Reflections from the Middle East and North Africa
Daniel Nelson
You need to look carefully at Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa. All is not what it seems.
One of the first exhibits you see when you walk into the British Museum exhibition are Parastou Forouhar’s digital prints. An Iranian flag and geometric liners redolent of Islamic imagery.
But take your time, peer a little closer. What’s that? Body parts. Torture. A penis. Many penises. The pleasing patterns have been subverted, the personal has become political.
Similarly, the eye delights in Lebanese artist Rayed Yassin’s hand-painted, glazed porcelain Chinese vase – before you notice that the images are of the 1975-90 civil war.
The violence that provokes such art is not surprising. The region has experienced repression, coups, conflict, civil wars, sexual aggression and outside interference. As the name of the exhibition suggests, the works“speak of taboos, history and current politics and reflect on societies that have experienced extraordinary changes in living memory.”
So there are contorted figures, heads without torsos, women in hijabs hanging from a tree, pictures of women inscribed with their statements of why they want to learn to read, newspaper reports of damaging Western sanctions cut up and mashed into mosaics, portraits of politicians with the eyes burnt out, Sulafa Hijazi’s dressed-up couple wearing gas masks. As Hamid Sulaiman says of his suffering figures: “I could never believe that human beings could inflict such horrors on other human beings.”
Not every piece is harrowing or protesting. There’s delight, even reverence, for Islamic traditions, the use of Arabic script and wooden screens and Quranic illuminations. Several artists revel in their non-traditional freedom to incorporate the human body into their work. Hafidh al-Droubi’s parents warned him against drawing human figure: undeterred, he went on to teach life drawing in Baghdad.
Nevertheless, protest permeates the exhibition, partly because of political context, partly because many of the artists studied in art schools established in the first half of the 20th century or went to Europe to study. That’s presumably also why many of the works evoke Picasso, Goya, Munch and other Western artists.
In truth, although there are some strong, and unexpected, images it was not the art that engaged me as much as the small p politics and small c cultural aspects of the region. I am sure some will argue that the artists are not “typical” or do not represent anything or anyone other than the people who put the show together. But it does provide a rarely seen perspective, as well as insights and information – who in this country knows about the 1989 Tunisian-French naval battle of Bizerte?
It’s well worth a visit.
And don’t forget to make time to visit the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic world (rooms 42-43) where more works are displayed. They include Issam Kourbaj’s simply magical and magically simple Dark Water, Burning World, a flotilla of little boats fashioned from bicycle mudguards, each carrying a crowded group of burnt matchstick refugees; and Joreije and Hadjit Homas’ memorial to victims of Lebanon’s civil war.
* Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa, free, British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1, until 15 August. Info: britishmuseum.org
+ 11 June, Reflections special event with British Tunisian Society, 5-6.30pm
+ 29 June, Reflections: contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa, 5.30-6.30pm
+++ Photo: Hayv Kahraman (b. 1981), Honor Killing. Sumi ink and acrylic on paper, 2006. Fundedby CaMMEA