The Articulating-Self Inside Out

This chapter maps the different ways with which an Iranian woman artist, Katayoun Karami, critically responds to the stereotypes about the depiction of cultural identity in the artworks of female artists with a Middle Eastern background. The key point of Karami's response is the way she applies her self–portrait to articulate the self and her subjectivity, which is analysed in this chapter by examining one of her works named the Other Side. In this installation, the artist demonstrates the construction of gender identity in today's Iran through her personal perception of veiling. Working within the frameworks of feminist and Orientalist discourses, this chapter aims to explore how Karami's lived experience as a continual activity of becoming has been formed through the experience of veiling, and what strategies are deployed by her to interrogate the presumptions about the image of the veiled body in Western and Iranian contexts.

On Perpetual Conflict

This chapter focuses on the different tactics Emily Jacir uses in her varied art practice to trouble narratives of the Palestinian occupation. It tracks through notable artworks including Where We Come From (2001–03), Sexy Semite (2002), and ex libris (2010–12), and attempts by Jacir to reveal the discursive frameworks which normalise the atrocities in Palestine. Thinking with scholars including Achille Mbembe and Judith Butler, this chapter traces the strategies the artist uses to communicate the conflict outside of these discursive traps that continually interpret and produce the oppressive reality in Palestine. And, it follows Jacir in asking, what would it take to remake (transform) the sensibility of the conflict in Palestine?

Transmission as Resistance in the Work of Zineb Sedira

This chapter proposes a feminist reading of Franco–Algerian multimedia artist Zineb Sedira’s video and installation work from the early 2000s to today in order to consider the potential for global feminist art histories that are intersectional and relational through the ways in which Sedira focuses on memory. Memory and its transmission across generations is treated in three distinct but overlapping ways: memory within the context of Sedira’s only family, using Sedira’s personal story as a means of reckoning with larger histories and the construction of the gendered subject within them; collective memory in the context of post–colonial Algeria; and memory as held by the land itself, read especially through the lens of ecofeminism. In Sedira’s work, the gendered subject is constructed through women’s stories told from inside the perspective of family, that is, women considering their roles as daughters, mothers, and wives, told against and overlaid on top of the history of colonialism.

Claims to Fame

Since the day it was inaugurated in 2004, the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art has assumed a pivotal role in re–establishing the history of modern and contemporary artistic practices in Turkey. The major all–woman exhibition titled ‘Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey’, which was opened in late 2011 at Istanbul Modern, constitutes an important case study to prompt deeper exploration into the narrative frameworks within which the art museum reproduces differences. This chapter revisits the institutional and the curatorial discourse of ‘Dream and Reality’ by examining the statements released in the media and in catalogue essays with a view to comprehending the allegedly conflicting notions of gender and feminism on which the exhibition was premised and how differences were articulated against the politics of the state and art history writing. With this reconsideration, the chapter addresses the reverberations of these framings in the art histories of Turkey but also relocates them within the debates of art’s new transnational landscape.

Hyphenated. Transnational Feminism in Contemporary Israeli Art

The chapter discusses Jewish Israeli women immigrant artists through the case study of artist Jennifer Abesirra (b. 1984), an immigrant from France of Algerian origin. Abesirra's artworks stand as examples of the complex, multilayered, and dynamic identity of immigrant women in Israel. The discussion in the chapter integrates global and transnational aspects of women's migration with local perspectives, which are unique to the ethnic, religious, social and civic circumstances in the state of Israel. It tackles feminist issues, arguing for a new understanding of the role played by immigrant women within the nation–state. While striving to problematize essentialist theorisation, it examines heterogeneous constructions of gendered selves by women who live in transnational contexts: out of the mosaic of artistic artefacts analysed arises an argument that challenges the binary thinking that distinguishes the ‘Israeli society’ from ‘women migrants, and ‘the State of Israel’ from the ‘Middle Eastern space’.

Transnational Feminisms and the Decolonisation of the History of Art

This chapter discusses the aim and objectives of the volume by way of addressing the recent debates in the discipline of art history. The two main themes that comes through from this discussion are the current efforts of decolonising the curriculum of art history and the discipline itself, and the ongoing challenges to art history and its canon particularly coming from the perspectives of transnational feminism and postcolonialism. This introductory chapters draws upon scholars whose studies have been key to these discussions, including Okwui Enwezor, Nada Shabout, James Elkins and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state and relevance of them to the volume. This chapter ends with an explanation of how each section and chapters contribute to these debates and what novelties they bring into art historical scholarship.

Feminism and Social Critique in Syrian Contemporary Art

This chapter examines artworks by young Syrian artists produced during the first decade of the twenty–first–century. Seeking to distance themselves from what they perceived as outdated aesthetics, seen in the work of their teachers in the art school and the work exhibited at the official, state–sponsored artistic events, the young generation of artists began experimenting with artistic techniques and media that were new to the country, also searching for new ways to interact with society and advocate for social and eventually political change in the country. They addressed a wide range of issues related to the contemporary Syrian society and made a critique of the social and political status quo. Critical examinations of gender norms presented an important aspect of their critical art production, as they regarded the issues of gender as an important part of their wider project of re–thinking art as a means for social and political change.

Squares of Colour

This chapter explores the cultural position of two women artists, Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916–2017) and Etel Adnan (b.1925) in the second half of the 20th century in Lebanon. The strong presence of abstraction in their work calls for a reflection on materiality and abstraction, and on form and anti–form. Choucair and Adnan pioneered new ways of seeing, of thinking about art and its physical relationship to it through abstract aesthetics. Born in Lebanon, they have become significant artists who trained and lived abroad, while always keeping strong links to Lebanon. Their oeuvres present a reflection on the conflicted Western and Islamic heritage in Lebanon and in the Middle East at large. Although abstraction is no clear representation of female subjectivity, the use of abstraction as lived experience in Choucair’s and Adnan’s works serve to explore gender in Lebanon as a subjective and social context.

Notes on Tending Feminist Methodologies

This chapter reflects on feminist methodologies for research on women artists and art forms that are both feminised and racialised, existing on the fringes of art historical scholarship. The author’s recent work on women's weaving and fibre art sketches a productive pathway for crafting analytical approaches to asymmetrical relationships. Employing Sara Ahmed's writing on feminist sensations, citational relations, and the analogy of a 'wall', the chapter considers underlying reasons for the continued marginal status of women artists, 'feminine' space, and 'craft' production. Focal points of feminist labour include locating archival and artistic records, contending with their relative inaccessibility, invisibility, and vulnerability, and cultivating essential relationships around these materials. If tended to, these records and collaborative relationships yield an exciting picture and scholarship of care that work to destabilise hegemonic art histories.

Indigenous Algerian Women Artists in the French Landscape

Exploring the artistic paths of the two Algerian Berberi women artists under French colonisation, this chapter aims to demonstrate how art could be transformed into a powerful expression of anticolonial and feminist thought. Baya Mahieddine (1931–98) distinguished herself in painting while Taos Amrouche (1913–76) was a singer of lyrical Berber songs (chants). In 1947, Surrealist André Breton came across both of their work and fascinated by their authentic artistic style, described them as the ‘beginning of an age of concord and radical break’ with the artistic thought of the era. The social and personal trajectory of the two women gave their art a dimension of the gendered imagination nourished by their ethnic origins. A quest for identity guided their work towards self–understanding, constituting a path to an exploration of the ‘other’. In order to show the impact of their personal experiences on their work, as well as the feminist thinking that emerges along the way, this chapter delves into the social and historical conditions of their artistic practices.