We had a chance to visit Charles Saatchi’s new exhibition called New Art from the Middle East.  What caught our eye was this particular installation by  a French-Algerian artist Kader Attia called Ghost.  It is a large installation of a group of Muslim women in prayer in which Attia renders their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit.  Made from tin foil – a domestic, throwaway material – Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesizing the abject and divine.  Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies – from religion to nationalism, consumerism – in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion.  Attia’s ghosts evokes contemplation of the human condition as vulnerable and mortal; his impoverished materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifest in individual and temporal experience.

Other noteworthy artists in the exhibition are Iraqi artist Halim Al-Karim (3rd and 4th photos), Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui with Beirut’s current map in engraved rubber (5th) and Iranian artist Shirin Fakhim with her Sara Lucas-esque Tehran Prostitute installations.

The last two photos are not exactly from a Middle Eastern artist but from two of China’s most controversial artists renowned for working with extreme material such as human fat tissue, live animals, and baby cadavers to deal with issues of perception, death, and human condition.  Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Old Persons Home hilariously wicked, their satirical models of decrepit OAPS look suspiciously familiar to world leaders, long crippled and impotent, left to battle it out in true geriatric style. Placed in electric wheelchairs, the withered toothless, senile and drooling, are set on a collision course for international conflict as they roll about the gallery at snail’s pace, crashing into each other at random in a grizzly parody of the U.N. dead.