Loading ...Whitechapel Gallery in London Brings Modern Arab Art to the World
At a Christie’s sale in Dubai in 2010, applause erupted in the auction room as Mahmoud Said’s 1929 painting “The Whirling Dervishes” sold for $2.5 million. The event stunned the audience and marked a historic turning point: In addition to setting a world record for a modern Arab work, it firmly put the spotlight on art from this genre and its importance to collectors in the region, who are both looking back at the Arab world’s rich artistic traditions and linking them to contemporary practices.
Since 2010, auctions in the Middle East and Europe have continued to offer prized pieces from this field. (Some of them have been acquired by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, which opened in Doha, Qatar, in 2010 and houses the world’s largest collection of modern Arab art.) International institutions, from the Tate in London and the Guggenheim in New York to the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, have staged solo exhibitions celebrating Arab artists whose work precedes the recent interest in contemporary Arab art.
The Whitechapel Gallery in London is a rare Western institution to take an even more comprehensive approach. Through Dec. 6, the gallery is staging “Debating Modernism I,” the first of a four-part series called “Imperfect Chronology,” curated by Omar Kholeif, that documents the history of Arab art from the early 1900s to the present day. The first two installments of the series are the first shows focusing on Arab world modernists to be staged in Britain.
Over the next year, some 100 works by more than 60 Arab artists from the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, will be displayed in Whitechapel’s Gallery Seven, a space reserved for private collections. Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi, an Emirati art patron and collector, established Barjeel, which means “wind tower” in Arabic, in 2010 to preserve and manage his collection.
In addition to regularly staging exhibitions in Sharjah, Barjeel also frequently lends works to such museums as the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the New Museum in New York.
“We own 1,200 works, and the ideal scenario is that we loan all of them,” said Mr. al-Qassemi, who is also a commentator on Arab affairs. “This is the ambassador of Arab art to the world.”
The aim of the “Imperfect Chronology” series is to educate audiences about the genealogy of Arab art and to relate key moments that heralded the region’s contemporary art. According to Mr. Kholeif, the show acknowledges, as its name suggests, that its account is sequentially flawed, because there is a lack of documentation on artists and art practices from the modern era.
Mr. al-Qassemi, Mr. Kholeif, who will join the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago as a curator later this year, and others are trying to remedy this, drawing more attention to the issue by presenting exhibitions, publishing catalogs and speaking at panel discussions.
Mr. Kholeif said that the works in the Whitechapel exhibition should be viewed in the context of historical events in the Arab world, not in the West. Mr. al-Qassemi agreed.
“It is important not to measure the Middle East according to a European yardstick,” he said.
For this show, Gallery Seven’s floor has been carpeted in beige and its sidewalls have been painted a warm yellow, providing a convivial feel. Mr. Kholeif chose a salon-style hanging for “Debating Modernism I” to mirror practices from the early 20th century until the late 1960s. The 40 works offer the unfolding of a painterly vista of Pan-Arabism.
The story of the Arab world in the 1900s begins with a sequence of Orientalist and Impressionist landscapes by Said, Mohammad Sabry and others. They are flanked by renderings of the Aswan Dam — an engineering feat, built across the Nile from 1898 and 1902 and considered a key moment in Egyptian history — by Ragheb Ayad and Effat Nagi.
The next works in the show move toward figuration and Symbolism. They are from the mid-1960s, an era characterized by change across the Arab world, when artists attempted to create their own aesthetic following independence from colonial powers.
Hamed Ewais’s “The Protector of Life,” an image of an armed, dark-skinned man towering over several scenes characteristic of Egyptian life in the Nasser era, anchors the central wall. The work symbolizes the working class through a monumental, national hero, painted during a crucial time in Middle Eastern history: the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War.
Maria Sukkar, a London-based collector and member of the Tate’s Middle East and North Africa acquisitions committee, said that the current show was “a true eye-opener on early modern Middle Eastern art, especially for audiences who are not familiar with the cultural heritage of the region.” She said she was particularly moved by Ewais’s painting, “which tells of a painful story that started 50 years ago and that seems to have no happy ending in sight.”
Continuing with works from the same era, the show journeys through the German Expressionism of Marwan and examples of the Baghdad Art Movement by Shakir Hassan al-Said and Jewad Selim, graduates of the Slade School of Fine Art in London, to Mohammed Issiakhem’s haunting specter of the Algerian state and Khalil Gibran’s drawings, which Mr. Kholeif said show “Arab art being tied to a folkloric, literary tradition.”
The next section deals with spirituality and Surrealism. Kadhim Hayder mourns the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the prophet Muhammad; al-Said uses the canvas to explore otherworldliness; paintings by Paul Guiragossian and Munira al-Kazi feature Christian iconography. “Debating Modernism I” ends with works by Marwan, Dia al-Azzawi and Shafic Abboud, who all fled their homelands and immigrated to Europe. The next installment in the series, which opens Dec. 15, will showcase works from 1968 to 1987, with emphasis on figuration. The following two shows will feature contemporary work.
“What is key is that these artists belong in the same artistic worlds as their European modernist contemporaries, but are for the most part unknown to Western audiences,” said Venetia Porter, the curator of Islamic and contemporary Middle Eastern art at the British Museum. “That needs to change.”
Source: www.nytimes.com