“Orientalism” is not the issue—we have art all of our own. There is no denying that western tastes have lent towards “orientalism” and that there is a plethora of artists in the Middle East willing to satisfy these tastes, but there is more to the story than that. Scanning some of the modern and contemporary Middle Eastern artists, where are the “orientalist flourishes” in the work of, say, Mona Hatoum, Dia al-Azzawi, Adel Abdessemed, Walid Raad or Emily Jacir? Those “flourishes” are not in the up-and-coming works of Rokni Haerizadeh, Youssef Nabil, Ahmed Alsoudani or Ghada Amer either.

 

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