteers throughout the process. In addition, it can be difficult to review the changes students write to existing pages. But I found solutions to all that, and the result is rewarding.
Following are some of the pages of my students, roughly from those I gave the highest marks downward:
Go and have a look, edit their Wikipedia pages or leave some comments…
NRC nieuw orientalisme 14 April 2011
Goed artikel van Raymond van den Boogaard waarin ik en mijn medereizigers worden geinterviewed over hedendaagse kunst in het Midden-Oosten.
“They lack a warm sense of humor; their bodies are large, their character is coarse, their customs rude, their minds dull and their tongues heavy. Their skin color is of such an extreme white that they appear blue. Their skin is thin and their flesh rough. Their eyes, too, are blue and similar to their skin color; their hair is smooth and reddish due to the damp fog. Their religious beliefs are unreliable, which can be traced to the type of coldness and lack of warmth. The further north they reside, the dumber, more vile and primitive they are.” Continue reading