THE SEA SUSPENDED: ARAB MODERNISM FROM THE BARJEEL COLLECTION
Askari unified and coordinated the coming together of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) with the Barjeel Art Foundation for the Arab modern art exhibition The Sea Suspended: Arab Modernism from the Barjeel Collection.
This historic exhibition marked the first time a show of Arab art from the modern period took place in Iran. The exhibition featured works by modern masters drawn exclusively from the Barjeel Art Foundation collection and represented a fifty-year period of works from the 1940s to the 1990s from around the Arab world, including Egypt, Iraq, North Africa, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Following recent significant exhibitions such as Imperfect Chronology at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2015, curated by Omar Kholeif, and The Short Century at the Sharjah Art Museum in 2016, curated by Karim Sultan and Suheyla Takesh of the Barjeel Art Foundation, this exhibition seeks to explore an important era of Arab art history that has emerged during a period of intense social change.
The Sea Suspended: Arab Modernism from the Barjeel Collection explored themes of the nation and the self; the village and the city; abstraction; language; and identity. Artists across the region began to use paint as a medium, paired with the rise of new nation-states in the middle of the 20th century, led to new forms and styles that reflected new aspirations and identities and works that dealt with the complexities of the emergence of modern life.
Important artists from the Arab world represented their individual regions, highlighting the diversity of practices and approaches with a particularly wide variety of work from Egypt, such as Seif Wanly’s Mother and Child and Self Portrait (Artist in Studio); Inji Efflatoun’s Deer, a work nearing abstraction to reflect her socially engaged explorations of the margins of Egyptian life; and Hamed Ewais’ The Guardian of Life, illustrating a complex approach to nationalism in art during a time of war and defeat.
Iraq’s important role as a crucible of modernist innovation is represented by signature works from the avant-garde pioneers Shakir Hassan Al Said and Dia Azzawi, in addition to a major work for the exhibition: Kadhim Hayder’s Fatigued, Ten Horses Converse with Nothing. This painting, created in Iraq in 1965, depicts the convergence of modernist painting, historical allegory, and contemporary life. The work draws on the country’s tradition of literature around a key moment in Islamic history—the martyrdom of Hussein—which had a strong resonance during a period of extreme social unrest following the collapse of a monarchy, military rule, and transition into dictatorship. The visual language developed removes references to any point in history or place but helped to instigate a new shift in a distinctly Iraqi visual language that had a powerful, popular resonance.
Other work in the exhibition included Algerian-French artist Abdallah Benanteur’s The Gardens of Saadi; Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui’s Le Miroirs Rouge; an early painting by Emirati artist Hassan Sharif, contrasting to his signature works that introduced contemporary approaches to the Arabian Peninsula; and a figurative work by Abdel Qader Al Rais, demonstrating an example of his style before a shift towards abstraction and calligraphy.