Modern Art in the Arab World, Primary Documents: A Review Essay

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-351
Author(s):  
Hamid Keshmirshekan
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scholarly Output ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Critical Writings

The study of modern and contemporary art from Islamic lands, and particularly the Arab world, is a developing field. Over the past few decades, a variety of publications on modern and contemporary art from the Arab world and its diasporas has appeared in art magazines, journals, and exhibition and auction catalogues. There is, however, still a lack of scholarly literature and reliable resources on the subject. Many such existing sources have focused on productions that are largely in line with certain interests or agendas pursued by the particular magazine/journal, exhibition, or art market in question. Therefore, although recent scholarly output has played a crucial role in introducing modern art in the Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa, these publications have not sufficiently filled the gap of discussion regarding certain aspects of the subject. Modern Art in the Arab World, a collection of critical writings by Arab intellectuals and artists, offers an unparalleled source for the study of modernism in the Arab world. Mapping the primary documents with additional entries written by the editors and other scholars, this book addresses the major historical, conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic issues that inform the modern art paradigm in the Arab world. Arranged largely in a chronological order, it explores the art of the Arab world by tracing the main discourses that have shaped artistic practices and transformations in the region from the mid-nineteenth century until the late 1980s.

New and modern history of the Arab world

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rouben Karapetyan
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Modern History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Oriental Studies

The textbook covers the main events and developments in the recent history of the Arab world. The key issues of the past and present of the major Arab countries are examined. The general patterns, main stages and peculiarities of the historical development of these countries are presented. The work is designed for students of the faculties of “Oriental Studies”, “History” and “International Relations”, as well as wide range of readers interested in the history of the Arab world.

Locating Modern Arab Art: Between the Global Art Market and Area Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-36
Author(s):  
Haytham Bahoora
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art Market ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Institutional Barriers ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
Global Art ◽  
Visual Cultures

AbstractThis essay situates the publication of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents in the context of an expanding global interest in modern Arab art as well as the study of modern Arab art as an academic discipline. The essay first examines the implications of the cultivation of a new museum and gallery infrastructure for modern Arab art in the Arab Gulf. It then considers how the academic study of modern Arab art has faced institutional barriers, due largely to the overwhelming academic focus on Ancient Studies and Islamic art. Finally, it suggests that Modern Arab Art in the Arab World provides scholars with a comprehensive textual archive that calls for a historicized approach to theorizing the emergence of modernist aesthetics in Arab visual cultures.

scholarly journals Private Savings in the Arab Countries: Empirical Analysis and Policy Implications

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Samih Antoine Azar ◽  
Ali Bolbol ◽  
Alexandre Mouradian
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Budget Deficits ◽  
Fair Share ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Robust Least Squares ◽  
Private Savings ◽  
Econometric Approach

In the past two decades, Arab countries have had their fair share of political instability and economic dislocations. They have also experienced relatively low national savings – at close to 24%, more than 10% less than the Asian economies. This paper looks at how private savings can be invigorated so as to finance more investment and growth, especially in the presence of persistent budget deficits. It develops a simple macroeconomic equation for the determinants of private savings, and uses a novel econometric approach – Robust Least Squares – to estimate that equation for a sample of ten Arab countries across the three sub-regions of the Gulf, West Asia, and North Africa, for the annual 1994-2015 period. The paper finds that Arab private savings compensate for government dis-savings and help ameliorate pressures on the current account and exchange rates. It also finds that Arab private savings are closely related to long-run Arab GDP growth ala the life cycle hypothesis, and proposes policies to enhance the mutual growth of Arab private savings and GDP.

Page as alternative space redux: artists’ magazines in the 21 st century

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
David Senior
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
The Past ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Selection Of

In the past few years, several new publications and exhibitions have presented surveys of the genre of artists’ magazines. This recent research has explored the publication histories of individual titles and articulated the significance of this genre within contemporary art history. Millennium magazines was a 2012 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that traced the artists’ magazine into the 21st century. The organizers, Rachael Morrison and David Senior of MoMA Library, assembled a selection of 115 international tides published since 2000 for visitors to browse during the run of the exhibition and created a website as a continuing resource for information about the selected tides. The exhibition served as an introduction to the medium for new audiences and a summary of the active community of international artists, designers and publishers that still utilize the format in innovative ways. As these projects experiment with both print and digital media in their production and distribution of content, art libraries are faced with new challenges in digital preservation in order to continue to document experimental publishing practices in contemporary art and design.

Civil society in the Arab world: a reality that needs reforming1

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baqer Salman Al-Najjar
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Arab State ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes

Arab experience of civil society is new, and because of the nature of the Arab state, it is difficult to find a single case in the region that is independent of the state and able to exert pressure on it. The case of Lebanon, when the Karami government was forced to resign in February 2005, will remain unique for some time to come. However, the fear of similar repetitions elsewhere has led to greater restrictions on civil society organizations, or it has led some Arab regimes to install their own organizations (GONGOS) to defuse the pressure from other organizations or to weaken their demands for democracy and transparency. The GONGOS were a typically Eastern and Russian phenomenon, and they quickly spread to a number of Arab countries that had experienced totalitarian regimes in the past and also to some of the countries in the Arab Mashreq and Maghreb, which have recently under gone a political transformation towards democracy.

scholarly journals Transition, Flow, and Divergent Times

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-584
Author(s):  
Avinoam Shalem
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global History ◽  
Transition Flow ◽  
Recording Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
History Of

The Western academy's growing interest in the contemporary arts in the Arab world illustrates the desire to map “Islam”—problematic as this term is—within the global history of cultures and to integrate it into “Western” models of the writing and documenting of the past. As positive and corrective as these academic approaches may seem, the notion of recording time—that is, writing history—is still firmly bound at the beginning of the 21st century to the idea of continuity, and the pattern of “Western”-centric thinking imposes that notion upon contemporary artists and art historians. Yet the political changes and spontaneous eruptions that the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing, especially since the beginning of 2011, defy and resist conventional interpretations of historical processes and therefore demand a rethinking of the configuration of the past.

The “Arab Spring” as Seen through the Prism of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Negin Nabavi
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Arab World ◽  
New Order ◽  
Iranian Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
Arab Middle East

Revolutions are by nature unpredictable and unsettling. That the wave of revolutions in North Africa and the Arab Middle East began so unexpectedly and spread with such speed, leading to the fall of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, has added to the concern regarding the “new order” that is to come after the initial euphoria. From the outset, the fear has been that these revolutions will follow the same trajectory as Iran did in 1979—in other words, that they will marginalize those who launched the revolutions and provide the grounds for the rise to power of the most savvy, purposeful, and best organized of the opposition groups, namely, the Islamists. Yet when one considers the recent uprisings in the Arab world through the prism of Iran's experiences in 1979, the parallels are not so evident. Mindful of the variations and distinctions between each of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, it would appear that in broad terms, and beyond superficial similarities, there is little in common between the events of Iran in 1979 and what has happened in the past year in the Arab world.

Embodiment, Curation, Exhibition

Screen Bodies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-91
Author(s):  
Jiaying Sim
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Slow Motion ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film And Video ◽  
Do So

As part of the 2014 GENERATION project celebrating the past twenty-five years of contemporary art in Scotland, Douglas Gordon’s exhibition, “Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now,” took centerstage at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. Gordon contributed to the dialogue with a unique installation showcasing his twenty-two years of artistic endeavors through 101 different-sized old television sets elevated on old plastic beer crates, simultaneously screening 82 video and film works. The screens flickered and lit the dark main gallery as the visual works played on loop—some with sound, some without, some in slow motion. The exhibition included such works as 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (1997), Play Dead; Real Time (2003), Henry Rebel (2011), Silence, Exile, Deceit: An Industrial Pantomime (2013) and emphasized how Gordon’s collection has grown since its first exhibition from 1999 in Poland and will continue to do so, as he updates the videos and films.

scholarly journals Practice of applying visual advertising to Lithuanian contemporary art

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-66
Author(s):  
Dovilė Peseckienė
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Interaction Process ◽  
Process Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Advertising Strategies ◽  
Postmodern Art ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Visual Advertising ◽  
Active Interaction

Visual advertising has become common part of our daily life in the past few decades. It is not only used  for commercial, political or social purposes, but also for the implementation of artistic strategies. Specific constructed artworks, exhibitions and art projects situated in a special/unconventional public spaces (context or semiosphere) are used as a tool to seek more spectators and spread different messages with critical, ironical, social connotations which leads to the deeper communication with spectators. They cannot avoid them because the messages interrupt their minds accidentally passing by the streets and so involve in the active interaction process. Art full of advertising strategies criticises the consumerist society created by advertising, and provokes the subject to take on an active position with respect to raised problems, i.e., it acts in the ideological field of contemporary/postmodern art.

SYSTEM OF ARCHAIC SIGNS-SYMBOLS IN THE ORNAMENTS OF THE MESENA SPINNING ROTARY

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (77) ◽  
pp. 70-75
Author(s):  
A.A. Zhogolevа ◽  
◽  
E.G. Stolyarova
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Traditional Culture ◽  
Single System ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The article is devoted to the study of the symbols of the Mezen painting as a single system. The spinning wheel is viewed as a cosmogonic model of our ancestors, where painting is directly related to the content of the image. The object of the research is the archaic symbols of the Mezen painting. The subject is the development of ornaments and prints for decor and product design. The history of the Mezen craft (geography, origins, traditions), the artistic features of the craft (materials, technology) and the semantics of the ornament are studied. The article considers archaic ornaments of Mezeno in connection with the ancient cultures of mankind (the Neolithic era, Andronov culture, Ancient Greece, etc.) and Slavic traditional culture. The article deals with deciphering the semantics of the ornament of the Mezen spinning wheel as a reflection of the idea of the world of our ancestors. The author's development "The symbolism of the Mezen painting in contemporary art" is given, showing the possibility of using the Mezen ornament at the present stage of the development of artistic culture in art and design. The authors of the article propose to use the ornaments and symbols of Mezeno as decor and prints in modern art and design.

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