This book brings together artists and writers who use image-making and text as means to understand ecological change. By presenting their work here, including ongoing projects and commissioned pieces, the publication conveys knowledge within attentive proximity to the contributor's own definitions of the subject and their governance of observation and analysis of global crises in the age of the Anthropocene.
This experimental approach is inspired by Bayan al-Madrasa al-Kristaliyya (The Crystal Manifesto), published in 1976 by the Crystalist School in Khartoum, Sudan, consisting of Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, Muhammad Hamid Shaddad, Naiyla al-Tayib, Hisham Abdallah, and Hashim Ibrahim. As an editor, I wanted to utilize this modernist text as a curatorial lens to explore contemporary art, asking primary questions, focusing on recent artistic productions from West Asia and the Gulf region. The manifesto delves into artistic and philosophical commentary on topics such as time, science, space, and language. They also critiqued art-making practices within a growing "universal" imperialist discourse. Their collective thinking, led by Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq (b. 1939, Omdurman), their teacher, resonated with existing African liberation movements of the South as well as Arab and African visual art movements from the 1960s. These movements examined post-independence art making and the challenges of modernist definitions that attempted to flatten identities, events, geographies, and cultures. Madness of the Anthropocene draws inspiration from the "no-color phenomena" within the crystal—an object seemingly colorless whose visibility emerges under pressure—that they highlight. This dual state serves as a metaphorical and literal embodiment, echoing the overarching theme of the book chapters that embrace, in other words, what I call madness as an artistic methodology for image-making today. How do artists articulate or respond to subjects about the Anthropocene? How can we visually rethink disasters and madness, and, what do we do with those resolutions?
Edited and introduced by par Lina Ramadan.br>
Foreword by Faisal Al Hassan.
Contributions by Moza Almatrooshi, Rojda Tuğrul, Nour Shantout, Asmaa al-Issa, Fatma & Reem Al Sehlawi, Ritika Biswas.
