Through Eastern Eyes
I recently went to see an exhibition here in Barcelona called West by East which attempts to chart perceptions of the West from the perspective of the Islamic world, as opposed to the other way around which is usually the only view that is presented. The idea is a novel one and the exhibition does in fact provide some significant insights.
The exhibition is running at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona until the end of September when it moves to Valencia and is the brainchild of the Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb who was inspired to create the project in the wake of 911.
The exhibition is essentially about how Westerners (ie Europeans) have traditionally been perceived in the Islamic world. According to the exhibition notes, the layout of the show “allows visitors to observe how Islam has been divided in the way in which it sees the West and highlights the different viewpoints and attitudes that have existed side by side throughout history”. In particular it focuses on how concepts which we in the West see as being in opposition - ie, conflict, solidarity, interchange, fascination - actually have existed side by side throughout Islamic history rather than successively superseding each other as is the traditional Western view.
To this end, the exhibition presents seven different sequences and a total of 215 works ranging from the 12th-19th centuries juxtaposed to contemporary Islamic and newly commissioned works by nine visual artists (Marjane Satrapi, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Mohamed el Baz, Shadi Ghadirian, Jellel Gasteli, Bouchra Khalili, Hassan Musa, Khosrow Hassanzadeh and Touhami Ennadre).
The seven sections are:
1. al-Idrisi. A description of Europe
The point of departure for the exhibition is the famous map drawn by the Arab geographer al-Idrisi when in the service of the Christian king, the Norman Roger II of Sicily (1105-1154). The pioneering work of al-Idrisi is juxtaposed with a sequence of original work by the Iranian artist
Marjane Satrapi - best known for her great graphic novels - which was painted in situ.
2. Ibn al-Munqidh. Between the Jihad and the Crusades
The second section is a bit strange and I’m not sure if it works. It attempts to focus on the notions of chivalry which were born in the East and which gave rise to Western Chivalric notions (although the exhibition does not address this aspect directly). It uses the medium of the words of Ibn al-Munqidh (1095-1188) who was a Syrian who fought the Crusaders but who exemplified the eastern conception of the noble code of ethics inherent in the Islamic military code.
The words of Ibn al-Munqidh are set against the backdrop of a video by Algerian-born video artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah which is basically footage of the ruins of a fortress in Shaizar in the north of Syria to which he has a family connection. This didn’t work for me at all and I think that it is really a missed opportunity - so much can be said - and absolutely needs to be said - about the Crusades and concepts of jihad from the eastern point of view but unfortunately this section fell short for me.
3. Diversity in similarity
As is relatively well known, the Qur’an contains elements of the Bible and of Judaic scripture that do not derive from those traditions, as well as episodes taken from the Gospels, the Apocrypha and various suppressed Gnostic works. The religious iconography of Islam takes its inspiration from these episodes and hence there is a similarity with western religious tradition but one that has a unique slant and contains ‘hidden’ or lost elements.
It is generally supposed that Islam has a prohibition on the portrayal of living forms and is in essence iconoclastic. While there has been historically, as in Christianity, a strand of iconoclastic fanaticism, such a blanket assertion is very far from the truth and this segment shows some beautiful examples of Islamic art focussing mainly on depictions of Jesus and Biblical scenes as understood in an Islamic context.
Some of these are highly significant works. For example there is a page from the folio of the Jami al-Tawarik (a monumental history of the world and it’s religions which is inter-faith avant le lettre - commissioned by the Muslim ruler Mahmud Gazan it features illustrations such as the tree that the Buddha attained enlightenment under and significant episodes from the lives of Christ and Muhammad) of Rashid ad-Din.
Other manuscript illustrations include several pages from Nisaburi’s Qisas al-Anbiya (Lives of the Prophets, Iran 1577) including Noah’s Ark and The Virgin Mary with Infant Jesus (Gnostic ref: note the palm tree in this one!), shown as pics one and two below, as well as a page from al-Biruni’s Vestiges of the Past depicting the baptism of Jesus (pic 3 below). Incidentally al-Biruni is very interesting in terms of Islamic contributions to civilization which are ‘ignored’ by the West - he discovered for example, 600 years before Galileo, that the earth rotates on its axis daily and moves yearly around the sun.
To accompany this sequence, the Morocco-born visual artist Mohamed El Baz created an installation inspired by Abraham’s sacrifice and its present-day repercussions but to me - and I may be biased as my focus is on early Islamic Art - it really didn’t fit with the earlier Classical works and even, to my mind, detracted from them.
4. Painting the West
This section features more paintings from the 15th century and onwards but the real highlight of this showcase is the installation of Iranian photographer Shadi Ghadirian. I LOVE her work - particularly the evocative shots of modern Iranian women anomalously framed against 19th century sepia backdrops but featuring anomalous modern elements.
In her current installation at this exhibition she recalls the way she first encountered Western photos of women through the medium of imported fashion magazines which were heavily censored by blacking out all exposed flesh except for faces.
5. The desire for Westernisation
A major premise of this exhibition as a whole is that Islam’s fascination with Europe coincided with the impact of the Industrial Revolution. I’m not sure I agree with this but certainly Islam as a religion and a culture witnessed a major debate about how to adapt to new material conditions while remaining faithful to its own heritage. The Westernisation process began in this way, with a desire to discover or to assimilate European fashions and the philosophical, political and moral reasons that caused them to emerge.
This urge to Westernization is still alive and kicking - in fact whatever one thinks of it (and I don’t think much) there is no doubt that it could be harnessed by the west in pursuit of it’s aims. Many times I hear from someone who (for whatever reason) has some degree of anti-Islam animus that ‘they hate our freedoms’ or some such (I am paraphrasing) and this is particularly marked in relation to Iran whose populace in this view are universally signed up to a perceived ‘we hate America’ manifesto.
Nothing could be further from the truth for anyone familiar with the youth culture of Iran and to a lesser extent Syria and Jordan - they are manifestly pro-Western in the main and look to the West through a rose-tinted filter I find it almost impossible to comprehend or assimilate. But I digress....
5.1 - Photography and Kings
From the programme (as I had little interest in this section and sped through!): The fascination of some monarchs with photography as of the last few decades of the 19th century is well known. The issue of the image and the official portrait of four non-European heads of state allows us to appreciate a complex spectrum of reactions, ranging from the simple attraction of technological novelty, the mastery of which symbolised allegiance with modernity, to the debate with political and theological implications about images and their sacralisation.
5.2 - The modernisation of Islamic societies
Again: All of these transformations were documented by new photographic technology. In the process of Westernisation as a state policy, sometimes under sufferance, we can also highlight the emergence of artistic figures who adopted the technologies and formats of European visual arts, thereby recording, by means of photography or easel painting, the state of their society amid the transformations they lived through or the continuance of traditional rituals.
5.3 - The journey West
I didn’t understand this at all. This feature centred around a video installation by Moroccan video artist Bouchra Khalili who was attempting to comment on the taboo of foreign love such as might be found in the heart of an Islamic woman.
Basically it was a video of a woman who had placed an ad to interview various men for purposes of an illicit liaison. this just didn’t seem real to me. Illicit liaisons are as common in the East as anywhere else in my experience but they don’t really happen like that. Much more could have been done with this but I think they chickened out. The connection with the title is also somewhat unclear.
6. From love to tension
The Eastern (I’m starting to resent typing that word) obsession with all things Western was on one level expressed by Islamic collectors’ love for Western art. In the early 1930s, the president of the Egyptian senate, Mahmut Khalil, put together a collection of 19th-century European art, including masterpieces by Delacroix, Fromentin, Millet, Degas, Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Rodin, among others.
Then, in 1974, on the initiative of the Empress Farah Dibah, the Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in Teheran, with emblematic works from various 20th-century European and North American trends (from Max Ernst to Andy Warhol, via Pollock and Tapies). After Khomeini’s revolution, under the government of the Islamic Republic, the collection was put into storage and some of these have been loaned to the Barcelona exhibition.
There is a beautiful Monet here loaned from Cairo and a nice Delacroix. No Eastern link that I could discover apart from the fact they were owned by Eastern museums. A great surprise to turn the corner and see them though - kind of jolts you from an ‘Arabian Nights’ world back to the ‘reality’ of the West. Probably not intentional but it stops you in your tracks - a return to the familiar. They were probably just plonked there as an afterthought but it is an ironically Eastern touch.
7. The war of images
According to the exhibition blurb: “in the late 1920s, radical anti-Western feeling was theorised and incorporated into political discourse by the combative ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. In these between-the-wars years, supporters of the adaptation and imitation of the Western model gradually refined their protest. Ever since, the history of Islamic countries has been marked by the dividing line that separates pro-Western from anti-Western tendencies.” (Who writes this stuff?).
But there’s more: “This antagonism has become more marked in recent decades due to new communication technologies (satellite TV, Internet, etc.), marking the declaration of the war of images between East and West. The filming of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban and al-Qaeda (March 2001) or the images of the destruction of New York’s towers shows that the war of images clearly forms part of the strategy of anti-West terrorists. But it is important to remember that the war of images is waged not just between Islamic terrorists and the West, but also between two irreconcilable camps within Islam, divided by the way they see the West as a problem of thought and being.”
I’m not sure I would go along with this. The ‘War on Images’ is not part of the strategy of ‘anti-West terrorists’ (that statement in itself seems to me to be an exclusively Western mis-interpretation of an Eastern phenomena) but is the result of a literalist belief of a particular Islamic sect who a) interpret religious formulations exclusively in a literal sense and are consequently ‘at war’ with metaphorical or allegoric interpretations - and by extension are intolerant of those who diverge from their specific belief and b) being literalists, they are opposed to the use of reason and logic (which would result in questioning beliefs) and as such creat a fertile soil for reactionary and iconoclastic activity - this phenomena is not a strategy. It is merely iconoclasm which arises in all religions and cultures once literalism is embraced and questioning/reason is suppressed.
To claim it is a strategy by some ‘Dr Evil-esque’ masterminded organisation is to give them too much credit (and worse: it tows a party line pushed by current Western leaders which is essentially a fiction or lie - one that they know is such). The fact is that there is no plan. If the literalists see something which is a threat they will oppose it. If it falls within their power (ie Bamiyan Buddhas) they will destroy it. It really is that simple.
But the modern works in this section are striking. I particularly like the following exhibit - Monkey Supper by Hassan Musa
All in all I fell this exhibition was a bit of a missed opportunity. Perhaps it was being too ‘cautious’ and I can understand how it would not wish to come across as ‘radical’ as it’s target audience is essentially Westerners who have little or no knowledge of Islam other than conventional media output. In that light it probably has done a good job of educating people that Islam is not all terrorism and fanatics and that there is a great beauty underneath.
Having said that though, it does have aspirations to a philosophical discourse and ventures boldly into those arenas - having done this (in my opinion) the organizers should have the courage to really go for it and present a uniquely Islamic view as opposed to one condition or tailored to the West which I feel it verges on at times. I can’t help feeling that it would have been infinitely more powerful to just gather some of the greatest works of Islamic art in all media (paintings, ceramics, woodwork, carpets) and have one mind-blowing exhibition and state ‘This is Islam’ with no reference to any current political undertones. It would be mind-blowing: the beauty of Islam through art from the beginning to today. But then it wouldn’t be the same exhibition.
If you are in Barclelona you should definitely go and see it. I can guarantee you will see something that makes an impression and something that makes you think.
