An exhibition opening at Dubai’s Concrete on 15 November is set to challenge established accounts of modern art in the Arab world, bringing together works by women artists whose contributions have often been overlooked in the historical record.
Titled History Otherwise: Women Modernists from the Arab World, the exhibition is presented by Alserkal in partnership with Sharjah’s Barjeel Art Foundation as part of Alserkal Art Week. Running until 22 November, it features works from the Barjeel collection, tracing the creative practices and public presence of women artists across the 20th century.
Curated by Suheyla Takesh and Rémi Homs, the exhibition begins with an archive of exhibition posters dating from the 1940s to the 1990s. The material documents women artists who exhibited publicly, formed artistic collectives and helped shape the region’s cultural landscape, raising questions about how figures who were active and visible in their own time subsequently became marginalised in accounts of modern art.
The exhibition is organised around four themes: introspecting, documenting, abstracting and crafting. Together, they examine the different ways artists explored identity and personal experience, responded to social and political change, experimented with visual language and incorporated traditional materials and techniques into modern artistic practice.
Spanning painting, sculpture, textiles and other media, the selection highlights the diversity of approaches that helped define modernism across the Arab world. Among the works featured are Inji Efflatoun’s Untitled (1977), Samia Halaby’s White Cube on Brown Cube (1969) and Mona Saudi’s marble sculpture Continuity (1968). Also included is Juliana Seraphim’s Femme Fleur (Flower Woman) (1972), an oil painting that explores the relationship between the female figure and nature.
Rather than treating women artists as a separate strand of modern art history, History Otherwise places their work within the broader cultural and artistic developments of the period. Its emphasis on archival material and exhibition histories also draws attention to the institutions and narratives that have influenced which artists are remembered.
The project reflects Barjeel Art Foundation’s gender-balance policy, which seeks to address the underrepresentation of women artists in art collections and historical accounts.
The exhibition opens at 6pm on the 15th of November at Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz, Dubai, and runs through to the 22nd of November as part of the wider Alserkal Art Week programme.
