This paper draws on pictorial treatment of deserts by nineteenth-century European artists to examine contemporary photographic images of this landscape. With a focus on images that use aerial perspectives as the compositional strategy, the paper explains why the pictorial tactic of atmospheric ambiguation wherein the horizon line is obfuscated by, for example, the hazy rendering of crepuscular light or engulfing sandstorms has endured across centuries and how atmospherics contribute to imaginaries that see deserts as conceptual rather than physical spaces. The paintings of nineteenth-century artists Augustus Osborne Lamplough, Gustave Guillaumet, Charles Théodore Frère, and Eugène Fromentin allow us to conceptualize how the notion of ambiguity was used as a dominant pictorial strategy in English and French nineteenth-century depictions of Middle Eastern and North African deserts in contrast to the meticulous realism of quintessential Orientalist figurative works, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s celebrated painting "The Snake Charmer" (1879). This atmospheric obfuscation was not intended to generate confusion, but rather acted as a source of imperial power in the expression of the dual attitudes Europeans held towards the deserts of North Africa – for some they were spaces of desolation and death, while others considered them ahistorical expanses whose solitude offered spiritual rejuvenation countering the overstimulation of modern cities. This nineteenth-century paradigm has both continuation and consequences in the work of contemporary photographers, Sophie Ristelhueber and Fazal Sheikh, both of whom have used aerial perspectives to capture desert landscapes. My analysis of Ristelhueber’s series, "Fait" (1992) will foreground the artist’s unconscious perpetuation of Orientalist tropes by leveraging the abstraction of the aerial view to exploit ambiguity in the depiction of the post-war Kuwaiti desert, while my discussion of Sheikh’s Desert Bloom (2011) reveals his disruption of the desert’s essentialization by contextualizing the images within local knowledge developed in dialogue with Negev Bedouins.

My proposed paper will trace Palestinian artist Dor Guez’s photographic interrogation of the Palestinian landscape in three multimedia installations that span his career: “Georgiopolis/Lydd Ruins” (2009); “The Nation’s Groves” (2010); and “Knowing the Land” (2023). In Guez’s earliest public work, the nocturnal landscapes in “Lydd Ruins” both reveal and obscure remnants of Palestinian architecture destroyed or fallen to ruin in the (Israeli) city of Lod (formerly a Palestinian Christian town named al-Lydd) after Israeli military forces conquered the city in 1948. “The Nation's Groves” ("Mataei Hauma") was a government-owned agricultural company that served in the 1950s as a branch of the Zionist enterprise, managing and maintaining the groves, vineyards and lands nationalized following the establishment of the state of Israel. That installation focused on the Israeli forestation project and the work of The Nation's Groves company, while combining historical ethos with individual tales. Much of the land managed by the company had previously belonged to Palestinian farmers, who became laborers in The Nations Groves. In “Knowing the Land,” Guez threads connections between public and private archives, traditional photographic techniques, and new photographic practices that render the maps as sites of “dis-orientation.” The phrase “Knowing the Land” was coined in 1845 by Joseph Schwarz, one of the first geographers of Ottoman Palestine, and this project of exploration expanded during the British Mandate period. While my previous research explored Guez's use of family photographs, this paper will show how Guez uses landscape photographs, videos, and mediated images of such photographs from private and public archives to mine the mythological and political dimensions of Palestine as a site of colonial projections and strategies.

In 2013, artist Gershon Knispel, then 81, described his core ethos: “Having decided in my youth to embrace the principle of abolishing borders between nations, removing barriers between one person and another, between one people and another . . . there is no power in the world that can induce me to ‘toe the line.’” As a Jewish German child refugee and later dissident-in-exile during Brazil’s dictatorship, Knispel’s inability to “toe the line” led to a sometimes-stateless existence and marginalization within the art worlds he operated in. It also inspired his public-facing work focused on social justice in communities across Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. Recently, artist and curator Yevgeniy Fiks has introduced the term “refugee modernism” to describe a generation of artists, such as Knispel, who grew up as refugees during the Holocaust. Knispel’s refugee modernism, his personal refusal of national identification, was a deliberate choice and an almost unfathomable one as a Jew in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The state of Israel made a powerful case that only a nation-state could defend Jews from the genocide that followed Europe’s abject failure to protect its Jewish minorities. Yet while Zionism ddeclared the end of Jewish refugeehood, Knispel and his work challenged that idea by refusing the idea of a state that represents only a single people, to the exclusion of others. Both acknowledging and building upon his own refugee past, Knispel sought to form transnational solidarities that would empower oppressed and marginalized voices. How does centering the narratives of artists who won’t (or can’t) conform either to dominant national models of art history or trajectories of elite cosmopolitanism open new constellations of art history as a whole? This presentation seeks to position refugeehood and paths of forced migration as a central element of both modernity and modernism, thus decentering more dominant national models of art history. This focus on refugee modernism also offers an alternative mode of thinking about “global” modernism beyond regional identities and alignments vis-à-vis an unmarked Euro-American center. For this paper, I hope to examine how statelessness has shaped the development of modern and contemporary art and consider how my research on Knispel and other Holocaust-era refugee artists can connect to a potential broader geography and timeline of refugee modernism.

In March 1967, nine young Algerian artists published a manifesto in which they sounded the call to ‘gather all the plastic elements invented here or there by civilizations… of the Third World.’ Later that year, the Moroccan art journal Souffles asked nine artists to fill in a survey about the state of Moroccan art and their own. Again, in their answers they repeatedly invoked the Third World alongside local Indigenous culture: ‘the revaluation of plastic tradition in the current context is not unique to us. It is a phenomenon present in all Third World countries.’ This paper offers a situated and sustained comparison of the Algerian art movement Aouchem and Moroccan painters affiliated with the Casablanca Art School. As North African artists, both groups placed popular and specifically Amazigh visual culture in dialogue with the anti-colonial Third World movement. But to what extent was this strategy born out of dialogue with each other? This paper reveals a multitude of personal, aesthetic, and discursive encounters between the two groups over the course of the 1960s. It is driven by three essential lines of inquiry: visual analysis of their artworks; oral history interviews with the artists; and written archives including newspapers, correspondence, notes, and catalogues. In the second half, the paper casts outwards from the art groups to examine the political contexts surrounding them. How did the Algerian and Moroccan governments support or suppress the artists’ work? How did transregional solidarities differ between the groups? Why is the Casablanca Art School better known internationally today than Aouchem? Drawing on recent and urgent interrogations of global art history, this transregional comparative paper seeks to understand North African modernist art production from an alternative analytical standpoint to its former coloniser-colonised relationship with France. In this sense, the paper also responds to recent research into North Africa as a site of global solidarity and community beyond both colonial and nationalist paradigms.

In 1962, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture sponsored the travel of a group of artists and writers from Cairo to Aswan, where the construction of the monumental Aswan High Dam was underway. Lead by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989), this group embarked on a boat tour of the Nubian villages that would soon be forcibly displaced by the redirected flood path of the Nile. Egyptian Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha framed this project as a means of recording the culture and heritage of these communities before they disappeared. This artists’ tour overlapped with and paralleled the goals of the American University in Cairo’s Nubian Ethnological Survey, which endeavored to record and preserve knowledge about these Nubian communities in advance of their relocation through a combination of “salvage” and “developmental” anthropology. (1) In this paper, I offer close visual analysis of the artworks produced from this trip, including works by Taheya Halim (1919–2003), Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021), and Hussein Bicar (1913–2002). I ask how the role of the artist might have intersected with that of the ethnographer in Nubia and evaluate how artists reproduced the logics of “salvage anthropology” through their artworks. This paper draws on archival and museum collection research conducted in Cairo, Alexandria, and Aswan and uses methods drawn from social art history, which reads visual objects through the lens of their social, economic, and political contexts. I pair visual analysis of these artworks with analysis of their circulation as illustrations in popular Egyptian magazines and state-sponsored publications as well as exhibitions staged in Cairo to understand how these artworks mediated information about Nubians and their impending displacement to a broader Egyptian public. I argue that the depictions produced by artists who traveled to Nubia contributed to the construction of Nubia as a “bounded culture” at a remove from the larger flow of Egyptian society and helped to shape perceptions of Nubians as a sympathetic but abstracted and flattened “other” to be acted upon rather than agentive and dimensional Egyptian citizens who might contest their displacement or make alternative demands of the state. In doing so, this paper brings forward how the Egyptian state harnessed visual culture to support the logics of postcolonial developmentalism in the 1950s and 60s. 1) Hopkins, Nicholas S. and Sohair R. Mehanna, eds., Nubian Encounters: The Story of the Nubian Ethnological Survey 1961 – 1964, (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010): 4.

In his 1979 theorization of Mediology, Régis Debray defines mediasphere as a system of cultural transmission associated with a technical medium.1 At the conjunction of the symbolic world of meaning-making and the technological domain of image-making, mediaspheres not only exhibit distinct styles of representation but also wield political power. Put succinctly, power is in the hands of those who represent. Scholars in Media Studies have mapped various genres in which representations of Muslims have been linked to themes of violence, intolerance, and terrorism.2 This paper focuses on (ostensibly) positive images of Muslims, especially Muslim cultural production, in the Global North media. How do neoliberal art establishments represent Muslim modernities? The Museum of Modern Art’s 2006 exhibition, “Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking,” featured the work of the MENA artists such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Jananne Al-Ani, and Shahzia Sikander.3 What cuts through the work of these women artists are themes of oppression, displacement, exile, melancholia, fragmentation, and a sense of loss. Despite sharing some cultural heritage of the MENA regions, these artists are trained in North American and European schools (écoles), and as such immersed in the epistemologies of the Global North. What has rendered their work appealing to the Western audience, as Iris Gilad has observed, is the theme of suffering and resistance—much of which has nothing to do with the personal experience of the artists.4 The mediasphere, in other words, features Muslim modernities only when it is political, ethnic, and religious—a point already suggested by Olivier Roy, Hamid Dabashi, and Miriam Cook. There is an exception, however. Established in 1977, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture is a platform that has escaped the ethnicization of cultural productions of Muslims. By demonstrating that architecture built by and for Muslims is the same as architecture designed and built for other people, the Award undermines claims about alterity and Otherness of Muslim architecture. This paper historicizes the emergence of the Award in the late 1970s within and against the bourgeois architectural mediasphere. Building upon archival research and oral histories, this paper maps discursive shifts, stylistic reorientations, and representational techniques espoused by the Aga Khan Award over the past 47 years.