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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)

Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art

• Andrew Gayed, OCAD University

Dr. Andrew Gayed will present his newly published book, Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, available from the University of Washington Press in Winter 2024. Premodern archives from the Middle East show rich and diverse homoerotic worlds that were disrupted by the colonial imposition of Western models of sexuality. Dr. Gayed traces how contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern diasporic artists have remembered and reinvented these historical ways of being in their work in order to imagine a different present. Queer World Making illuminates contemporary understandings of queer sexuality in the Middle Eastern diaspora, focusing on the visual works of artists who create political art about queer identity, including Jamil Hellu, Ebrin Bagheri, 2Fik, Laurence Rasti, Nilbar Güres, Alireza Shojaian, and others.

Gayed is seeking to articulate a Western and non-Western modernity that works beyond the dichotomy of sexual oppression, stereotypically associated with the Middle East, versus sexual acceptance, commonly attributed to North American norms. Instead, Gayed traces how diasporic subjects create coming-out narratives and identities that provide alternatives to inscribed Western models. Queer World Making decolonizes, and thus queers, Western neo-orientalist and racist projections of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia region as a zone of sexual oppression. This book serves the urgent need to respond to the violent orientalizing global formations that currently frame the queer Middle Eastern subjects in the Global North.

keywords: diaspora, decolonial, queer, orientalist

Magic Carpets

• Sukaina Kubba, University of Toronto

I explore travelling objects, textiles and vehicles—such as rugs, trains and ocean liners—as containers of cross-cultural histories and relational narratives. I have been investigating how rugs—primarily from the Iran/Iraq region—are made, purchased, rolled, wrapped, transported, settled-or-acquired in homes and collections across deserts and oceans. Rugs are primordial units of architecture rolled and unfurled by nomads and migrants, laid over sand, rocks, floors and walls to form a new home, to de-mark a re-location. Recently, I have been mapping rugs through laborious techniques such as drawing, printmaking and embroidery, aiming to mimic the unnamed labour of the women that conceive of and fabricate them. The industrial materials I employ—such as rubber, latex and reused packaging plastics—act as indices and concrete references. I reference packaging materials that envelope, wrap and protect travelling textiles. At the same time, the industrial materials act as records of the extraction, trade and manufacture that also cross oceans and deserts.

In Magic Carpets, I will present current research into carpets that adorned cross-Atlantic ocean-liners with a focus on the Stoddard-Templeton Archive in Glasgow. The Company manufactured rugs for the Queen Mary (Cunard) ocean-liners among others; and the archive contains volumes, illustrations and samples (including Persian carpets) that were used by the ship rug designers. The research will focus on ideas of borrowing and reproduction; the role of colonialism and cross-Atlantic trade; aspirational design; and will continue to explore rugs/carpets as vehicles of stories and people. I will present previous artworks and work in progress (relating to the current research) for an upcoming exhibition at DCA in Scotland in 2024.

keywords: Magic Carpets, Cross-Atlantic, ocean-liners, colonialism and design

Between here and there: on the adaptation of MENA diaspora artists in Canada

• Fatma Hendawy, Independent curator

The year 2011 marks a pivotal moment for contemporary art in the MENA region, witnessing an upheaval of political and social change that is still influx until this day. Although there was a moment of hope in the region, some countries are still struggling with the consequences and the constant oppression of their regimes. For example, since 2012 many of the local and international NGOs in Egypt were forced to shut down, any foreign funding towards the art and culture in specific is heavily questioned and problematized. This kind of funding limitation had reshaped the dynamics of the art scene in Egypt and many of the surrounding Arab countries. In addition, many artists from this region have been the subject of extreme censorship as well as their critical ideas.

Immigration and seeking refuge have become a survival and protective tools for many art professionals. This proposal focuses on the challenges facing contemporary artists from the MENA after 2011 and artists who have experienced displacement and/or immigration because of funding limitations and censorship. Artists in the diaspora have adapted to the notion of duality, through living between their home country and their country of refuge, using two different languages to express themselves, and navigate different systems.

It is crucial to question the processes of “integration”, “empathy” and “colonial guilt” imposed on immigrant artists by their countries of refuge/new home. How these processes impact the ethos of their creative process? How the exposure within a new context is always on the threshold of “tokenization”?

keywords: contemporary art, MENA region, diaspora, adaptation, immigration, identity, colonial guilt