Art at Work—People, Power and Cultural Production
Summer 2026
Across the Middle East, people are creatively remembering, resisting and imagining amid war, occupation, displacement and political upheavals. MERIP’s summer issue of Middle East Report, “Art at Work—People, Power and Cultural Production,” explores culture not as an escape from politics, but as a space where struggles over power, identity and belonging are continually negotiated. From songs circulating through Iran and northeast Syria to theater in the Golan, cultural practices become counter-archives, preserving experiences and histories that official narratives seek to erase. Artists in Lebanon grapple with how to draw the act of looking at death and destruction day after day through their phone screens. A Gazan artist confronts the Israeli surveillance he has lived with his entire life, while in Amman, musicians and performers navigate state repression, foreign funding and the commodification of solidarity. Other contributions examine the institutions and markets that shape what counts as art, from the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Gulf’s cultural economy to the gendered boundaries between art and craft and the precarious labor behind AI-generated spectacles. Across these diverse contexts, this issue asks who gets to produce culture, who controls its circulation and value, and what happens when artists challenge imposed categories.