Since April, L.A. has seen an unbroken stream of small shows on the modern and contemporary history of Lebanon and Iran, narratives positioned to resonate with those of other Middle Eastern countries, or countries like Venezuela, which have historically occupied similar geo-political positions on a world stage.

April - June was the season of imagined art histories: Walid Raad's Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World Part 1_Volume 1_Chapter 1 (Beirut: 1992 - 2005) showed in REDCAT's liminal gallery space. June - July was Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin's Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect – an incisive, two-track history of American post-war manoeuvering in the Iranian and Venezuelan cultural sector. Now through August, the MAK Center at Schindler House hosts The Isle, an architectural inquiry into the failed utopia of the Iranian island of Kish by artist duo Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, also known as Pages.

In all three, the impulse to turn geographic units into analytical categories overlaps with a significant use of the heavily "factual:" architectural models, didactic texts, and documentary videos proliferate. What little manipulation there is is mainly a question of presentation. Pages takes an exacto knife to a vintage Vogue spread on the island of Kish; Balteo Yazbeck and Farzin cannily juxtapose press clippings on international American art exhibitions with models of Alexander Calder's production from the same period. (In Raad's case, the addition of some fiction to the mix is tempered by the heavily theoretical texts bolstering his project). Sleekly documenting the material manifestations of individual and political power in locations where oil money, and center-periphery relations are particularly salient, all three share a common philosophy to "let the facts speak for themselves."

Why this particular congruence? Maybe it's as simple as the fact that all have taken it upon themselves to write essentially new histories for a relatively untutored general audience. They share a common impulse to simultaneously establish a record, and set it straight. Yet this redundancy is a little disappointing. The appearance of three exhibitions like this in the same city, at the same time, seems to point to a broader trend. And the trend itself engenders its own set of nagging questions – not only whether there might be other ways to write new histories, but why exactly this is an increasingly common goal in the contemporary moment: does it help?

--Sarah-Neel Smith

(Photo credits: Pages, Model for an Island (detail), Mixed media, 2009, MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, ©Joshua White and Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World Part I_Volume 1_Chapter 1 (Beirut 1992-2005) A project by Walid Raad (2009). Installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery and the artist. © Walid Raad. Photo: Scott Groller.)