Condition Report: Symposium on Building Art Institutions in Africa is a collection of essays resulting from of the symposium held in Dakar in 2012. They address the changing role of art institutions and initiatives in Africa, where the cultural and artistic context is characterized by a predominance of government led art programs and infrastructure.

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of a variety of independent art spaces using a wide range of formats to promote art and critical exchange. These initiatives draw a new cartography of artistic action in Africa. This reader looks at the structural and programmatic issues at play within those institutions. Models and profiles of art institutions developed in other regions of the world are also examined. The publication also discusses how former colonial powers define and implement their strategies of cultural representation and exchange in post-colonial areas, and how these in turn influence local dynamics of cultural action.

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Goethe-Institut.

This book brings together Wael Shawky's most accomplished and mature series, Cabaret Crusades and Al Araba Al Madfuna, for the first time. Today, the relationship between art and politics is more crucial than ever, and the volume Crusades and Other Stories is significant for its production of knowledge, new perspectives, and reflection through shared sensibilities about our contemporary time of unrest and uncertainty. Wael Shawky works with an original visual language in video, drawing, and performance that draws on histories of oral storytelling and recreation. In so doing, Shawky opens a foundational debate that explores the construction of history universally to look at how narratives of the past are controlled and rewritten in order to define present and future understandings of the world. Adopting a vocabulary of theatre and cinema, and mixing forms of aesthetics and production, Wael Shawky's films are performances of the reconstruction of well-known and sometimes disputed tales, myths, and legends that interrogate human histories as creative spectacle. Child actors in the series Al Araba Al Madfuna and hand-crafted marionettes in the Cabaret Crusades trilogy intentionally exaggerate the meaning of the roles they play in a statement on the theatricality of existence. Text in English and Arabic.