ARTH 42.01 Unmaking History: Contemporary Art in the Middle East
This course focuses primarily on the work of contemporary artists who make work in or about the so-called Middle East. It includes recent works by artists from nations as diverse as Algeria, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Turkey and the UAE. One of the main objectives of the course is to look at art practices that attempt to deepen our understanding of the varied cultures, ethnicities and societies that are found in this part of the world. The geographic focus of the course–mostly the Muslim nations of the Arabian peninsula and North Africa–is not meant to perpetuate the assumptions about this region as a monolithic geopolitical entity, nor to blindly label its production according to existing ethnic, religious or national categories. Against media stereotypes of the region, the artists studied in this course have made work that function as a critical platform for rethinking traditional identity formations and extending the space of cultural encounter across borders (territorial, political, linguistic). In many cases these artists may not be living and working in their country of birth but their ethnicity, religion or citizenship continues to inform both their own sense of identity and the terms of their art practice. Some of the topics to be discussed include: artistic responses to the Arab-Israeli conflict, representations of everyday life in times of war, the movement and obstruction of people, goods and information across borders, the rise of new art markets in the Middle East, the politics of gender and sexuality in the Arab world, and the of use archival documents to rethink the meaning of evidence, truth and testimony.
Instructor
Elias