Under the Skin

Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Edited by Ceren Özpinar and Mary Kelly

Proceedings of the British Academy

For scholars and students of the history of art, gender studies and feminist theory, philosophy, Middle Eastern studies and sociology
Introduces new artworks and emerging artists from the Middle East and North Africa, engaging art collectors, curators and galleries, and supports the decolonisation of art history
Features local authors from the Middle East and North Africa and helps readers gain an authentic perspective
Provides an international vision on art from the area

Under the Skin

Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Edited by Ceren Özpinar and Mary Kelly

Proceedings of the British Academy

Description

Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today is set out to show what is beneath the surface, under the appearances of skin, body, colour and provenance, and not the cultural fixities or partial views detached from the realities of communities, cultures and practices from the area. Through 12 chapters, Under the Skin brings together artistic practices and complex histories informed by feminisms from diverse cultural and geographical contexts: Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey.

The aim is not to represent all of the countries from the Middle East and North Africa, but to present a cross-section that reflects the variety of nations, cultures, languages and identities across the area-including those of Berber, Mizrahi Jews, Kurdish, Muslim, Christian, Arab, Persian and Armenian peoples. It thus considers art informed by feminisms through translocal and transnational lenses of diverse ethnic, linguistic and religious groups not solely as a manifestation of multiple and complex social constructions, but also as a crucial subject of analysis in the project of decolonising art history and contemporary visual culture. The volume offers an understanding on how art responds to and shapes cultural attitudes towards gender and sexuality, ethnicity/race, religion, tradition, modernity and contemporaneity, and local and global politics. And it strives to strike a balance by connecting the studies of scholars based in the European-North American geography with those attached to the institutions in the Middle East and North Africa in order to stimulate different feminist and decolonial perspectives and debates on art and visual culture from the area.

Under the Skin

Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Edited by Ceren Özpinar and Mary Kelly

Proceedings of the British Academy

foreword, GRISELDA POLLOCK, NADIA RADWAN, MANDY MERZABAN
List of Figures
Note on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction CEREN ÖZPINAR and MARY KELLY
Agency and Resistance to National and Global Discourses
1. Have There Really Been No Great Women Artists? Writing a Feminist Art History of Modern Egypt, NADINE ATALLAH
2. Feminism and Social Critique in Syrian Contemporary Art, CHARLOTTE BANK
3. Hyphenated. Transnational Feminism in Contemporary Israeli Art: Between Mizrahi and Arab Identities, TAL DEKEL
4. The Moment of Change: Thematic Strands of Contemporary Saudi Women's Art, LINA M. KATTAN
Translating Ethnicity and Subjectivity into Art
5. The Articulating-self Inside Out: Katayoun Karami and Becoming a Woman, SOMAYEH NOORI SHIRAZI
6. Squares of Colour: Abstraction in The Work of Saloua Raouda Choucair and Etel Adnan, ISABELLE DE LE COURT
7. Transmission as Resistance in The Work of Zineb Sedira, HOLIDAY POWERS
8. Indigenous Algerian Women Artists in The French Landscape: Baya Mahieddine and Taos Amrouche, AKILA KIZZI
Methods and Strategies to See Politics and Practices Differently
9. Notes on Tending Feminist Methodologies, JESSICA GERSCHULTZ
10. On Perpetual Conflict, RACHEL NELSON
11. Claims to Fame: An Exhibition of Women Artists from Turkey, CEREN ÖZPINAR
12. Locating the First Sculptural Mark: An Artist Interview with Diana Al-Hadid, MARY KELLY
Index

Under the Skin

Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Edited by Ceren Özpinar and Mary Kelly

Proceedings of the British Academy

Author Information

Ceren Özpinar is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, History of Art and Design Programme. She was previously a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the University of Sussex (2015-17). Dr Özpinar's research focuses on contemporary art, art historiography, and feminist art and art histories since 1960 with a special interest in Turkey and the Middle East. Her first monograph, The Art Historiography in Turkey (1970-2010) was published in 2016, and the next, entitled Politics of Writing Art Histories: Narratives of Contemporary Art, Feminism and Women Artists from Turkey, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2021.

Mary Kelly (née Healy) is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art History, Theory and Gallery Studies & Director of the MA in Global Gallery Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Trinity College Dublin. She is an Irish Research Council Awardee and a Fulbright Scholar. Dr Kelly's research and teaching employ a comparative discourse analysis which bridges European Orientalism and postcolonial theories; women's art and feminisms; contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa, and the role of fine art galleries in societies. Her publications include invited chapters with the British Museum (2019); journal articles published in Cultural & Social History (2018) and Women Studies (2015); and her forthcoming monograph is entitled French Women Orientalist Artists, 1861-1956: Cross-cultural Contacts and Depictions of Difference (Ashgate, Taylor & Francis).

Contributors:

Nadine Atallah, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne
Charlotte Bank, independent art historian and curator
Tal Dekel, Kibbutzim College, Tel Aviv, and Tel Aviv University
Isabelle de le Court, independent scholar and art advisor
Jessica Gerschultz, University of Kansas
Lina M Kattan, King Abdul-Aziz University
Mary Kelly, University College Cork
Akila Kizzi, Paris 8 University
Rachel Nelson, University of California, Santa Cruz
Ceren Özpınar, University of Brighton
Holiday Powers, VCUarts Qatar
Somayeh Noori Shirazi, University of Alberta

Under the Skin

Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Edited by Ceren Özpinar and Mary Kelly

Proceedings of the British Academy

Reviews and Awards

"A brilliant work with seamless scholarship" -- Claudia Yaghoobi, Woman's Art Journal

"I want to welcome and celebrate this remarkable and significant collection of art historical work and art-writing as a profound contribution to the conditions of making and reading art in the postcolonial and the planetary that embody the shifting perspectives of generation and geography." -- Prof. Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds

"This much-awaited volume ... provides tools and methods for further investigation, in which the appreciation of regional specificities in terms of knowledge and scholarly debates, as well as historical facts — although against the grain of contemporary tendencies — prove to be crucial for the transcultural and inclusive repositioning of the discipline of art history." -- Dr Nadia Radwan, Universität Bern

"One of the key invocations of this publication is to prompt scholars, art historians, critics, curators & writers to consider intersectional feminist approaches in the research of global art histories as integral rather than niche." -- Mandy Merzaban, Massachusetts Institute of Technology