Fares Chalabi is a Ph.D candidate in Philosophy at Université Paris 8, France.

Conceptual Geographies
Chalabi aims to develop a reading of contemporary art production in a number of political entities, such as Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, based on the concepts developed in Deleuze’s Cinema 01&02. The negative aim of his research is to criticize and show the limits of multicultural theories and art historical approaches, where neither so-called ‘Arabic’ identities nor the ‘modern versus the conservative’ paradigms can explain the dynamics, vitality and actuality of contemporary art of this geographical region. The positive aim is to propose a grid of reading that links art production to the political systems, or ‘field of forces’. As shown by Deleuze, a sensory-motor organization (how I perceive, act and feel) is the modality in which a political field of forces actualizes itself in the subject inhabiting this field of forces. A comparative study of the specifics of the different political organizations in the Arab world will reveal nuances in the correspondent sensory-motor organizations. His study aims to present a double interest: to read the historical-political interactions between these political entities as grounding specific yet complementary sensory motor organizations leading to complementary or opposite responses in the arts; but also to compare the different works of art as specific answers to specific yet interrelated fields of forces, to see if possible solutions could be borrowed from one field of forces and used in another.

- Fares Chalabi, 2013