Seventeen Ways of Looking
By Azra Dawood

Venue: Museum of Modern Art

This exhibition is part anthology, part investigation. The unifying theme is – by some stretch - Islam. Or rather, the question whether the art on display can be termed ‘Islamic’. The exhibition features selected works of 17 contemporary artists - 10 women, 7 men. Of these, the majority are Middle Eastern or South Asian diaspora artists. Although they are originally from similar ethnic and cultural backgrounds, they have different religious backgrounds and their work displays a wide and varied range of interests and influences.

Are the works 'Islamic' merely because of their countries of origin? (Six of the artists are from Iran and the rest come from Pakistan, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt and Turkey). To make this experiment interesting, the curators have included a sort of control group comprised of 3 artists that are not from the Islamic World. The West is their home and they come from Western and non-Muslim backgrounds. What makes them relevant to the discussion at hand, is the influence of Islamic ideas and artforms evident in their work. Is their art Islamic if they themselves are not of the Islamic faith or region? And if so, will this necessitate a broader definition of what is Islamic?

Perhaps the most well known artist of the show is the Iranian expatriate Shirin Neshat. In fact, I had friends refer to this exhibition as ‘that Shirin Neshat show at the MoMA’. To an average viewer, Ms. Neshat’s pieces will be the most recognizable of the group: three black and white photographs choreographed by the artist herself but shot by another.

Two of the photographs are layered with text in Ms. Neshat’s own handwriting. The first (Speechless-1996) shows the face of a woman with the barrel of a gun as a sort of ornament showing through her chador. The text provided by the Museum tells us that the words inscribed over the photograph are from a tribute to martyrdom by Tahereh Saffarzadeh (a contemporary female religious poet).

The companion photograph to this portrait, is an image of a woman’s hands held up to her parted lips (a sort of gesture of dismay perhaps). The words here are from a poem by Farrokhzad in which the poet mourns the lack of concern and respect for human life. These are contradictory portraits. And together they are a reflection of the opposing forces at work in the artist’s birth country.

Ms. Neshat may be the most famous artist in the show. But others not far behind in prominence include Shahzia Sikander (Pakistan), Jananne Al-Ani (Iraq), Raqib Shaw (India), Marjane Satrapi (Iran) and Walid Raad (Lebanon). Here, I will describe the work on display by some of these artists. I will also include a description of one of the items from the control group.

Shahzia Sikander received formal training in the ancient Persian art of miniature painting. But she has notably taken that artform to a new level. One that has generally earned her respect in the West and criticism at home. Her paintings are beautifully and intricately detailed – a characteristic of miniature painting. But what takes her interpretation of the artform to a whole new level, is the introduction of objects and themes that are not of it. Her works are considered personal, political and feminist. It is precisely this variety of themes that takes what had been a well-preserved (perhaps mummified) artform and makes it breathe again with new life.

Jananne Al-Ani’s photographs Untitled I and Untitled II feature 5 women – the artist, her three sisters, and their mother, sitting for a portrait. The women are seated so that each faces herself in the portrait on the opposite wall: the two photographs are a sort of mirror reflection of each other. The women’s faces range from being fully veiled to completely exposed and I found myself caught between their powerful gazes - an effect that I later learnt the artist likes to promote. There is a multitude of themes at work here, such as the artificial nature of portraiture (witness the unnatural, ‘unreal’ juxtaposition of veils and exposed legs), and the surprisingly disconcerting effect of the veil on a photographer or a viewer. Ms. Al-Ani’s work ‘explores the myth of the subjugated and sexualized ‘Oriental’ woman as object and successfully unnerves the viewer as they face the unyielding glare of [her] subjects.’

The Garden of Earthly Delights III, by Raqib Shaw, is a giant 10’x15’ triptych, richly and exuberantly detailed in the tradition of miniature painting (albeit at a much larger scale). In addition to miniature painting, there is a hint of Japanese prints as well. And indeed Mr. Shaw has acknowledged the influence of ‘Japanese decorative arts and prints, jewelry, the shawls of his native Kashmir, and museums and libraries.’ In addition, his work (left) is also reminiscent of abstract paintings. The companion brochure to the exhibition notes that the painting is ‘equally in dialogue with the allover fields of Jackson Pollock; with his scattered minutiae drawing attention to every inch of the painting.’

In addition to technique, there is also the matter of content and themes embodied in the painting. In the case of Garden of Earthly Delights, Mr. Shaw has created an ‘autobiographical and highly coded’ work. In talking about this work, he mentions the ‘moment of orgasm, the question of sexual preference and the absence of morality’ – none of which you would expect to find in Islamic Art.

Mike Kelley’s Untitled is one of the control objects in the exhibition. Mr. Kelley is an American artist. Surprisingly perhaps, his piece is the most visually similar to what is generally thought of as Islamic Art. It is a carpet, the design of which was influenced by an illustration of an actual Ottoman carpet in one of the Bulletins of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But unlike its inspiration, Mr. Kelley’s version has personal (and Western) references built into it. He ‘tampered with the original design by changing the background color from red to the green of his own Irish background, and by replacing the motifs in the central medallion with Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs.’

Another notable piece in the exhibition is a chapter from Marjane Satrapi’s comic book Perspepolis: Story of a Childhood, which draws from the artist’s personal experiences to tell of life in 1980’s Iran. The drawings ‘reveal the clash between a teenager’s fantasies of Western popular culture and the post-revolutionary Iranian reality in which such inclinations were suppressed.’ The text is in French. But that’s the beauty of pictures. You don’t need to be able to understand the language.

So in the final analysis what is the answer to the exhibition’s central question? It is obvious that this work does not fit into the traditional notions of Islamic Art. Traditional Islamic artforms of calligraphy, carpets and miniatures do indeed make a strong appearance here. But they have been liberally borrowed from, changed, and mixed with other art forms in order to illustrate a broad range of issues, not all of which are related to Islam. And even when they are (as in Ms. Neshat’s orchestrated photographs which are used to examine the changes in her country after the Islamic Revolution), does this make the work itself Islamic? Especially when it is not celebrating Islam, but rather questioning a modern day revolution generated in the name of Islam? Is it the medium and the art form that will dictate whether a work is Islamic? Or is it the subject and the treatment of that subject?

I am a little apprehensive of what can be gauged from a small sampling of work. Most of the artists featured in the exhibition, have produced an extensive body of work and each artist deserves individual and careful attention. Some of the works - such as Ms. Neshat’s photographs - have generated contradictory readings by scholars and students. Who knows what we might deduce from a collective viewing of everything she has produced, rather than just a sampling of it?

Perhaps the exhibition (even though it is only a small reflection of all the work that is out there), has served its purpose. It has generated more questions in my mind and I take it as a positive sign that the labels cannot be applied easily. The less readily we can identify, categorize, and file away art, ideas or thoughts, the better off we are in the world we live in today.

Published May 28, 2006