Visual Arts

Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa
New Approaches to Muslim Expressive Cultures
This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon.
The contributors to this volume explore the dynamic place of Islamic art architecture and creative expression in processes of decolonization across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together new work by leading specialists in the fields of African Islamic and modern arts and visual cultures the book directs unprecedented attention to the agency and contributions of African and Muslim artists in articulating modernities in local and international arenas. Interdisciplinary and transregional in scope it enriches the under-told story of Muslim experiences and expression on the African continent home to nearly half a million Muslims or a third of the global Muslim population.
Furthermore it elucidates the role of Islam and its expressive cultures in post-colonial articulations of modern identities and heritage as expressed by a diverse range of actors and communities based in Africa and its diaspora; as such the book counters notions of Islam as a retrograde or static societal phenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributors propose new methodologies for accentuating human agency and experience over superficial disciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell about art-making and visual expression thus contributing to widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship on histories of modern expression.

Calligraphy in Mauritania: Creating a Lost Identity
This paper focuses on the role of calligraphy in contemporary painting in Mauritania. I begin by outlining the history and contemporary status of Arabic calligraphy in this country after which I trace the role of calligraphy in contemporary painting through the work of three artists representing three generations since the inception of a modern art movement in the late 1950s. I argue that the use of calligraphy in contemporary painting reflects an exploration of changing conceptions of Mauritanian identity as situated between North and Sub-Saharan African and between an Arab present and an Amazigh past.

Cybernetics and Postcolonial Utopias
This article argues that in the pre-1965 square-based abstraction by Mohammed Melhi Islamic art as a cultural heritage is mobilized as a space of both creation and re-invention only to be immediately destabilized with a larger project that seeks universalism by transcending national and religious belonging. He locates these abstractions within cybernetics and the language of IBM mobilizing them towards a vision of modernity that is not regional and instead argues that the fundamental question of the era was in his words “the common point between Human and Science.” This work connects Islamic art with a belief in borderless technological modernity as a predecessor to the later strategic nationalism of the Casablanca School. Yet these paintings are also a utopic vision of a modern world of connection and possibility that could exist outside of the ongoing enmeshment of colonialism – not just decolonizing but rejecting the grounds of colonization entirely.

Possessed: The Mystical Post-Surrealism of Wifredo Lam, Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar, and Ibrahim El-Salahi
This essay compares three paintings made by three prominent global modern artists: the Cuban Wifredo Lam (1902–82) the Egyptian Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar (1925–66) and the Sudanese Ibrahim El-Salahi (b.1930). Combining Surrealist techniques with references to mystical practices of their natal communities they express the state of possession of the non-white modern artist. Because of the asymmetrical power relations of colonization they were both ‘possessed’ by a European style of easel painting and ‘possessed’ by local movements that demanded nationalist symbolism. Within this demanding context it is no surprise that they decided to paint their dreams.

Between Art and Architecture, Modernism and Makhzen
This chapter discusses how two architects Abdeslam Faraoui and Patrice de Mazières commissioned artists such as Farid Belkahia Mohamed Chebaa and Mohamed Melehi to create artworks for new building projects across a newly independent Morocco. It considers how artists and architects collaborated to experiment with what a distinctly Moroccan modernism could be and it asks how these artist-architect collaborations intersected with state efforts to promote foreign tourism and repress those it viewed as dissident.

Dispersal, Decolonization, and Dominance: African Muslim Objects from the Swahili Sultanate of Witu (1858–1923)
This article examines four objects associated with the Sultanate of Witu (1858–1923) the last of coastal East Africa's independent Swahili Muslim city-state. The objects were removed from Witu between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and dispersed into British and American collections. They include: 1)an illuminated Qur'an manuscript in the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland in London UK; 2) an ivory-inlaid chair in the British Museum in London UK; 3) a pair of carved wooden sandals in the Brooklyn Museum; and 4) a carved door in the Museum of Science Boston US. The study argues that decolonizing African Muslim material culture requires accounting for how present-day structures and institutions of power as well their everyday practices reproduce coloniality and dominance over these objects.

Kader Attia's Alternative History of the Grands Ensembles, from France to Algeria and Back
The French phrase “grand ensemble” designates a modernist residential housing typology consisting of the repetition of standardized units into vast-scale compositions. The grands ensembles were imported from France to Algeria by way of colonialism. At the onset of the postcolonial era the dense migration of groups of people in the other direction from Algeria to France where more grands ensembles were constructed to house them brought this episode of architectural history full circle. How have French-Algerian residents of postcolonial grands ensembles perceived metabolized and responded to this circulation of people and architectural forms in time and space? To answer this question this chapter turns to the collages of Kader Attia (b. 1970) a French-Algerian artist who spent his formative years as a resident of grands ensembles in postcolonial France. This chapter argues that Attia's collages tell a resident-centric architectural history of the grands ensembles across France and Algeria thus proposing alternative conceptions of modernity and its relation to vernacular traditions.

Tattooing as Subversive Archive: Safaa Mazirh's Reclamation of Tattoos in Postcolonial Morocco
This chapter concentrates on the photographs of Moroccan artist Safaa Mazirh and her 2017 series “Amazigh.” In this series of 13 black and white photographs Mazirh uses a multiple exposure technique in the camera to place North African tattoo designs over her nude or semi-nude body. She creates a multi-layered palimpsest that critiques colonial-era efforts to record tattooed women as ethnographic objects. The practice of tattooing has largely faded from fashion in Morocco as it is understood to be counter to Islam. Mazirh sees tattoo symbols as an expression of Amazigh identity that should not be forgotten. Mazirh's method of superimposing tattoo symbols over her own body contributes to the subversive nature of her photographic project that reclaims the past and also archives its destruction.

Teaching analysis of fortified monuments in a time of remote learning
First COVID-19 then the war in Ukraine forced educational institutions to adapt to online and hybrid teaching methods in new realms. Despite the challenges presented by this some educators have found innovative ways to teach in hybrid mode such as using new technologies or creative teaching methods. This article shows the method used by Olha Tikhonova and Oresta Remeshylo-Rybchynska to engage students in difficult situations with different kinds of restrictions and challenges both during the COVID-19 restrictions and then after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022. The method is rooted in Olha Tikhonova’s comprehensive approach to analyzing case studies focused on castles and the teaching methodology is built around this approach. The method is suitable for use in a partially or entirely virtual teaching environment. It is easily adaptable to interactive communication with participants through web meetings.

Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa
Presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa region from queer artists as well as scholars who work on queer themes. With contributions from both scholars and artists this volume demonstrates that queer visual culture in the SWANA region is not only extant but is also entering an era of exciting growth in terms of its versatility and consciousness. The volume focuses on artworks produced in the contemporary era while recognizing historical and contextual connections to Islamic art and culture within
localities and regions from the pre-modern and modern eras.
By framing this volume as unambiguously located within queer studies the editors challenge existing literature that merely includes some examples of queer studies or queer representation but does not necessarily use queer studies as a lens through which to engage with visual culture and/or with the SWANA region. Through four interrelated sections - Gender and Normativity Trans* Articulations Intersectional Sexuality and Queer SWANA - this volume probes several previously unexplored academic areas namely the intersections of queer studies with other fields.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.

Hyperformalism: Notes on Machine Vision and Art Historical Method
This chapter is a critical examination of the relationship between machine vision and art historical method. It looks at many of the assumptions and resulting problems when art historical methods namely the formalistic approaches of Giovanni Morelli and Heinrich Wolfflin are used in computer vision. It then posits an alternative approach (called hyperformalism) based upon the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl's concept of ‘stilfragen’ and the history of ornament arguing that it holds untapped potential for the application of computer vision for the history of art.

Picturing Platformization: Information Infrastructures in Picture Archives Online
This chapter focuses the platformization and datafication of picture collections online. The aim is to consider how or in what ways the transformation from analogue to digital changes the archive qualitatively and to scrutinize how digitization may alter the way we conceive of picture archives particularly photographic archives and of photographs as such. The focus lies on information infrastructure that is how both textual and visual information is organized classified and made accessible with Flickr Commons as an example. Through five visualizations this chapter points out how the underlying systemic thinking in an online platforms like Flickr Commons is based on a bibliographic tradition of library collections rather than information infrastructure used in archives and museum collection.

Source, Surrogate, Store, and Search: Significant Sites in Post-Digitized Art History
Comparative analysis of online platforms frequently consulted by art historians allows us to identify how digitization has affected everyday practices in the discipline at multiple levels. Expanding on Johanna Drucker's (2013) distinction between ‘digital’ and ‘digitized’ art history this chapter analyses a selection of search results from three widely-consulted online platforms that offer access to high-quality digital art reproductions. It suggests that the use of these platforms by art historians can be understood in light of the wider phenomenon of post-digitization where by internet users behave in practice as ifeverything is already digitized even if they know in theory that it is not. To help post-digitized art historians disentangle the results of their research from the research of their search results the chapter argues for the development of a critical methodology centred on the four significant sites of source surrogate store and search.

Deep Art History: Inferences between Google Arts & Culture and Art Museums
The chapter compares the AI methods used by the online platform Google Art & Culture with the application of AI methods on the websites of the national galleries in Denmark and Norway. By re-activating theoretical insights offered by art historian Norman Bryson in the 1980s the chapter critically examines the methodological opaqueness resulting from the art museums’ use of AI. By applying AI methods to their websites the national galleries aim to open theirs collections to the broader public. However paradoxically this process obfuscates the underlying premisses for how the works of art are presented how they are connected and hence how meaning is ascribed to the works.

Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction
Art images are regularly used in computer vision research and generative AI applications. Each art dataset presents a particular point of view that both defines and delimits what art is and this point of view often happens to closely align with the traditional western canon of art. In this chapter I define art data in the context of machine learning and then analyze the history and make-up of one popular online art image collection-turned-dataset WikiArt. I then turn to a discussion of an implied dataset of the popular text-to-image generator DALL-E 2. I argue that art datasets reanimate the western concept of style by instrumentalizing it in such a manner. This zombie canon of art is then deployed in the world in ways that may go unnoticed infecting not only how we see art but how it is defined and reproduced.