Description
Four young artists set off on a year-long journey (Sept 02 - Sept 03) across the Middle East, working through Turkey, Iran, Kurdish Iraq, UAE, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Israel. Their aim was to show - through art - their collective experience of the people and places they encountered, to leave behind popular misconceptions and, through an exchange of ideas, to enhance understanding. The result is Off Screen. Welcomed everywhere as artists, they got to places that journalists, tourists and writers don't get to. They made portraits of Iraqi artists in Baghdad three months after Bush declared hostilities over and hours later recorded the 4Ysuperscript th¨ of July celebrations in one of Saddam's former palaces; they recorded the invasion of Iraq from a village in Jordan, student protests in Iran, weddings, prayers, poems, wallscapes, MacDonald's workers in Oman, short stories about female identity and much, much more. This book presents the atmosphere and feel of the streets, mosques, homes and deserts they visited. Spontaneous images using tactile forms, colour and layered collages of typography and iconography are interwoven with diary extracts and ephemera to communicate a visually rich, deliberately subjective and very accessible record of this extraordinary journey. But more than that, this is a highly original portrait of cultural identity in the 21Ysuperscript st¨ century.
