Modernidades Frustradas.Discursos Críticos en el Arte Árabe en Oriente Próximo (2000-2015)

Zusammenfassung

The present research aims to investigate the critical strategies within artistic production in the Arab Middle East, over the last two decades. It is proposed that such artistic production has established, during this period, a different body of artistic discourses, and this central idea forms the objective of the present study. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Arab art in the Middle East began to experiment with new models, both conceptual and formal. With this, a line was being drawn, a paradigmatic shift between a previous space (characterised by the local and the national) and a global universe. Such a change represented a break with the art considered locally as modern —essentially inherited from European education and the European colonial institution—; while it also sought the emancipation of artistic thought and its renewal.Modernity, in the universal sense, had profound consequences on the Arab world, to the point that the very criticism of it, developed in the European academic circles, also left clear traces on the artistic and intellectual discourses of the Middle East. Art in the Middle East cannot be conceived without understanding the social, political and cultural contexts of this relationship between the two worlds, which begins with the entry of Napoleon Bonaparte into Egypt in 1798 and the first cultural contacts and agreements between both parties. The critique of the Western universalist discourse, inherited from modernity, becomes the centre of a progressive Arab discourse...