Upcoming Events
CAA Affiliate Session
Friday, February 15, 2013, 5:30 – 7:00 pm
A Revolution in Art? The Arab Uprisings and Artistic Production
Chairs: Dina A. Ramadan (Bard College) and Jennifer Pruitt (Smith College)
Saleem Al-Bahloly (University of California, Berkeley) Can There Be an Art of a Revolution? The Counter-Example of the Politics of Painting in 1950s Baghdad
Dina A Ramadan (Bard College) When Artists Become Martyrs: Understanding the Place of Art in the “Revolution”
Christiane Gruber (University of Michigan) “King of Kings of Africa”: Racializing Gaddafi in the Visual Output of the 2011 Libyan Revolution
Jennifer Pruitt (Smith College) Painted Discontent: The Role of Street Art in the Egyptian RevolutionPast Events
Two AMCA-sponsored panels at the 2012 Annual Meeting - Middle East Studies Association
Sunday November 18, 2012
In the Shadow of the Cold War: Modern Art in the Arab World
Organized by Sarah Rogers (Darat al Funun) and Saleem Al-Bahloly (UC-Berkeley)
The convergence of Middle East studies and Cold War studies in recent years has brought the region's strategic importance to bear upon a conflict conventionally conceived as a duel between capitalist fantasies and communist ideologies. Yet this scholarship has not thus far taken account of the role of the visual arts in the struggle, nor how that struggle bore upon the visual arts in the Middle East, despite the fact that both Cold War studies and American and European art history have documented the ways in which art, and particularly certain styles of painting, namely American abstract expressionism, was a site of ideological investment.
Scholarship on the visual arts in the Middle East has acknowledged the function of art in forging political alliances, which resulted in traveling exhibitions, artists' residencies, cultural exchanges, and the establishment of university art departments, cultural centers, and publications that have been central to the region's art scenes. However the current paradigms in this scholarship rely upon analytic conventions, themselves a product of the Cold War, that in overemphasizing national style and autonomy, fail to adequately situate the arts in the more general political context set by the Cold War, and thus fail to deal with the complexity of the artistic encounters that took place in the name of 'cultural diplomacy' as well as the often unintended and novel aesthetic shifts that resulted. This panel reframes the relation between art and politics in the 1950s and 1960s by considering that relation in a broader international context.
Panelists:
Sarah Rogers (Darat al Funun) American University of Beirut and the Formation of the Modern Lebanese Artist
Saleem al-Bahloly (UC-Berkeley) The Politics of the Modern Artwork in Cold War Iraq
Jessica Gerschultz (University of Kansas) Mutable Form and Materiality: "Interweaving" Art and Politics in the New Tapestry of Safia Farhat, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Maria Laskiewicz, and Jagoda Buic
Monday November 19, 2012
Arab Spring, Artistic Awakening? Art, Resistance and Revolution
Organized by Jennifer Pruitt (Smith College) and Dina A Ramadan (Bard College)
Since the early weeks of the "Arab Spring," critics and commentators have been eager to assert that in something of an awakening, artists from the region are finally being allowed the freedom to express themselves after decades of repression. Exhibitions and symposia soon followed, primarily concerned with the unique and specific role played by artists in the groundswell of grassroots activism, as well as how artists are directly tackling political upheaval in their work.
This panel would like to engage in a more nuanced examination of the relationship between art and politics, one that recognizes the limitations of prescribing a role for artistic expression based on anachronistic understandings of contemporary revolutions. Given the evolving nature of the "revolutions" we have witnessed over the last year, what is the changing place for artistic production and how do we move beyond the temptation to assign artists the responsibility of representing the revolution.
Papers on this panel will propose possible paradigms through which to understand the complicated relationship between art and revolution from a range of disciplines. Two of the papers will consider artistic production in Egypt since the revolution, the first addressing the role of the artist, particularly the artist as martyr and the relationship that develops to our understanding of the work, while the second examines the explosion of graffiti art across the walls of Egypt. Continuing the interest in art in public spaces, the third paper will look at the Libyan context, and specifically the representations of Muammar al-Gaddafi, the so-called "King of Kings of Africa," in which the opposition sought to degrade Gaddafi through the use of a variety of "BlackFace" visual stereotypes. The final paper uses the Syrian documentary film collective, Abounaddara, to problematize the characterization of art during the Syrian uprising as a 'new' genre and the uprising as an event with predetermined meaning.
Chair/Discussant: Elliott Colla (Georgetown University)
Panelists:
Christiane J. Gruber (University of Michigan) "King of Kings of Africa": Racializing Gaddafi in the Visual Output of the 2011 Libyan Revolution
Jennifer Pruitt (Smith College) The Global Street: The Rise of Cairene Street Art, 2011-2012
Dina A Ramadan (Bard College) The Artist and the Martyr: Egyptian Art in the Time of Revolution
Anne-Marie McManus (Yale University) Demanding Images: Documenting Revolution in Syria
AMCA Academic Conference 2012
The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories
June 1-2, 2012
Held in collaboration with the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut, the conference was sponsored in collaboration with the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut, supported by a generous donation from Rana Sadik and Samer Younis, and the Provost and Dean of FAS at AUB. Special thanks to Saleh Barakat.
Presenters Saleem al-Bahloly, Bassam el Baroni, Saleh Barakat, James Casey, Clare Davies, Angela Harutyunyan, Patrick Kane, Anneka Lenssen, Alexandra Dika Seggerman, and Tammer El-Sheikh responded to our call for papers.
CFP: Historical writing about modern and contemporary art has tended to frame its narratives around key political events, using these moments to demonstrate a rupture of some sort in the institution of "art" and approaches to its production and ambition. For example, we understand that the atrocity of the bombing of the civilian town of Guernica in 1937, shocked Picasso into a new understanding of painting's power to represent human suffering; after World War II, artists sought to express existential angst in tune with the apparent death of civilizational certainties; after the student and labor protests of 1968, artists rejected the formalist legacy of modernism and sought transgressive, performative modes of creativity and/or political critique. And so on. The narratives that have been mobilized to write a history of Arab art are no exception. The 1967 Naksa, the swift defeat of the Arab armies at the hands of the Israeli Army, and with it the creation of massive refugee groups and the rapid unraveling of the project of Arab nationalism, has been marked by art historians as perhaps the most significant moment in recent history, one that changed aesthetic sensibilities and thus forever reshaped contemporary artistic production in the region.
As part of its ongoing critical engagement with the writing of an art history of the Arab world, AMCA proposes to convene a conference to reexamine this, perhaps the most defining event in our subject's historiography. To date, the narrative of breakage and radical inversions associated with 1967 remains prevalent (if not entirely dominant). At the same time, it has gone oddly unexamined. By some tellings, the shocking loss of life and territory as well rendered artists' indulgence in a modernist aesthetics of abstraction entirely illegitimate. It became imperative to mobilize art within a larger oppositional cause, to re-focus the energies of defeated populations so as to rise again against Western imperialism. By other tellings, the defeat prompted artists to finally break with the party lines offered by their patron-governments, opening up to experimental aesthetics and avant-garde attitudes. Other narratives emerge from between these poles, talking about the loss of centralized patronage and the shifting terrain of the artistic livelihood in the post-Arabist decade of the 1970s. No single model seems quite to capture or explicate the claims made for "1967" as a key political event. We hope to return to these and other narratives and begin to track not only the immediate effects of the 1967 war, but also its longer-term transformational effects, as manifested in the many art worlds and art movements that intersected in the Arab world of the 1960s, and after. To put it bluntly: if we know that everything changed, how do we know it? Can we document it? See it? Track it? Diagnose it? Deny it?
Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab gave the keynote response on both days. Discussants included Dina Ramadan, Sarah Rogers, Nada Shabout, and Salwa Mikdadi.
The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories
June 1-2, 2012
American University of Beirut
Bathish Auditorium in AUB's West Hall
Free and Open to the public
Click HERE for details
CAA Affiliate Session: Artists in Times of War and Revolution
February 24th 2012, 12:30–2pm
Chair: Pamela Karimi, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Wafaa Bilal, New York University
Salwa Mikdadi, Emirates Foundation
Nada Shabout, University of North Texas
Sandra Skurvida, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York
The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories
June 1-2, 2012
American University of Beirut
Bathish Auditorium in AUB's West Hall
Conference sponsored in collaboration with the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut, supported by a generous donation from Rana Sadik and Samer Younis, and the Provost and Dean of FAS at AUB.
Program to be posted shortly.
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Christiane Gruber, prizewinner Maria Domene-Danés, Nada Shabout at the prize reception |
Rhonda A. Saad Prize Ceremony at MESA’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., December 2011
AMCA is pleased to announce that Maria Domene-Danés has won the 2011 Rhonda A. Saad Prize for the Best Graduate Paper in Modern Arab Art. A committee comprised of Hannah Feldman, Jessica Winegar and Nada Shabout selected her paper, “Disrupting Narratives, Unveiling Biopolitics in the Atlas Group Archive,” for this, the inaugural awarding of the annual prize. Maria is currently a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington, studying under Professor Dawna Schuld. The advising faculty member for her paper was Professor Christiane Gruber. In addition, the committee acknowledged honorable mention to Yazan Khalili for his submission, “Darkness Against the Landscape: De-familiarizing the Image.”
We congratulation Maria on the honor!
Call for Papers - AMCA Academic Conference 2012
The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its HistoriesJune 1-2, 2012
Historical writing about modern and contemporary art has tended to frame its narratives around key political events, using these moments to demonstrate a rupture of some sort in the institution of "art" and approaches to its production and ambition. For example, we understand that the atrocity of the bombing of the civilian town of Guernica in 1937, shocked Picasso into a new understanding of painting's power to represent human suffering; after World War II, artists sought to express existential angst in tune with the apparent death of civilizational certainties; after the student and labor protests of 1968, artists rejected the formalist legacy of modernism and sought transgressive, performative modes of creativity and/or political critique. And so on. The narratives that have been mobilized to write a history of Arab art are no exception. The 1967 Naksa, the swift defeat of the Arab armies at the hands of the Israeli Army, and with it the creation of massive refugee groups and the rapid unraveling of the project of Arab nationalism, has been marked by art historians as perhaps the most significant moment in recent history, one that changed aesthetic sensibilities and thus forever reshaped contemporary artistic production in the region.
As part of its ongoing critical engagement with the writing of an art history of the Arab world, AMCA proposes to convene a conference to reexamine this, perhaps the most defining event in our subject's historiography. To date, the narrative of breakage and radical inversions associated with 1967 remains prevalent (if not entirely dominant). At the same time, it has gone oddly unexamined. By some tellings, the shocking loss of life and territory as well rendered artists' indulgence in a modernist aesthetics of abstraction entirely illegitimate. It became imperative to mobilize art within a larger oppositional cause, to re-focus the energies of defeated populations so as to rise again against Western imperialism. By other tellings, the defeat prompted artists to finally break with the party lines offered by their patron-governments, opening up to experimental aesthetics and avant-garde attitudes. Other narratives emerge from between these poles, talking about the loss of centralized patronage and the shifting terrain of the artistic livelihood in the post-Arabist decade of the 1970s. No single model seems quite to capture or explicate the claims made for "1967" as a key political event. We hope to return to these and other narratives and begin to track not only the immediate effects of the 1967 war, but also its longer-term transformational effects, as manifested in the many art worlds and art movements that intersected in the Arab world of the 1960s, and after. To put it bluntly: if we know that everything changed, how do we know it? Can we document it? See it? Track it? Diagnose it? Deny it?
Thus, for the upcoming conference “The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories,” AMCA is calling for either papers or panels that take the presumed centrality of 1967 in Arab art history back up as a subject of inquiry. We especially encourage papers dealing with specific studies of artworks, artists, manifestos, collectives, and discourses. Panels might propose to consider what is at stake in framing contemporary art history in the region around a moment of defeat, whether it is possible to speak of an aesthetics of trauma that is present in post 1967 art, and in what ways artworks themselves might register such total epistemological change, or not. Or, panels might mobilize the problems glimpsed in the historiography around 1967 to engage periods or problems that are not immediately adjacent to the political and aesthetic conditions of that loss. We hope to draw on a range of disciplines and types of expertise. Paper topics and approaches need not be limited to that of art history and criticism as traditionally understood. Ultimately, we are seeking to raise methodological questions about the writing of art history in the region, and to begin the intellectual work of addressing them in ways that engage the historical record in conjunction with the economic, social, and emotional legacies of 1967.
AMCA is currently accepting individual paper proposals as well as panel proposals. Panel proposals should provide a brief overview of the panel stakes as well as a list of tentatively confirmed paper presenters and titles and suggested discussants. Graduate students are particularly encouraged to submit proposals. All proposals to be submitted by December 15, 2011 to: info@amcainternational.org. A response will be given in January 2012.
Mathaf - AMCA Academic Conference 2010
Modern Arab Art: Objects, Histories, and Methodologies
December 16-17, 2010
This, our first AMCA conference, brought together established and emerging scholars working throughout the world to present research and think through the intellectual problems shaping the field of modern Arab art today. It was hosted in collaboration with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar and took place in conjunction with the museum’s inaugural events and exhibition openings.
Papers were given by: Raja Adal, Jessica Gerschultz, Sarah-Neel Smith, Sharif Mahmoud Sharif, Elizabeth Miller, Patrick Kane, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, Cynthia Becker, Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, Holiday Powers, Saleem al-Bahloly, Chad Elias, Karin Zitzewitz, and Samah Hijawi.
Chairs and Discussants included: Wijdan el-Hashimi, Tina Sherwell, Salwa Mikdadi, Kirsten Scheid, Kamal Boullata, Stephen Sheehi, Charbel Dagher, Hannah Feldman, Nasser Rabbat, Iftikhar Dadi, Suad Amiry, and Arindam Dutta.
To view video footage of presented papers, see: http://www.youtube.com/user/mathafmodern (There are 23 parts).
CAA Affiliate Session: Modern Arab Art and Its Historical and Methodological Relationships to the Post-Colonial Context
February 9th 2011, 12:30-2pm
Over the past decade, modern art of the Arab world has received intense interest within not only the international marketplace but also the U.S. and European academies. Yet, scholarship remains trapped within the colonial paradigm. Most art histories of modern Arab art to date proceed by a chronological model that attributes the emergence of modern art in the Arab world to colonial influence. Introduced by Europeans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, modern art—both its technologies and the social category of the artist—is considered a foreign import. The chronological-colonial narrative is, in many ways, a distorting one. It interprets modern Arab artistic engagement with western art as imitative or belated while neglecting the transnational - local, regional, and international- vectors of influence that converged to produce visual art and culture at a given place and time. Furthermore, this model often privileges national art histories, decolonization struggles, and identity politics at the expense of broader and more complex historical trends that extended across the region.
The chronological-colonial model is not unique to the study of modern Arab art, but rather extends to the field of modern art in geographies that share a colonial history such as Latin America, South East Asia, and Africa. In an effort to chart new methodological approaches to understanding the production of modern Arab art outside this conventional paradigm, this special session brings together scholars whose work examines modern art production throughout various post-colonial contexts. In doing so, this roundtable aims to chart the convergences and divergences between the region of the Middle East and other locations previously assumed peripheral to the study of Modernism. By attending to questions of history and historiography, we will consider the relationship between the chronological-colonial model and conventional art historical paradigms of influence, asking in what ways the post-colonial framework is a productive analytical unit for understanding the history of modern art, its proposed aesthetic values, and its diverse and precarious origins.
MESA 2010 (San Diego, CA) AMCA-Sponsored Panel:
Articulating Politics, Mobilizing Art: The Left and the Visual Arts
Friday, 11/19/2010 02:00pm
Organized by Dina A. Ramadan & Sarah A. Rogers
Chair/Discussant: Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Northestern University
Dina A. Ramadan, Bard College —Writing for Art and Freedom: Reading Aesthetics and Ideology in Al-Tatawwur
Z. Pamela Karimi, UMASS-Dartmouth —The Visual Culture of the Left in Cold War Iran
Donald LaCoss, U of Wisconsin LaCrosse—The Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile, 1973-1980
Sarah A. Rogers, Columbia University Middle East Research Center, Amman — Palestinian Art & Leftist Politics in Beirut
Omnia ElShakry, UC Davis — The Specter of the Political and the Promise of Politics: Contemporary Artistic Production and the Middle East
This panel will consider the informative relationship between aesthetic and political languages in artistic production and its surrounding discourses in the modern Middle East. Of particular interest is the interaction between various "leftist" political movements in the region (and here the interpretation of such groups is certainly expansive) and the visual arts. Histories of the left in the region have largely neglected artistic practices, focusing instead on what are more conventionally seen as socio-political and economic concerns and movements. Any attention to the artistic production has been limited to seeing artworks as merely reflective of political situations or agendas. Similarly within the emerging field of Middle Eastern art history, an engagement with the political, particularly with leftist discourses, conventionally privileges an ideological reading at the expense of aesthetics. In this way, form is often separated from content, and aesthetics are emptied of their potentially diverse political manifestations. Instead, this panel aims to understand the ways in which political and aesthetic languages inform, and are made to speak to, one another. In doing so, we aim to raise questions as to how political agendas are articulated artistically and similarly how artistic movements are mobilized politically. Where do tensions arise, where do boundaries blur, when does it become (im)possible to talk about clear distinctions, and why?
In order to address these questions, papers examine a series of case studies that cross disciplines, national boundaries, and time periods. Topics include: the Egyptian Trotskyist artists' group al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyah; the Arab Surrealist movement in exile (1973-1980); Beirut-based Palestinian art and activism in the decades before the Lebanese civil war; Marxist art criticism in pre-1979 Iran and the role of contemporary art from the Middle East as a staging ground for politics at the Istanbul Biennial.
AMCA’s panels at the 2009 MESA Annual Meeting, Boston, MA
Pirated Politics: Contemporary Art, Artists, and the Post-production of the Middle East
Chairs: Anneka Lenssen and Rhonda Saad
Discussant: Nada Shabout
Rhonda Saad, (Mis)consuming Reality in Omer Fast’s The Casting (2007)
Elizabeth Rauh, Street Art in Post-Revolutionary Iran
Kathy Zarur, Mediated Reality In and Out of Palestine
Between Public Memory and National Narrative: The Visual Document and History in the Middle East
Chairs: Mitra Abbaspour and Alex Seggerman
Discussant: Kishwar Rizvi
Joanne Nucho, Ordering History in Time: The Beirut National Museum
Katie Pfohl, Joseph Lindon Smith’s Painting Excavations of Egypt
Alexandra Dika Seggerman, The Street and the Road: Public Art in Cairo
Mitra M. Abbaspour, Collecting Truths: Strategies of the Photo Archive in Contemporary Lebanese Art
AMCA’s panel at the 2008 MESA Annual Meeting, Washington, DC
A History of the Real World: Realism and the Visual Arts in Egypt and Lebanon
Organized by Raja Adal and Sarah Rogers
Jennifer Pruitt, Harvard U–Reconsidering Realism in Early Fatimid Art: The Fatimid Luster Workshop of Muslim bin al-Dahhan
Dina A. Ramadan, Columbia U–Evaluating Real Images: Early Egyptian Art Criticism and the Pursuit of Realism
Raja Adal, Harvard U–Reality and Unreality in Egyptian Primary School Drawing Classes during the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Stephen Sheehi, U of South Carolina–It’s Like Really Being There: al-Nahdah, Ideology and the Photographic Aesthetic
Sarah Rogers, MIT–Daoud Corm, Realism, and the Origins of Lebanese Art
AMCA’s inaugural double session at the 2007 Middle Eastern Studies Association Conference, Montreal Canada
Art Without History? Evaluating 'Arab' Art
Organized by Nada Shabout, Dina Ramadan & Sarah Rogers
Chair: Nada Shabout & Silvia Naef
Discussant: Shiva Balaghi
Sarah Rogers, MIT-Building a Market, Defining an Audience: Beirut's Gallery System, 1960s & 1970s
Dina Ramadan, Columbia University-Visualizing the Nadha: Egyptian Artists' Collectives and their Criticism during the Interwar Years
Anneka Lenssen, MIT-London’s Arab Renaissance c. 1975
Salwa Mikdadi, Independent Curator-Women and Institutionalization of Contemporary Art Practices in the Arab World
Katarzyna Pieprzak, Williams College-Art in the Streets: Modern Art, Museum Practice and the Urban Environment in Contemporary Morocco
Caecilia Pieri, Paris/Amman Ahlia University, Jordan-Modernity and its Post in Constructing an Arab Capital: Baghdad’s urban space, context and questions EHESS
Nadine Khalil, AUB-Lebanese Cultural Workers and Artists: Navigating the Arab Cultural Terrain in New York and Beirut