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• Tammer El-Sheikh, York University

In the past several iterations of UAAC panels have been convened on teaching and research in the area of Islamic Art and Architecture. This reflects a wider engagement in our discipline with that area. Less common in our field, and sorely needed in teaching and research on Canadian art are studies of the Modern and Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and Iran and their diasporas. As a result of successive waves of immigration from these regions and countries, after the Arab-Israeli wars of ’48 and ‘67, the Iranian Revolution of ’79, and closer to our time the Gulf Wars, the Syrian refugee crisis and what's often called the "Arab Spring," Canada has become home to a growing number of artists of Middle Eastern, North African, Turkish and Iranian descent, many of whom are engaged in their work with questions of identity and citizenship in colonial, post-colonial and settler colonial situations. This panel will include presentations on visions of citizenship and belonging advanced by such artists.

keywords: diaspora, Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, Iran, modern and contemporary art, citizenship, post-colonial, settler-colonial

session type: panel (double)

The State of Engagement Across Iranian Diaspora Artists: Exploring the Intersection of Art, Identity, and Activism in Montreal, Quebec, and Canada

• Yasin Zare, Université du Quebec à Montréal

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has witnessed various social and political movements, resulting in the migration of numerous Iranians to Canada. As the Iranian diaspora in Canada has evolved over time, comprising different generations and diverse immigration backgrounds, it is significant to examine the involvement of Iranian diaspora artists in social movements. In this context, this research aims to investigate the engagement of Iranian diaspora artists in social movements. Through a mix of methods, combining a semi-structured questionnaire and interviews with both emerging and established artists, my research addresses three main areas: first, the artists' involvement with social movements related to Iran and its regions; second, their engagement with social movements within the host society, including Montreal, Quebec, and Canada; and finally, their participation in global movements. Taking into account the significance of geographical location for understanding temporal contemporaneity in art, this study will also investigate the notion of contemporaneity and its references by analyzing a selection of the artists exhibitions. This study provides valuable insights regarding the evolving role of Iranian diaspora artists in social movements and contributes to a deeper understanding of the intersection of art, identity, and activism within and beyond the Iranian diaspora community in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

keywords: Iranian diaspora in Canada, involvement in social movements, art and identity, contemporaneity in art

Transformations: Contemporary Syrian Art in the Diaspora

• Manar Abo Touk, Concordia University

This paper examines how displacement has impacted Syrian artistic production post 2011 in the diaspora through themes that explore memories, heritage and reclaiming language as a decolonial practice. I draw on Edward Said’s Reflection on Exile and Linda Tuhiwai Smith Decolonizing Methodologies to analyze works of Canadian based artists Buthayna Ali (b.1974, Damascus, Syria), a multimedia artist and Khadija Baker (b. 1973, Amuda, Syria) a multidisciplinary artist of Kurdish-Syrian descent. Specifically looking at the installations Y...Why, 2010 and Behind Walls, 2017 to investigate suppressed histories, the meaning of homeland and belonging, and the experience of migration through storytelling as they relate to their placement in Canada.

I argue that each artist reclaims elements of their heritage while navigating various influences from diasporic environments that contribute to identity formation within the ‘in between’ space as they respond to themes of dislocation and belonging. The inclusion of contemporary Syrian Art contributes to the understanding of the experiences of displacement and loss within the disciplines of diaspora studies and art history.

keywords: diaspora, global art history, Syrian art, transnational studies, contemporary Arab art

Sapphic Fictions: Remediating Persian Illustrated Manuscripts in the Queer Post-colonial

• Noor Bhangu, Toronto Metropolitan University

In the 21^st century, queer artists working in the diaspora are increasingly turning to historical and dominant visual archives to excavate alternative histories of sexuality, rewritten or altogether erased through processes of Western imperialism. These artists are approaching such archives with the hopes of remaking the associations between visuality and meaning. This paper will elaborate on the archival research and counter-archival queering of one such artist, Katayoun Jalilipour, to understand the queer impulse to remediate in the context of contemporary art. Through a look at the series, Gut Feelings, this paper will consider the artist’s research in colonial archives holding Persian Illustrated Manuscripts and ways of queering depictions of heterosexual love, supplemented by Islamic histories of sexuality and postcolonial queer theory.

keywords: Islamic art history, queer art history, curating

Been T[here]: Cultural Translation within Diaspora

• Soheila Esfahani, Western University

Esfahani’s art practice explores the terrains of cultural translation and questions displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture by re-contextualizing culturally specific ornamentation and various collected souvenir type objects. She navigates the notion of cultural translation by exploring ornamentation as a form of “portable culture” that can be carried across cultures and nations. Her practice aims to destabilize the origin of culture and reconstruct Homi Bhabha’s “the third space of in- betweeness”: a site of cultural translation, where locations of cultures are negotiated, and new narratives are adapted and hybridized. Her work simultaneously emphasizes and disrupts familiar collected objects in order to dissolve traditional boundaries between cultures.

Esfahani’s recent body of work, Been T[here], investigates stereotype as otherness and explores process of ambivalence central to stereotype within post-colonial discourse. This body of work responds to Homi Bhabha’s notion of stereotype as “a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated ... For it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalisation; produces the effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically constructed.” (Bhabha, 18) Through creating souvenir type objects, Esfahani uses the language of stereotype in order to destabilize the subjectification and cultural identification that occurs through stereotypical discourse.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Other Question. Screen (London), vol. 24, no. 6, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 18–36.