When the unsettling politics in and surrounding the Middle East becomes futile, art rises as a movement to acknowledge the shortcoming politics is too ill to resolve. This paper will explore how contemporary art been used to expose and reform social and political flaws.We will focus on three artists that, by uncovering social and political defects in their art, advocate for reform. This study will employ art analysis to study how elements in the art pieces hold a mirror to society for it to confront its shortcomings and ultimately, repair them. Contemporary art is used as a powerful way to reveal and respond to social issues. We will demonstrate this through three contemporary artists who address the waning of traditional Islamic art, the damage caused by war, and the stereotypical and harmful perceptions of women.The three artists come from distinct backgrounds but ultimately attempt to spark a social and political change. Dana Awartani demonstrates how the Islamic Art tradition is fading to, ultimately, advocate for the urgency of it revival. Traditional Islamic Art represents God–who represents divinity, infinity, and harmony– through art forms including geometric design and vegitals (“Arts of the Islamic Work”). This, however, has shifted and is being replaced by modern art. Similarly, Kifah Al Shebib depicts a metaphorical woman searching, and still is, for peace for thirty years, because wars never settled in that time period. Finally, Lalla Essaydi depicts how women are and have been confined by men by using her personal experiences from growing up in Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
Map of Paper
In the paper that follows, we will first introduce Dana Awrantani to show her attempt to revive Islamic Art and what it stood for. Next we will examine the creations of artist Kifah al Shebib to depict one of the most prominent modern day issues, the aftermath of warfare. Last, we will discuss artist Lalla Essaydi to show how art can be used to bring attention to the confinement of women.
Dana Awartani
Because Islamic Art is less used today, Dana Awartani’s “works are continual acts of revival, performances of contemporisation” (Arthr). She is a Jeddah-based Palestinian artist who exhibited an installation titled I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I’d forgotten you. I was dreaming in 2016. She uses hand-dyed sand to layer the floor with Arabesques, “an ornamentation based on intertwining leaf and flower motifs” (Dodds, 393). In a video playing alongside it, she sweeps the sand into a pile, a simple modern patterned floor appears and, finally, she leaves the room. What she disassembled was not just sand, but, too, what it represented: the divinity, infinity, and harmony of God. She swept it therapeutically to not only allow such event to seep in in her audience’s mind, but to show how “we are too involved in trying to be modernized and evolved by copying western cultures and not embracing our own” (Vogue Arabia). Advocating for its restoration in her work, Awartani cautions against the negligence of traditional Islamic Art and its replacement with what we deem “modern”–a term of the Western region that itself otherizes the East.
Kifah Al Shebib
Wounded by the wars and their aftermath in Iraq, Kifah Al Shebib is another artists that has encapsulates modern-day Baghdad in her first exhibition entitled A Tune in the Memory. Displayed in Jordan in 2016, it features twenty-nine oil paintings. One of her pieces, entitled Return of the Stork (عودة اللقلق), depicts a woman carrying a nest on her head, and holding a bowl of water to quench a stork flying toward her. This woman is Iraq, and the water is the Tigris River. Telling the story in an interview, she expresses the bird’s visits to Baghdad every Spring as it was time for warmth, intimacy, and peace. However, “before thirty years,” she says with a mournful voice, “the storks never returned, because of relentless wars” (Al Sharqiya). The woman is also looking beyond the bird to search if they are all returning. Al Shebib explains, “when this little animal feels safe,” depicted by the birds in the nest on her head, “it will return, and so will we.” Kifah Al Shebib engages her audience to reflect on the dire destruction that took Iraq in storm, prompting them to reach for concord.
Lalla Essaydi
An issue that has been heavily present in modern arab society is the treatment of women. Lalla Essaydi, a contemporary artist who grew up in Morocco and Saudi Arabia, creates art pieces addressing the confinement of women by using personal experiences to create truthful representations showcasing her intended statement as a feminist (PBS). Essaydi creates photographs by constraining women in a place to show viewers that in this space, women become and will always stay “confined visions of femininity” (Brooklyn Museum). The inspirations behind these pieces stem from her personal memory of a women trying to step outside of these confinements and as a result being punished by being forced to live in a large home, owned by Essaydi’s extended family, by herself for a month. During this time, she was not able to communicate with anybody, only being surrounded by servants who were to avoid interacting with her. In one of her projects, she takes the traditional Islamic form of calligraphy. She relates this art form back to the inequality of women, having it displayed on the woman’s body written in henna, stating that this art form was “inaccessible to women” as they were not supposed to know how to read or write it, and now having the woman wear it over her body in order to create a resistant social statement (WomenInTheartsMuseum). By using henna, which is considered to only be done and worn by women, Essaydi connects these two gendered forms of together. By doing this, she shows how modern artists use traditional aspects of Islamic art to create their own art that is representative of a social movement that they believe in.
Lalla Essaydi, Converging Territories #9 , 2003. Courtesy of the Artist and of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York and Zurich
Credits: “#5WomenArtists Spotlight: Lalla Essaydi” by National Museum of Women in the Arts
The declining use of traditional art forms, the increase in wars, and the continuation of inequality against women are but a few issues that contemporary artists depict in their works to call for change in the middle eastern Muslim society. The artists, similarity, are only three from many who use their art and platform to not only spread awareness about and challenge taboo aspects of culture, but also to speak against tyrannical governments by calling people to action.
Feature image credits: “Return of the Stork (عودة اللقلق)” by Kifah Alshebib is licensed under CC by SA.
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