AUB - 2016 - The concept of An-Nahda is revived in Fine Art Exhibition on the Arab Nude
▻http://www.aub.edu.lb/news/2016/Pages/arab-nude-nahda.aspx
Curatorial statement:
The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener examines the way in which artists and intellectuals of the Mandate era engaging in a double struggle against imperialism, Ottoman and European, resorted to an ideal form or pictorial device to concretize their visions of Arab modernity. For them, to be “Arab” was as much a matter of ambiguity and ambition as was the quest to be an artist. In fact, both labels required leaps of imagination over local conditions and imperial plans. What claims for identity, community, and political society were invested in the divesting of Arab bodies of their clothes? Our exhibition documents the debates that met the genre of the Nude in exhibition halls and newspapers. It situates artistic practices in relation to ongoing, urgent discussions about the meaning of citizenship, urbanity, and internationalism carried out amid movements for women’s rights, pan-Arabism, and various nationalisms, as well as educational reform, militarization, the scouting movement and nudist colonies. Without espousing the role of awakener for artists, our subtitle foregrounds the social,political or cultural motivations for these artists to embrace and adopt the genre of the Nude in their artistic careers.
Dispelling the myth that there were no Nudes in the 19th or early 20th centuries in Mandate-era Arab capitals, the exhibition displays a large and varied selections of Nudes, made in different styles, media and techniques, as well as a wide array of documents, works of photography and cinema, and clippings from periodicals of the day. Arab painters and sculptors of that era – from Mahmoud Mukhtar and Muhammad Nagi in Khedivate Egypt to Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi in French Mandate Lebanon – set out to effect an aesthetically grounded liberation from both Ottoman and European colonization. They regarded the Fine Arts as an efficient technology of modernization and an effective tool for the education of the masses in the spirit of modernity. They embraced the Nude genre as a culturing tool (using the Arabic term tathqīf, for disciplining or cultivating).
The exhibition situates artistic practices in relation to ongoing, urgent discussions about the meaning of citizenship, urbanity, and internationalism carried out amid movements for women’s rights, pan-Arabism, and various nationalisms, as well as educational reform, militarization, scouting movement and nudist colonies. This was a period of great social, technological and political transformation that caught many Arab intellectuals in its historical whirlwind. It was also a time when new technologies, techniques, and modes of representation worked their way into local cultures. The curators, Kirsten Scheid and Octavian Esanu, and AUB Art Collections and Galleries Director Rico Franses are using the subtitle “The Artist as Awakener” to highlight social, political or cultural motivations for these artists to embrace and adopt the genre of the Nude in their artistic careers.
Pas d’illustrations malheureusement...