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Middle East Art: Memory, Tradition, and Revival
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Middle East Art: Memory, Tradition, and Revival

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 July 2023) | Viewed by 11039

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Ori Z. Soltes

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Theology and Fine Arts, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA
Interests: art history; Middle East; philosophy; theology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Middle East has a history of several thousand years of offering a complex and unusually tangled web of confusing and often conflicting definitions, aspirations, and interferences that in turn intersect matters of religion, politics, ethnicity, nationality, and economics.  Given that visual art has always resonated from the imperatives of religion, politics, and economics—and their intersections with each other—it is not surprising that Middle Eastern art reflects diverse spiritual, religious, political, ethnic, national—and simply aesthetic—foci.

This issue will explore this complicated reality within the contexts of contemporary art but introduced against the background of the history and art history of the region. The introduction will offer that broad context, and a series of contributors will offer essays that focus on a handful of Middle Eastern countries, each of which presents a particularly rich and interesting perspective—with abstract and figurative elements, both familiar and unexpected, as part of the overall narrative of past–present–future, both drawing from and drawing away from memory and tradition and pushing toward while transcending revival.

Dr. Ori Z. Soltes
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Arab
  • Persian
  • Turkish
  • abstract
  • representational
  • political
  • spiritual
  • memory
  • traditional
  • contemporary

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

25 pages, 5005 KiB  
Article
In Place of a Missing Place
by Noam Segal
Arts 2024, 13(3), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030091 - 20 May 2024
Viewed by 928
Abstract
This essay reflects on works chosen from the Sonnenfeld Collection at the Katzen Gallery at American University in Washington, DC—it originally accompanied an exhibition at that gallery in early 2021—to comment on the observations of several generations of Israeli artists on the land [...] Read more.
This essay reflects on works chosen from the Sonnenfeld Collection at the Katzen Gallery at American University in Washington, DC—it originally accompanied an exhibition at that gallery in early 2021—to comment on the observations of several generations of Israeli artists on the land and its meaning for the culture and politics of Israel’s coming into existence and evolution during the first 70 years of its existence. Beginning with a pair of photographs of pioneers in the land in the fifteen years before statehood—and conceptually re-purposed by a contemporary Israeli artist in 2008—and moving through decade after decade of engagement with the landscape of Israel in both figurative and abstract modes, with and without humans present within these contexts, veering from brightly colored to virtually colorless images, including paintings and photographs, the essay traces a distance between earlier assertions of presence and the gradual emergence of questions regarding presence, absence, and identity. Israel, in its internal development, is both visually and thus verbally interwoven with the issue of its external relationship with its immediate neighbors and to the shifts between what comprises “internal” and “external”—”this” and “other”—as the context has metamorphosized from the 1930s to the 1950s to 1967 to 1993 to 2000 and to the present. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middle East Art: Memory, Tradition, and Revival)
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18 pages, 5716 KiB  
Article
History Haunting the Present: Re-Interpreting the Truth in Contemporary Art of Iran
by Hamid Keshmirshekan
Arts 2023, 12(2), 45; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020045 - 27 Feb 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3600
Abstract
This article examines the notions of history and memory with references to the works of contemporary artists from Iran. It interrogates the theme of challenging the present through the re-interpretation of history and investigates how artists respond to social, cultural and political conditions [...] Read more.
This article examines the notions of history and memory with references to the works of contemporary artists from Iran. It interrogates the theme of challenging the present through the re-interpretation of history and investigates how artists respond to social, cultural and political conditions by creating a multi-faceted aesthetics of resistance. While looking at the broader subject of history and memory in contemporary Iran, the article scrutinises the works of artists who have been involved in themes such as the embodiment of cultural memory, concern for truth, historical record and intellectual reference to history to reflect the present. I adopt a hauntological interpretation when reading works of artists as it corresponds to their recurring references to the past to invoke an unsettling view of an imagined future. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middle East Art: Memory, Tradition, and Revival)
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32 pages, 11956 KiB  
Article
Menhat Helmy and the Emergence of Egyptian Women Art Teachers and Artists in the 1950s
by Patrick Matthew Kane
Arts 2022, 11(5), 95; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050095 - 23 Sep 2022
Viewed by 5080
Abstract
The rise of Egyptian women artists and art teachers at the end of the 1940s appeared in tandem with an active women’s movement that asserted the agency of women in modern Egyptian public life. In this article, we discuss the art career of [...] Read more.
The rise of Egyptian women artists and art teachers at the end of the 1940s appeared in tandem with an active women’s movement that asserted the agency of women in modern Egyptian public life. In this article, we discuss the art career of Menhat Helmy (1925–2004), a 1949 arts graduate of the ma`had al-ali li-ma`lumat al-funun al-jamila (Higher Institute for Women Teachers of the Fine Arts), located in the working-class district of Bulaq in Cairo, and who was among the first Egyptian graduates of the Slade School of Art in London. In a series of etchings executed from around 1956 and through the 1960s, Helmy produced a visual commentary on the dignity of Bulaq’s residents, with emphasis on the active presence of women in its neighborhood and public spaces. Helmy may be viewed in context with the feminism of her fellow women artists, including Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021) and Inji Efflatoun (1924–1986), and in relation to Efflatoun’s two books on feminist causes. As new professional artists and teachers, they advocated the promotion of education and vocational choice for women. Helmy’s choice of this neighborhood as a subject for art allows a comparison to theories about Bulaq’s development and its locus for the arts for which a multidisciplinary approach is required. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middle East Art: Memory, Tradition, and Revival)
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