Manazir Journal is a peer-reviewed academic Platinum Open Access journal dedicated to visual arts, architecture and cultural heritage in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Every issue focuses on a specific theme defined and proposed by a guest editor responsible for the issue and its follow-up. Manazir Journal accepts proposals for issues published in English, French, German and Italian and is also open to languages of the MENA region, such as Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

Check out our first issue "The Arab Apocalypse. Art, Abstraction & Activism in the Middle East" directed by Silvia Naef & Nadia Radwan: https://bop.unibe.ch/manazir/issue/view/1009

Vol. 1 (2019): The Arab Apocalypse. Art, Abstraction & Activism in the Middle East

This first issue of Manazir Journal originates in the exhibition dedicated to the Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer Etel Adnan held at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern in 2018 and the related symposium. It illustrates how artists, in the Arab world, connected abstraction and political activism, in a search that ties visual aspects to clearly expressed opinions and visions of and on this region. The title refers to Adnan's well-known epic poem "The Arab Apocalypse" which she wrote during the Lebanese civil war.

Introduction
Nadia Radwan
6-10

Curator's note
Etel Adnan Meets Paul Klee
Fabienne Eggelhöfer
11-18

Articles
"Painting in Arabic": Etel Adnan and the Invention of a New Language
Silvia Naef
19-29

Hamed Abdalla: Talismanic Modernism
Morad Montazami
30-44

La participation de l’Égypte à la IIème Biennale de São Paulo (1953-1954) Une
initiative individuelle, des enjeux nationaux
Nadine Atallah
45-68

The Museum as an Egalitarian Space? Women artists in Beirut’s Sursock Museum in
the 1960s and 1970s
Nadia von Maltzahn
69-82

Etel Adnan — in Close Encounters with Paul Klee Review of the Etel Adnan Exhibition
and Symposium Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, September 27th – 28th 2018
Joan Grandjean, Mirl Redmann
83-93

Artist's statement

The Political Basis of Abstraction in the 20th Century As Explored by a Painter
Samia Halaby
94-110

The journal is linked to Manazir – Swiss Platform for the Study of Visual Arts, Architecture and Heritage in the MENA <http://www.manazir.art/>, a platform of exchange that aims to connect researchers interested in these themes in Switzerland. The term “Manazir” refers to landscape, perspective and point of view in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian. Thus, Manazir Journal is oriented toward a diversity of transcultural and transdisciplinary “landscapes” and “points of views” and open to a multiplicity of themes, epochs and geographical areas.