misterquark replied to your post : I’m continually baffled by the British Museum...
“The exhibition concludes with a 21st-century perspective, through the eyes of four female artists from the Middle East and North Africa who continue to question and subvert the idea of Orientalism in their work and explore the subject of Muslim female identity.” its kinda good to acknowledge and critique orientalist history tho?
misterquark replied to your post : I’m continually baffled by the British Museum...
also like, like if they were showing orientalist european art or islamic art without any context of the history of orientalism in the west would be Really Bad, its not wrong to have an exhibition showing the history of orientalism, and u can do that without celebrating it or saying that the empire was good
misterquark replied to your post : I’m continually baffled by the British Museum...
(also sorry i dont mean to pester but i just did a bunch of googling and the british museum have never put on an exhibition abt mughal india, so idk where that claim is coming from? the british library did one in 2012, but i didnt find anything abt pork being served at the opening)
So I definitely agree that it is good to critique and acknowledge orientalist history, and the inclusion of those artists is really good, but there are a lot of issues with how contextualized this exhibition is, and especially how it is being framed.
From the main description: “The show takes a deeper look at the art movement of ‘Orientalism’ – specifically the way in which North Africa and the Middle East were represented as lands of beauty and intrigue, especially in European and North American art. Often blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, Orientalist art reached its heyday in the mid-1800s, as Europeans and North Americans were looking overseas to fundamentally learn more about other cultures, but its popularity had faded by the 1940s with the decline of the British Empire.”
The things that I take issue with, and that others have pointed out, is phrasing like “fundamentally learn more about other cultures.” Orientalism was less about learning “fundamentally” about other cultures since its practices deeply distorted any realities that were trying to be depicted. The knowledge constructed through Orientalism was tainted with the colonial relationships that were deepening and served to set up a dichotomy of Occident and Orient with the Orient a projection of the Occident’s anxieties and underbellies. The exhibition blog posts do acknowledge this to a degree, but even these do not quite capture the otherizing processes of Orientalism. This is certainly better than just laying out a bunch of decontextualized art, but the histories of colonialism that produced these are only present at a very surface level. Plus, the blog post that serves as an “Introduction to Orientalist Painting” barely acknowledges the anthropological gaze present in much of the art (”Visitors to the Middle East and North Africa were often depicted in local dress, whether as a genuine attempt at cross-cultural existence or simply to experience the ‘unusual’ and different”), except in the discussion of depictions of the harem and the corresponding challenge presented by İnci Eviner ‘s work.
I guess my biggest issues are with the extent to which colonialism is (un)acknowledged and how it is being framed, even if it is, like, a third of the way there. To me, it’s like when a museum acknowledges that a particular object was stolen from indigenous peoples but then still have the object in their collections. It’s well meaning, but in a very surface level way.
Also, with regards to my tag about the Mughal exhibition, I have been trying to find the article that had talked about it as well and have not had luck. I had read it after seeing another grad student in my department who works on South Asia talked about it, and I think it’s from 2017 (though it could be 2016 or 2018, too), and now I am thinking it could have been at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which obviously is not the British Museum’s responsibility, then. It was really egregious (and deeply ironic), but I cannot find it, so I’ll remove those tags.
