چکیده:
Women artists from Muslim societies and Middle East are confronted with visual clichés of "being a woman", "being a Muslim" and "being a Middle Easterner". Art exhibitions and events welcome those art works that reproduce the stereotypes of re-Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism. After the September 11 attacks, the number of art exhibitions focusing on Middle Eastern women increased. This was an opportunity for women artists to bring their issues into the spotlight of the public attention and world's media; on the other hand, women were dealt with some hidden expectations and stereotypes which held by Western art events, that this events tending to direct artistic experiences towards the Western stereotypes. In this article, by methodological approach of "event studies", we review some of the most important art events for the Middle East; also we focus on two exhibitions "Breaking the Veils" (2002, Greece), and "She who tells a story" (2013, USA) which were held with the aim of rethinking stereotypes. The results showed that the works of women artists from Middle East can be categorized into a bipolar spectrum: from the image of women suffering from war, the repressed beauty of the Orient lands, the pitiful oppression of women, to the image of resilient and powerful women. At both ends of this spectrum, from passive victimized women to rioters and anti-tradition activists, there are diverse works that cover a wide range of themes. Women artists are looking for a way to both criticize the limitations of patriarchal culture and overcome the reductionistic and exotic expectations from women's art. This difficult path must be taken against the expectations held by the art market and political expectations from art exhibitions.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism in Contemporary Art of Middle Eastern Women: A Study of the Breaking the Veils (2002) and Women Narrators (2013) Exhibitions Mohammad Reza Moridi 1, Soheila Abadi Far *2 Abstract Female artists originating from Muslim societies and the geography of the Middle East are confronted with visual stereotypes of “being a woman,” “being Muslim,” and “being Middle Eastern.
In this article, by reviewing some events and exhibitions of women from the Middle East, we will focus our study on two exhibitions; the “Breaking the Veils” exhibition1, which was first held in Greece in 2002 and then in many countries, aimed to change the image of female artists from Islamic lands.
1. Breaking the Veils to change the image of women artists from Islamic lands, and the “She who tells a story”1 exhibition, which was held in 2013 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with the presence of twelve Iranian and Arab female photographers, with the aim of rethinking stereotypes and rejecting the concept of the inability of Middle Eastern women.
Mikdadi also addressed “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Arab Art” in a chapter of Sherifa Zuhur’s3 book, Images of Enchantment (1998), and while providing a concise overview of the history of art in Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon, she examined female artists such as Indji Aflatoun and Effat Nagy 5 in Egypt and Helen Khal 6 in Lebanon, and their efforts to change the visual representation of traditional women.
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