Abstract
This paper charts recent exhibitions of contemporary art from predominantly Islamic nations and their diasporas to unpack the ways in which Orientalism continues to survive and thrive in the global art world. Western European exhibitions and exhibition catalogues, in particular, are at the centre of these neo-Orientalist cultural expansions as they mask their fetishistic impulses under the banner of “inclusion” and “representation.” In their museological containers, visual art objects and their makers are transformed into fashionable commodities, whose political dissent is softened through the lens of the aesthetical and the art historical. This lens suggests that the most radical aspect of Middle Eastern and/or South Asian art is not their opposition to Western taxonomies of taste; rather it is their proximity to the past and their embodiment of the binary between primitive primitivism and rapid cultural/economic progress. In what ways are the politics of culturally-specific art practices compromised (read: de-politicized) when they are mediated by curators who are not members of the source community from which they draw from? Whose voice is made inaudible when curators are appointed as the translators of difference in predominantly White institutions? Further, in what ways can artists and members of their communities speak back to curated exhibitions that are more interested in their visual representation than their un-translatable complexities? Against this backdrop, this paper interrogates broader problematics of the rhetoric of inclusion and representational politics to point to the limitations of inclusion and theorize new ways of thinking through difference.
Digital Media
This presenter hasn’t added media.
Request media and follow this presentation.
