West Asia

The publication, Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, offers an unprecedented resource for the study of modernism: a compendium of critical art writings by twentieth-century Arab intellectuals and artists. The selection of texts—many of which appear for the first time in English—includes manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, letters, and the guest-book comments including those featured here.

MoMA’s C-MAP research program developed an extended focus on historical alliances such as Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and other south-south, east-east, and Third World nexuses. This conversation addresses such pasts, and their reverberations in the present, as they appear in Mohaiemen’s media-based practice.

When the Brussels Expo presented the exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art in 1958, it unintentionally pioneered a more broadly global view of modern art, although not without some friction.

“In your practice, how do you approach the challenges that arise when presenting art from contexts that are not familiar to your audience?” With the dominance of the biennial model and the aggressive globalization of art institutions, such a question is as pertinent to a curator as it ever was.

Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-65, an exhibition on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich from October 2016 – March 2017, presents the period and its art as already global, multi-faceted, and modern.

On contemporary artist Walid Raad’s work in his recent solo exhibition at MoMA and on the changing politics of presenting art from the Middle East in the region and around the world. Final part of three. This question of temporality is directly related to the problematic of taxonomy engaged by Scratching . . ., and epitomized by ongoing debates…

On contemporary artist Walid Raad’s work in his recent solo exhibition at MoMA and on the changing politics of presenting art from the Middle East in the region and around the world. Second part of three. As Raad has often acknowledged, his work is indebted to the writings of the Lebanese artist and philosopher Jalal…

On contemporary artist Walid Raad’s work in his recent solo exhibition at MoMA and on the changing politics of presenting art from the Middle East in the region and around the world. First part of three. Over the past decade, major museums in Cairo, Copenhagen, Detroit, Doha, Kuwait, London, New York, and other cities have…

We live in a world filled with images that are captured, edited, and published at hyper speeds, images referring to images. Our political, ethical, and intimate lives are constructed around images, through images, and in images. In situations of war and mass violations of human rights, it is our hyper-mediatized world that creates the typical…

Rachel Weiss, curator, writer, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Jane Farver (who also came to talk on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwei Enwezor,…

Jane Farver, curator and former Director of Exhibitions at the Queens Museum, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Rachel Weiss (who also came to present on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwei Enwezor, Reiko Tomii &…

We cannot always quantify change; is Istanbul changing very fast? … too fast? To document and archive in a place that has a habit of describing itself as “in flux” is of immense importance; we rely on the stories we record and tell to create a collective memory. We thank the individuals and institutions that…