In the spring of 1976, London was the site of the World of Islam Festival, a multifaceted event designed by a host of former diplomats, scholars, and those avidly interested in Islam in order to inspire Muslim-Christian unity. Through a panoply of art and visual culture exhibitions, as well as other events, organizers attempted to present a comprehensive view of Islamic civilization, as they termed it, from the framework they called an Islamic point of view. Using history to educate the public was thought of as a means to solve contemporary tensions between religious and ethnic groups in Britain at the time. Archival documents, which have yet to be cited in the extant literature, illuminate this little-known planning process. Through a contrapuntal reading of archival material held in repositories across London, this paper returns to the World of Islam Festival to reexamine the thing it lacked: contemporary art from West Asia and North Africa. I ask three main questions. First, how did the festival use historical Islamic art objects as metonyms for the Islamic world? Secondly, what were the reasons for marginalizing contemporary art and artists from the so-called Middle East, despite the presence of contemporary artists such as Libyan Ali Omar Ermes, and Sudanese Osman Waqialla in the festival’s planning efforts? And third, against these historical displays, how did contemporary Arab, Iranian, and Turkish art gain prominence in London, particularly through artist-led movements and alternative spaces of display? Through a reconsideration of the World of Islam Festival, I not only illuminate the forgotten shows of contemporary Middle Eastern art at the festival, but also posit that these small shows acted as a locus for identity articulation against the festival’s historicist overtones, as well as reflected the diasporic identities of an amorphous London. In turn, I argue that the World of Islam Festival should be understood a critical interlocutor for the broader proliferation of contemporary Middle Eastern art in London beginning in the mid 1970s. Articulating the broader impact and significance of the World of Islam Festival prompts new historiographical questions about the Western reception of contemporary Middle Eastern art in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In December 1934, an exhibition of Soviet painting and sculpture opened in Ankara, the capital of the recently proclaimed Turkish Republic, and later traveled to Istanbul, the country’s artistic center. At a time when artists and intellectuals vehemently debated what art in the new Turkey should look like, this exhibition exposed its audiences to various strains of socialist realism, the contemporaneous Soviet proposition of revolutionary art. This paper historicizes the exhibition’s reception in Turkey, asking how it contributed to the ongoing redistribution of artistic values. My analysis understands this exhibition as a discursive site where Turkey’s painters could re-evaluate the Western European artistic criteria that they had previously espoused in comparison with the newly encountered Soviet ones. My discussion focuses on the reviews of Ali Sami Boyar (1880–1967) and Nurullah Berk (1906–1982), two painter-critics from different generations who practiced academic and modernist painting, respectively. By putting close readings of their texts into dialogue with visual analyses of the Soviet paintings that they discussed, this paper will argue that the exhibition did not necessarily disseminate the socialist realist method, which foregrounded the depiction of a model socialist reality to emerge through revolutionary development. Instead, the exhibition functioned as a springboard for reconfiguring distinctive modes of modernist painting that would participate in the new Turkey’s making. Against abstract tendencies, Boyar advocated a figurative modernism that pursued individual expression of the artist through the painting’s formal qualities. At the same time, this modernist painting drew from local and Western European aesthetic traditions to depict contemporary subject matter. Berk’s modernist model, too, remained mostly figurative, though with the explicit task of serving the regime through its socially communicable and politically relevant subject matter. Berk contended that this painting would still stay disinterested and have open-ended meaning. In turn, this modernism would receive state patronage for its production and dissemination, thereby even be able to create its broad public. While both artists-critics remained attached to the Western European artistic criteria of disinterestedness and art as expression, they decidedly rejected its individualist model driven solely by formal, art historical ambitions—abstraction, in particular.

In pen and ink artworks such as Vole Voile (Veil Flight, 2007), contemporary Tunisian artist Najah Zarbout contests the sexualization and subsequent covering of female hair by using hair to conceal and, alternatively, expose the female body. The body is sometimes present, buoyed by hair, and sometimes absent, where the silhouette of the body, shown as negative space in the drawing, collides with a mass of hair. This analysis of Zarbout’s surrealist collages argues that Zarbout uses covering, revealing, and mirroring as metaphors through which to explore the social layers of Tunisian women’s reality. Zarbout is one of the many contemporary Tunisian women artists who use surrealism to encode critiques of a Tunisian authoritarian system that is structured upon genital sex, gender, and the family in the service of the nation-state. The demands of the state and society on women’s bodies can manifest in a woman experiencing herself as being both an embodied entity and also the “other” who surveilles her. Unruly hair, an extension of the female bodies in Zarbout’s artworks, both veils and reveals portions of the figures in its mediation of the space between embodiment and disembodiment. In doing so, the hair disrupts the self/other dichotomy and illuminates how Tunisian women are renegotiating their relationships to their doubled selves. Zarbout’s emphasis on covering and revealing in the Tunisian context recalls discourses surrounding the Muslim women’s veil, which in Tunisia, occupies a complicated social position mediated by culture, religion, and the state. Elsewhere, monolithic understandings of the veil cultivated by Neo-Orientalist fantasy-driven rhetoric have been analyzed by artists and scholars alike. However, while works by Zarbout from the 2000s reference veiling, she in fact offers a different approach. Rather than engaging in discussions about the cultural and political significance of the material veil itself, she redirects passé discourses surrounding veiling to investigate the different social veils that Tunisian women wear; social veils produced at the intersection of Tunisian state prescriptions and social norms embedded in extra-state cultural understandings. By recontextualizing hair as something with which to cover or enhance the body, rather than a thing to be covered, Zarbout’s artworks demonstrate how the tangible material of women’s hair intersects with its social meaning in a culturally Islamic context.

This essay is a response to a single statement by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), that drew a genetic connection between Muslim artists and historical Islamic art in describing two key exhibitions in 2015 and 2016. Titled Islamic Art Now and Islamic Art Now Part 2, these related exhibitions shared the subtitle Contemporary Art of the Middle East and collectively presented the works of 45 different artists. In displaying these exhibitions, the museum not only saw itself as expanding the “parameters of Islamic art” but also collectively framed these works in the following words: “this art often has an up-to-the-minute sensibility in terms of its medium (such as video or digitally constructed images) and its political messaging, but what we have here termed “Islamic Art Now” shares the same DNA with historical Islamic art”. In closely analyzing the kinds of Muslim protest works promoted through these exhibitions (and the broader oeuvre of each artist), I place a magnifying glass on the needle-work of power implicit within this description, and instead forward a radically different statement of their work. I argue that, while attempting to create antithetical knowledge, these Muslim artists continue to share a secular aesthetic sensibility that is at once visual, biological, grotesque, plastic and painful. In exploring these aesthetic orientations, I illustrate, in Asad-ian fashion, that these aesthetic underpinnings point to, reflect, and help perpetuate a particular kind of subject – one that is quite different from the medieval subject that fashioned classical Islamicate art. In doing as such, I also highlight that the aesthetic politics of such artists is limited in challenging the dominant order precisely because the modern, secular subject that it re-produces can only see, and thus, act in certain limited ways. This essay is thus a preliminary meditation on the ways in which elite art institutions -entangled in a cultural game – hope to promote images of the Muslim world that highlight cultural complexity and foster tolerance. More specifically, it is concerned with contemporary Muslim artists that garner considerable prestige within these circles. While scholars often focus on Orientalist depictions, there is considerably less emphasis on the works of Muslim artists. As alluded to earlier, in studying their works I simply ask: what is the texture of the gaps implicit within such well-intentioned representational endeavors? And do these gaps truly allow for the work of resistance and protest?

Ana Masreya talks of the Egyptian revolution, in her high heels during cabaret performances in Brooklyn, attended by immigrant Arab feminists who take the stage and lecture during the show. DaGeG, a collective of queer Arab artists formed in Berlin is trying to theorize how to say queer in Arabic, and what performance has got to do with a discourse on politics. An Egyptian activist commits suicide in exile in Canada. An author in Egypt writes under a pseudonym to problematize the pains of queer Arabs in exile and their alienation from current discourses. And in London, Iraqi performance artist and drag queen Glamrou is redefining political activism today while addressing both Islamophobia in Europe and Jihadism. With DaGeG drawing from critical literary theory and translation studies, and Glamrou using quantum physics and history of Islam, this generation of queer Arab artists in exile and in the diaspora are constructing complex theoretical frameworks to look at intersectional questions of identity formation outside of the western canon. They are doing this away from seminal works that have shaped how we theorize gender and its performance today in western academia. Is it a matter of language and terminology, that renders the question of ‘queer Arab art’ urgent and volatile? Or is it grappling with a colonial past, renewed by seemingly neocolonial epistemologies? This paper documents the work of key radical queer Arab artists in the 21st century, situates this work within the 10th anniversary of the Syrian war while problematizing the term ‘Arab Spring’, and opens up a discussion on terminology, canons and colonialism. It works through the scholarship of theorists and academics Arafat Sadallah, Mariem Guelloz, Ismail Fayed and Abdullah Al Bayyari. It argues for nascent Arab contributions to the fields of gender and sexuality as they intersect with political discourses and nation building narratives in the Arabic speaking region. It addresses the image of Arabs and Muslims in Europe today as they continue to be vilified in the media, and alienated by new Islamophobic laws. Through surveying the practices of an invisible community, marginalized both in the Arab region and in exile, for not conforming neither with capitalist contemporary queer aesthetics nor with regional grand narratives, or with immigrant communities identity formation processes, this paper aims to pay respect to the radical politics these artists perform, present, and theorize.