| March 1, 2008 |
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ArteEast's 2008 Virtual Gallery Exhibits to call attention to this important history of modern art in the Middle East
Kirsten Scheid and Jessica Winegar introduce the first of four artists who were extremely important interpreters and translators of modernism in their time.
In the past ten years, contemporary visual art from the Middle East has garnered unprecedented attention worldwide. Many artists from the region are now sought-after participants in international exhibitions, and new publications have sprung up featuring their work, which has also enjoyed record sales. Yet while many art works and artists now circulate the globe, in-depth knowledge of local art histories does not. Art historians, critics, and artists living in the region produce and rework these histories, often in non-Western languages, yet their work has generally been overlooked in the excitement over contemporary art itself.
Meanwhile, many other Middle Eastern artists are still only known within their national spaces, often because full appreciation of their work requires knowledge of these art histories. Primary among these are the pioneers of modern art in the region, members of earlier generations of cosmopolitan artists who invented and contributed to the emergent meanings of modernism, created the major arts institutions, and taught the teachers of many contemporary artists today. These pioneers are generally well-known and often revered in the Middle East, yet they have received little, if any, attention elsewhere. This exhibition seeks to fill these gaps by providing an historical account of the early percolation of modernist interest in the settings that have produced many of today's internationally well-known artists, as well as hundreds of others who have not yet received attention.
ArteEast is excited to dedicate its 2008 Virtual Gallery series to calling attention to this important history of modern art in the Middle East by featuring the work of four artists who were extremely important interpreters and translators of modernism in their time. These are artists who also contributed, from their specific positions in colonized or newly independent Middle Eastern countries, to the emergent meanings of modernism worldwide. Their artistic formulations, and interventions in art scenes from the Middle East to Europe, laid the groundwork for the art we see today.
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Kirsten Scheid is a Beirut-based anthropologist and art historian who writes regularly on modern and contemporary art in the Middle East. Her research interests include the history of painting in Lebanon, cross-cultural investments in fine art, and the use of art for negotiating ambiguous social identities such as gender and class. She teaches at the American University of Beirut and is completing her Ph.D. at Princeton University. Kirsten combines her academic interests with local cultural engagements in her capacity as the coordinator for a series of Arabic children’s books, as a member of the editorial board of the Arabic bi-monthly political cultural review Al-Adab, and as an activist for popular movements to invest in local economic and cultural resources in the face of dispossessing globalization. In 2001, Kirsten helped co-found a cultural facilities center accessible to Beirut’s lower class and refugees. At this center she curated Women at an Exhibition, showing 4 generations of local women painters painting women; she also helped formulate a ground-breaking exhibition and conference on censorship and its resistance in the Arab world. In 1992-3 Kirsten conducted independent field research on the contemporary Palestinian painting movement in the West Bank.
Jessica Winegaris a professor of sociocultural/visual anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA. She is the author of the award-winning book Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2006), which examines the heated cultural politics of neoliberal era artistic production and consumption as articulated through reckonings with the legacies of colonialism, nationalism, and socialism. She has also written numerous articles on Middle Eastern art and is a founding member of the Task Force on Middle East Anthropology. |
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