Fahrelnissa Zeid in the Mega-Museum: Mega-museums and modern artists from the Middle East (original) (raw)
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Art Museums and the Middle East: A Contested Territory
International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2020
Two well-dressed men, one on a horseback with a long stick in his hand and the other following behind on a donkey, are riding across the mountains of eastern Anatolia. These two men, unmistakably modeled after Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, travel up and down the mountains, stopping at a creek to cool off. The journey they have embarked upon, however, is unknown to us. From their conversations we learn that they have been traveling for forty days and forty nights. They are exhausted. The absurdity of riding a horse and a donkey in full business attire, coupled with their association with Don Quixote, makes us suspect that they have a mission-an impossible one. Revealing it, they stop to ask the first man they encounter, a villager, in Kurdish: 'Is this the road to Tate Modern?' This is a video entitled 'Road to TATE Modern' (2003) by Kurdish artists from Turkey, Ş ener Özmen and Erkan Özgen, which was exhibited at the opening ceremony of Istanbul Modern, a modern arts museum, on December 11, 2004. The opening of this museum may not have been as absurd as the Quixotic horseback excursion from mountainous eastern Anatolia to the Tate Modern in London depicted in the video, but it was equally ambitious and proved to be nearly as challenging. In the words of Oya Eczacıbaş ı, chair of the museum's board of directors, Istanbul Modern was established in order to show 'how much we [i.e., Turks] belong in the West in a way the world doesn't realize'. 1 The Eczacıbaş ı family-the founders of Istanbul Modern-had wanted to establish a modern arts museum since 1987. 2 The first home of Istanbul Modern was warehouse number four in Karaköy, which had been used previously for the Fourth and Eighth Istanbul Biennials in 1995 and 2003.
RACAR/Canadian Art Review-Revue d'art canadienne, 2017
This paper discusses recent Western exhibitions of art from the Arab world and Iran and their catalogues: 25 ans de créativité arabe, Paris/Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, Institut du Monde Arabe/Silvana Editoriale, 2012, 215 p., ISBN 9788836624317; Massimiliano Gioni, ed., Here and Elsewhere, New York, New Museum, 2014, 279 p., ISBN 978-0-915557-05-9, Unedited History, Séquences du moderne en Iran des années 1960 à nos jours, Paris, Paris-Musées, 2014, 199 p., ISBN 9782759602452; Fereshteh Daftari and Layla S. Diba, eds., Iran Modern, New York/New Haven and London, Asia Society Museum/Yale University Press, 2013, 256 p., ISBN 9780300197365; Omar Kholeif, ed., Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary – Works from the Barjeel Art Foundation, London/Munich/New York, Whitechapel Gallery/Prestel Verlag, 2015, 272 p., ISBN 9783791354859 (Trade edition), ISBN 9783791366302 (Museum edition).
A .pdf of the entire anthology is now available for download at the MoMA Publications website: https://www.moma.org/d/pdfs/W1siZiIsIjIwMjAvMDMvMzEvODVydG9lMW5tY19NQUFXX01vZGVybl9BcnRfaW5fdGhlX0FyYWJfV29ybGQucGRmIl1d/MAAW\_Modern\_Art\_in\_the\_Arab\_World.pdf?sha=f87b38cb2a1e1a75
Footer here 17 Footer here 17 Imagination is a lost guest roving the earth; it is the strongest cultural force. Its movement never ceases throughout our lives. -May Ziadeh (Cairo, 1912) Modern art truly is the art of the age, and its complexity is a result of the complexity of this era. It expresses many things: anxiety, fear, great disparities in most things, human massacres, man's distancing himself from God, and then the new perspectives on everything, generated by modern theories in psychology and other disciplines. -Jewad Selim (Baghdad, 1951) People speak of the simplification of form and content-apparently, to paint a plow is to put your work within reach of the peasant. [ . . . ] Must we really return to naïve Épinal prints? And, in order for music to be understood, must we forbid symphonies and only compose little ditties? Underdeveloped painting is not on the revolution's agenda.