The philosopher Georg WF Hegel considered the whole of history a vast dialectic. Nadine Kanso’s recent series of works, Rewind, Ya Zaman, creates images of her own society’s dialectic: vibrant collages, almost reminiscent of ad campaigns, are comprised of newspaper clippings highlighting Arab cultural and political icons from the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, which are compressed into the background by images of stylish, modern individuals, who are themselves flanked by massive luxury items and the distractions of a slightly more superficial present.

Kanso’s montages proffer a nostalgic memorialization of antecedent Arab history while examining the superficial weight of modern life as a youth in an Islamic country. Born and educated in Lebanon, Kanso has lived in Dubai for nearly a decade. As the most populous city in the UAE, Dubai is home to immigrants from a number of surrounding Arab countries. These countries share a rich cultural heritage, which Kanso acknowledges in Rewind, Ya Zaman. However, the robust economic growth in Dubai since 2002 has at times led to the overshadowing of that culture’s own legacy by the spectacles of real estate and consumerist culture.

Kanso’s discourse between past and present is comprised of two layers. The background of the images commemorates a number of figures prominent in recent Arab history and that of its nationalist movement. Kanso highlights remarkable presences who empowered and invigorated the culture internationally: politicians such as George Habash, musicians, including singer Umm Kulthum, and writers such as Nobel Prize-winning Naguib Mahfouz. The monochrome presentation of these former times accommodates a vital and continuous questioning, which is posed through a conglomeration of scattered, recently hand-written notes in both Roman and Arabic text, as well as newspaper clippings, documents and iconic imagery. Despite being an appropriated and reconstituted account, the black-and-white is freighted with inferred notability.

In contrast, the figures in the foreground of Kanso’s Rewind, Ya Zaman blithely pose as interlocutors in a perpetual exchange between the contemporary and the traditional; their identities and current experiences are cultivated from the historical narration of their background. This aspect of the structural perspective in the series conveys an impression of concern over these young characters’ futures. Each collage portrays its young protagonist considering friendship with gargantuan fashion, makeup and electronics: they manifest an ostensible nonchalance in regard to their adjacent heritage.

Kanso’s layering creates a discourse that alludes to a cultural dialectic, as well as suggesting that while a generation may appropriate the phantom genes of its predecessor, it does not necessarily resemble it. Furthermore, although Rewind, Ya Zaman creates a conceptual space considering a sense of time without a palpable flux, it insinuates the past’s lack of influence on its descendants. However, as Kanso might be illustrating, the present will surely yield a future completely different from what one might imagine.