One rather unexpected consequence of 9/11 and its political aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq has been a steadily developing appreciation in the west of the art and culture of the Middle East. Thanks to TV maps and animated battle zones, and a regular supply of incident, outrage and news, the basic geography and politics of the region have become better understood. (Who now would admit to confusing Iraq with Iran, as many in Britain might lazily have done a decade ago?). Meanwhile, bridge-building cultural initiatives by the British Council and other agencies have opened up new channels of communication to compensate for heightening political tensions.
In the professional art world, this has helped nurture a gradual awakening to the range and quality of work coming from regions far from the safe and traditional Europe-US axis around which the history and progress of international art have always been explained. When the Tate recently announced plans for a conference on contemporary art in the Middle East, it sold all the tickets immediately, having to move to larger spaces at Tate Britain and Tate Modern to meet demand. This revealed both a thirst in London for a broader understanding of the Middle Eastern art scene and an evident wish on the part of artists, curators and commentators from the Middle East to bring their work and issues for debate in a European context.
Contemporary Art in the Middle East is a well-timed response to those aspirations, providing a confident but carefully qualified survey of new and recent art from a dozen predominantly Muslim countries stretching from Afghanistan to Morocco.
Actually Morocco is mysteriously excluded from the otherwise helpful map of the region included in the opening pages, though discussion and anxiety about what is and is not the "Middle East" is a habitual part of the curatorial and artistic discourse here. (It certainly featured in debates at the Tate gathering, and was a recurring theme in the varied presentations of Middle Eastern art at this year's Venice Biennale.) Of course not everyone will like the very idea of a category of art defined by a geographical region, and a diffuse and diverse one at that. Artists of established stature such as Mona Hatoum or Shirin Neshat have long-resisted such a straitjacket, preferring instead to operate from a determinedly international stage despite the Middle Eastern inflection of much of their subject matter.
Is the whole idea of "Middle Eastern art" proposed in this book just the serving up of a new slice of exotic oriental culture for consumption in the west rather than the analysis of good art on its own terms? Happily, Paul Sloman and his colleagues are alert to just such a danger, and indeed confront it directly by giving Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and the controversy it continues to engender several pages of summary and attention in one of the appendices. While this might seem to imply that Said's core proposition that western interest in the culture of the orient was a form of imperialism inevitably affects and directs our engagement with all the art on view in the book, it does usefully equip the reader with a concise understanding of the intellectual context within which "cultural relations" of this kind are pursued.
Chapters by Nat Muller, Lindsey Moore, TJ Demos and Suzanne Cotter explore some of the central issues guiding the production and reception of so much of the art in question: war, displacement, exile, gender, mapping, authority. Muller's summary of the art worlds of Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine is considered and probing, and Moore's focus on the Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira is both movingly appreciative and academically rigorous all too rare a combination in contemporary art criticism. TJ Demos's "Desire in Diaspora" discusses Emily Jacir's celebrated art project of 2003, Where We Come From, in which she asked a number of Palestinian exiles: "If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?" and then recorded through photography, film and other media her responses to their various requests for example, the placing of flowers on a mother's grave in Jerusalem. Cotter, curator of Out of Beirut, the important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 2006, takes the work of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari as a route to understanding something of the preoccupations of artists working in Lebanon, for so long the locus of a sophisticated but perpetually interrupted art world.
Each essay deftly drills a small area rather than attempting to survey, and the net result inevitably falls far short of revealing Middle Eastern art's full variety and texture. But the subsequent central section, in which examples of the work of 45 artists are illustrated and in some instances briefly discussed, hints thrillingly at the range, quality and latent power of so much of the work that has recently been produced from a great many different geographical and political situations. The photography and sculpture of Shadi Ghadirian, made in Iran; the embroidery and gel paintings of Ghada Amer, born in Egypt and now working in the US; Libyan-born, Canada-based Arwa Abouon's witty Allah Eye Doctor Chart (a provocation about seeing and believing); Palestinian Londoner Laila Shawa's chilling 20 Targets. Some omissions may surprise where is Mitra Tabrizian, subject of a Tate Britain exhibition just last year? but this is generally an intelligent and balanced selection, even incorporating the work of Yehudit Sasportas when, given the prevailing tone, it might have been tempting simply to pretend that Israel did not exist.
Art is forever a political instrument, and for this very reason, Sloman's pioneering book it really is the first of its kind has potential influence far beyond the curators and collectors to whom it seems primarily directed, not least because of its determination to set out the territory so clearly and unemotively, in a way that is easily digestible by the non-specialist reader.
Kamal Boullata's Palestinian Art from 1850 to the Present (with a preface by John Berger) is no less powerful a publication for taking quite the opposite approach. Billed as "the first insider's study of Palestinian art", its historically detailed and sometimes harrowing narrative of artists' attempts to thrive within consistently oppressive constraints tends to rival the impact of the art itself, including the geometric abstracts (generously illustrated) which Boullata himself has been producing since the 1980s.
It is rare and exciting to find an art book full of persuasive, urgent visual imagery whose language and strategies are ultimately unfamiliar, whatever their surface appearance, to the complacent western eye. And it is refreshing to sense that the pull of much of the work derives from and points back to Palestinian culture itself, rather than being necessarily part of the self-conscious east-west discourse which so preoccupied Edward Said. As such it represents another advance in international understanding of Palestinian history and aspiration, but determinedly through the artist's eye.
Art from the Middle East seems to matter right now, and not just because so much of it is so good. These two books provide the proof.
Stephen Deuchar is director of Tate Britain.
