This second edition of the Biennale of Contemporary Arab World Photography extends the first by spotlighting artists who are developing an original, personal vision of the contemporary Arab world. The way the artists represent it may at first sight seem poetic and deeply informed by aesthetic concerns. These photographs are far removed from the violent, numbing, not to say stifling, images that populate media coverage of numerous destabilized or conflict-ridden territories in the region. Media images are, for the most part, snapshots responding to the urgency of the moment and transmitted, we must remember, by reporters who often risk their lives. By contrast, the artists featured in the Biennale step away, in terms of time and space, from the turmoil of daily news. That distance, or apparent neglect, is, however, no doubt only a surface impression; for there is something that continues to bring them back to fragments of reality, be it social, cultural, or historical, and they refer to it indirectly, in a more or less roundabout way. Their symbolic or imaginary universe is constructed, to a greater or lesser extent, on the basis of reality, and it is the gaps and misalignments that lend their photographic project its substance and originality. And this is also how the artists invite us to interpret their work.
