www.dailystar.com The ties that bind the Arab world to South America often get a bad rap these days. Whenever a slow news day aggravates the otherwise swift and continuous media coverage of the so-called "war on terror," investigative journalists tend to bring up that business about financing from the Triple Frontier.

The point where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet is notorious for its mercenary activities involving arms smuggling, drug running and money laundering. In the last five years, an additional air of malice has been layered onto the Triple Frontier, now considered the cash-pumping heart of Middle Eastern "terrorism," replete with arteries serving Al-Qaeda and Hizbullah. For local Lebanese flavor thread the Brazilian end of the Madina Bank scandal into the narrative and you have some very bad business indeed.

As such, a small but sturdy exhibition tracing some of the more positive elements of Arab culture at play in South America provided a welcome counterweight to the sensational and salacious.

Organized by the Brazilian Ministry of External Affairs, "Amrik: The Arab Presence in South America" celebrates the ways in which Arab achievements in art, science, architecture, design, cuisine, fashion, literature, music, mathematics and more have rooted themselves into South American soil and thrived. Much to its credit, the show does not trot out the usual names and faces of, say, Lebanese who have made their fortunes abroad. Unlike similar such exhibitions, it does not elevate emigration to art but rather tells a multifaceted and heartfelt narrative of cultural commingling through original and notably contemporary imagery.

Curator Andre Botelho Vilaron commissioned 23 photographers from Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Uruguay and Chile to capture the Arab presence of the exhibition's title. Each photographer gave his or her own aesthetic and conceptual twist to the task.

Argentina's Guadalupe Miles, for example, took portraits of women whose ancestors had emigrated from Syria prior to World War II. In each image, the subject holds an object - be it a doll, dress, cushion or blanket - that remains an emblem of her distant homeland.

Julio Pantoja, meanwhile, took another set of portraits depicting women of Arab descent with the culinary dishes they learned to make from their forebears. Soledad Dahber, a bespectacled 29-year-old artist, for example, holds up a delicate bowl of tabbouleh for the camera. In the exhibition, her picture accompanies a hand-written recipe calling for a generous dose of yerba buena fesca. Six-year-old Ana Luz Alabi Nasr poses with a plate of lahme baajine prepared by her mother (herself the daughter of immigrants from Homs) and dubbed empanades arabes.

Colombia's Jorge Mario Munera, in Weegee mode, documented a slew of insightful moments in such institutions as the Colombian-Palestinian Cultural Foundation, where one couple in traditional dress nods off on a Damascene bench set against an elaborate mosaic wall, while another poses like a young Bonnie and Clyde in fetching, culturally specific headgear.

Mixed into the exhibition's stock of contemporary photographs are archival images from personal and institutional collections (including the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation).

The entire show is encapsulated in a catalogue bursting with colorful, energetic graphic design - it looks rather like an early issue of the magazine Bidoun and has much fun with geometric patterns. For local viewers, that catalogue does more than simply support the exhibition - it saves it from the ruin of disastrous timing.