The short and spectacle life of UAR, between 1958 and 1971, offers physical and conceptual depictions of UAR and/or its founder as ephemera to be collected. As the project "insists on the significance of the invisible, or, rather, the repression of the visible in the operation of spectacle", it also investigates the place and value of putting together such a collection. Among the photos of inter and national relations, slogans and propaganda newsreels, states' politics depicted on magazine covers, flashes of bold news headlines on oxidized newspapers, loads of works by admirable artists, writers, filmmakers and their opponents, gold-foil stamps, cigar bands and hand-made stereoview images, there is a children book titled "Baba Gamal" [Our father Gamal]. Published by Dar Al Maref in Cairo, and found in a bookshop in Amman, "Baba Gamal" is the best found so far that could explain UAR to children of the/all time.
Presented is a reproduction of selected pages from this publication. Here, some words and all people have walked out from the scenes to make space for UAR products and images.
About the artist
Ala Younis is an artist and curator. Born in Kuwait, based in Amman, graduated as an Architect from University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan in 1997. Younis's artistic practice is engaged in the reinterpretation of inherited narratives, by way of research-based sociopolitical investigations deeply explored in concurrence with personal experience. Through art, film and publication projects, she unfolds the conditions under which collective historical and political collapses can become personal ones. Her work was shown in: Tea with Nefertiti, Mathaf and Institut du Monde Arabe (2012-13), ROUNDTABLE, 9th Gwangju Biennial (2012); The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); Home Works '5, Beirut (2010); The Jerusalem Show, Jerusalem (2009), and PhotoCairo 4, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo (2008). In 2012 she was selected by ArtReview as one of the art world's 'Future Greats 2012', and her publication projects 'Needles to Rockets' (2009), and 'Tin Soldiers' (2012) are collaborative art publications that involved in its making individuals from different backgrounds.