Making Contemporary Art in the Middle East Annual Henri Zerner Lecture

Contemporary art in the Middle East can be seen as the continuation of a historical tradition of Islamic art or as a radical break with the past; as a market-driven phenomenon fueled by the wealth of a new Persian Gulf–based clientele or as a searing critique of the social and political conditions of the region.

In this lecture, Glenn D. Lowry, director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, uses the idea of “in between-ness” as a social, political, and geographical metaphor to suggest how many artists from the region, including Bouchra Khalili, Oraib Toukan, Wael Shawky, Walid Raad, and Rania Stephan, among others, have developed strategies to make art that is at once rooted in local concerns and engaged with universal issues. Lowry argues that the Middle East is not an isolated and foreign place but is a case study for how we locate ourselves in time and space in a rapidly changing world, one where social and cultural mores are in flux.