An Islamic Cosmos: Artistic Engagements with Islamic Heritage in Iran and the Arab East, 1958-2018
Rauh, Elizabeth
2020
Abstract
This dissertation offers a study of contemporary artistic experiments with popular religious images and folk traditions in the Islamic world. I explore how artists active in Iran and the Arab world dealt with global art flows, including Surrealism, Socialist Realism, and Abstraction, at a time when Islamic traditions were dissipating due to the advent of colonial modernity and European interventions in the Middle East. I demonstrate that contrary to prevailing wisdom, several prominent artists have steadily mined Islamic artistic heritage to generate avant-garde artworks since 1958. Beginning with the first chapter, I reassess the 1960s Iranian Saqqakhaneh or “Spiritual Pop Art” movement by examining artist activities in the 1950s with popular prints and Shi‘i Muslim votive traditions. I argue that these earlier artworks explicitly drew upon religious folk arts and attest to subversive activities against the monarchy and its political program of Western-style secular modernity. Expanding upon such modern mediations of Shi‘i Islamic popular traditions, Chapter 2 explores experimental artmaking in 1960s Iraq and demonstrate how several artists incorporated and transformed images of the Battle of Karbala and Shi‘i folk rituals into their creative practices, especially following the 1963 Ba‘ath Party military coup. The third chapter continues exploring modern depictions of Islamic heritage through the lens of Syrian artist Ali Jabri and his 1970s Neo-Realist preservationist practice, including his curation of the Museum of Popular Traditions in Jordan, where his exhibits of everyday devotional materials from the 19thand 20th-century are still on display today. In Chapter 4, experimental practices with Islamic mysticism are examined through destructive processes in the paintings of Shakir Hasan Al Said and Hana Malallah. Drawing on her teacher Al Said’s abstract methods of scorching and scratching the painting surface, Malallah produced large-scale abstract paintings out of burnt textile fragments, including burial shrouds during the first Gulf War (1990-1991), and introduced a new practice of artistic and bodily mediation via wartime destruction in Iraq. Looking to the future, Chapter 5 explores contemporary Middle Eastern art experiments with science fiction and futurism aesthetics to creatively imagine—and re-imagine—the past, present, and future of the Islamic world. Altogether, the dissertation project showcases the role of historic Islamic traditions as creative fuel in modern visual arts, and offers new methods and materials with which scholars can expand the scope and understanding of Islamic artistic heritage in modernity.Subjects
Contemporary Artist Engagements with Islamic Heritage Islamic Art History Middle Eastern Art History Arab and Iranian Modernism Contemporary Middle Eastern Art Islamic Heritage
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Thesis
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