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September 2019, English
17×24 cm, 264 pages, 73 color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-1-884919-35-0
Design
Eider Corral
Copublishers
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York
Status
Available

Artists who belong to Algeria are caught between a national mythology that does not represent them and a historical space blanked out by state-sanctioned amnesia on both sides of the Mediterranean. Waiting for Omar Gatlato: A Survey of Contemporary Art from Algeria and Its Diaspora presents the work of twenty-five such artists who offer diverse representations of everyday life and are rigorously critical in their engagement with the legacies of Orientalist figuration, modernist abstraction, monumental public art, Conceptual art, and postmodern media theory after 1962, in a postindependence context.

This publication includes the first English translations of texts by key theorists of contemporary art in Algeria on the evolving relationship between art and politics, as well as poetry by Samira Negrouche and a graphic essay by Nawel Louerrad. The book’s title comes from an essay by Wassyla Tamzali on Merzak Allouache’s 1977 film Omar Gatlato.