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Spotlight: A Representation Gap

Neery Melkonian

Although the prominence of the Middle East in political rhetoric (and
action) is affecting the amount of work by Middle Eastern artists
American audiences see, a problem remains. US-based Middle Eastern
artists often gain prominence and are shown more frequently
internationally. Are American curators not proposing sensitive and
thorough shows involving Middle Eastern artists? Are American
institutions threatened by the nature of their work, which is
frequently critical of American political policies? Or, more grimly,
are both true?

An online article in the January 26 issue of the Beirut Daily Star
entitled `Promoting an Alternative Image of the Arab World’ notes that
in 2004 artist Mona Hatoum, poet Mahmoud Darwish, and architect Suad
Amiry were all recipients of prestigious European awards, supposedly
based on merits and not the contemporary politics that have thrust the
Middle East very much into the spotlight of the western world. Similar
opinions were echoed in 2004 when Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British
architect, became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture
Prize.

Even if such awards are politically motivated, they don’t negate the
worthiness of their recipients, who are pioneers in their respective
fields and have been producing remarkable work for decades. A more
pressing issue to consider might be whether such recognition is
capable of altering the effects of vast representational imbalances
Middle Easterners have been experiencing in the US, culturally and
otherwise, for over a century.

Much like the delivery of news on the Middle East in the mainstream
media, curatorship has recently lacked when it comes to mediating
works by artists from this region. Without nuance, the translations of
work by Middle Eastern artists risks confining its legibility to the
ghettos of the contemporary art world instead of reaching larger
audiences. A brief overview of recent visual art trends (biennials,
mid-career surveys, and thematic exhibitions) demonstrates a growing
interest here in the works of Middle Eastern artists. But the
translatability of this delayed and somewhat sporadic reception within
a market-driven international art scene and its corresponding `global’
aesthetics also reveal certain patterns which beg some questions and
pondering. Namely, US-based Middle Eastern artists usually gain
recognition in Europe and elsewhere before the stamp of acceptance
comes from cultural institutions in the US.

For example, until the 1997 New Museum’s opening of Mona Hatoum’s
15-year survey exhibition (organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Chicago), the artist enjoyed much broader recognition in Canada and
Europe, despite’or maybe because of’the more overtly political content
of her earlier performance work. Similarly, New York-based Egyptian
artist Ghada Amer, known for her painstakingly stitched canvases that
appropriate pornographic imagery from popular culture, was shown at
the Istanbul, Johannesburg, and Venice Biennales (1995, 1997, and
1999, respectively) before significantly cracking the US art scene in
2000, when she was included in the Whitney Biennial; P.S.1’s Greater
New York; and had solo shows at Deitch Projects, New York; and the
Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee. The majority of New York-based
Walid Raad’s Atlas Group exhibitions between 2002-2004 were
international. Emily Jacir’s now-iconic Where We Come From series, in
which the artist (who possesses an American passport) performed favors
for’and the fantasies of’Palestinian citizens who aren’t privileged
with her freedom of movement, recently came under a scrutiny in the US
that it didn’t face when it was shown at the 2003 Istanbul
Biennial. Earlier this year, away from cosmopolitan centers, the
Jewish Federation of Kansas pressured Wichita’s Ulrich Museum of Art
to place brochures and a sign expressing their views in the gallery
where Where We Come From was scheduled to be shown. A nationwide
letter-writing campaign succeeded in convincing the university to
withdraw their decision.

It’s perhaps because of such controversies that the University of
Illinois’ Krannert Art Museum’s group exhibition Beyond East and West:
Seven Transnational Artists references the region without naming it,
but expands its geography by including a US-based Pakistani artist and
a British-born, part Iraqi artist. It might be worth mentioning that
five of its seven artists were part of a Middle East diaspora(s)
exhibit called Between Heaven & Hell (which I conceived in 1994) that
was unexpectedly canned (along with its curator) by the organizing
institution after it had received funding from the Rockefeller
Foundation and the NEA. The curatorial premise of Between Heaven &
Hell (which has been available online for nearly a decade) also
reverberated in the promotional materials of the more recent exhibit.

Granted, the term `Middle East’ has been problematic since its
colonial inception, but to render it invisible’even if just in the
`packaging’ of a touring exhibit’speaks to an erasure or denial of
sorts. To substitute the term `diasporas’ with yet another charged
term, `transnational,’ doesn’t help us unpack our (mis)understanding
of the Middle East, either. Just as projecting a different (imaginary)
cartography avoids the pitfalls of (actual) geopolitical remapping of
the region. Don’t such assumptions affirm that post-colonialism has
produced what some call `imperialism without colonies’?

Though mediating through languages outside their own, during the last
decade a number of Middle Eastern diaspora artists and cultural
producers have finally gained legitimacy within the competitive and
territorialized space of the international art world. Run by a circuit
of cosmopolitan dealers, collectors, curators, art publishers, and
intellectuals, these artists’ works are curated, brokered, managed,
and written about in ways which confront us with familiar questions:
who represents whom? How is a discourse framed? What happens to
national and cultural specificities (including ethnic minorities in
the region such as Azeris and Kurds) in homogenized `global’
exhibition practices? Are the production and dissemination of these
forms of knowledge available to broader audiences, including Middle
Eastern communities living in the West?

The internationalization of contemporary art by Middle Easterners
living in the West began nearly ten years ago, even though the
westward migration of Middle Easterners can be traced back to the end
of the Ottoman Empire and the following remapping of the region by
European colonial powers. The tragic survival story of the
Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky (and the lesser known sculptor
Raoul Hague, Gorky’s compatriot and contemporary) stands not only as a
testament to the era’s grand project of Modernism (the formation of
nation states, displacement of large populations, ethnic cleansing,
and genocides) but also to the relegation of art to exile and the
struggle for survival. No wonder such experiences found expression
best in the homogenized aesthetics of abstraction.

Currently, the inclusion of Middle Eastern artists within the art
world’s `mainstream’ doesn’t equate to the more committed integration
of broader representational concerns. Without conscience-formation,
exhibitions, biennials, and prizes risk becoming markers of passing
trends, void of meaningful currency and vulnerable to the changing
appetite of shoppers in the expanding global art malls.

Neery Melkonian is an art writer based in New York. She was formerly
Associate Director at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard
College, and the Director of Visual Arts at the CCA in Santa Fe. She
spent the last five years producing art-based projects in the war-torn
and disputed enclave of Nagorno Karabagh, Armenia (arbitrarily annexed
to oil rich Azerbeijan by Stalin). Melkonian was born and raised in
the Middle East to parents who were survivors of the Armenian genocide
and immigrated to the United States, where she pursued graduate
studies in art history at UCLA.

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