Re-displaying the Modern: A History of Art Exhibitions, Artistic Networks and Institutions in the Middle East and North Africa 1930-1989

This doctoral research project focuses on the institutional history of modern art practices in the Middle East and North Africa between 1947 and 1989. While revisionist narratives have brought into view previously neglected spatial and temporal networks, art historical scholarship tends to overlook the fact that artworks today praised as 'discoveries' in the West belong to a local narrative of a pre-globalised history of art and exhibitions. This project thus aims to provide a critical framework to map the development of galleries, festivals, biennials, journals and other platforms for artistic exchange in the region. The dominant historiographies of modernist art have, until recently, ignored art from the Middle East or cast it as derivative of its European sources.

The project will thus engage broadly with institutional practices across the region and re-evaluate the adoption and adaption of modernist paradigms, asking questions such as: What institutions served to exhibit and disseminate modern artistic projects in the Middle East in the second half of the twentieth century? How did these institutions, and the artists working in them, negotiate the tensions between the local and global, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, political engagement and artistic autonomy, and popular and avant-garde art trajectories? How might a map of the institutional links between artists working in cities such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Jerusalem, Istanbul and Tehran necessitate a re-thinking of the nation-state as a framework through which to understand artistic production in the region?

The project will involve examining art exhibitions, biennials and festivals as they intersect with the history of avant-garde groups, art movements and political alliances of their time, including but not limited to: Al-Nahda's cultural Renaissance in early twentieth-century Lebanon and Syria; the Egyptian Art and Freedom group in the 1930s; the Baghdad Modern Art Group formed in 1951 by Jawad Salim; the Union of Arab Plastic Artists that gathered throughout the 1970s between Damascus, Rabat and Baghdad, where the first Arab Biennale was held in 1974; the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of the Arts in Iran; and the Asilah festival in Morocco in 1978.

Based in London, the project will involve an examination of the histories of works of modern Middle Eastern and North African art within Tate's collection, utilising the museum's records. There is an aim to produce summary texts about individual artworks in Tate's collection for publication on Tate's website, following existing guidelines, and related texts, such as catalogue entries. Research findings will be shared with staff at Tate, both informally and formally through seminars and a range of possible publishing outcomes. The assembling of documents relating to the history of art in the region could be a further valuable outcome of the project.