Zainab Bahrani

Mezopotamyada Toplumsal Cinsiyet ve Temsil

Babilin Kadinlari

Nada M. Shabout

In the mid twentieth century, artists in the newly independent nation of Iraq experimented with a form of Modernism that they saw as a new and revolutionary artistic idiom for a secular national state. Combining ancient and Islamic forms and genres of art and with Western Modernist influences, these artists set out to create an art for the people. At the same time, they participated in what they saw of Western Modernism by bringing to it older forms of Islamic abstraction. In this way, they challenged both traditional indigenous forms and what they learned from modern art in Europe. Today these works continue to challenge the pervasive image of Iraq as a country with no modern artistic past. As the exhibition curators and authors of the catalogue, Zainab Bahrani, the Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, and Nada Shabout, an associate professor of art history at the University of North Texas, make clear, there are several reasons Iraq's modern tradition remains little known abroad. Access to the artworks themselves is one problem: The Iraqi Museum of Modern Art was looted after the fall of Baghdad, and most modern and contemporary works are now in private collections. The catalogue offers an unprecedented overview of the work of several generations of Iraqi artists, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, including paintings, sculpture, book arts, and videos by forty-five artists, among them Jawad Salim, Dia Azzawi, Hana Malallah, Nazar Yahya, Kareem Risan, Ghassan Gha'eb, Rafa al Nasiri, and Mohammed al Shammarey.

Modernism and Iraq

Ancient Art and Architecture

Mesopotamia

Representations of sexual difference (whether visual or textual) have become an area of much theoretical concern and investigation in recent feminist scholarship. Yet although a wide range of relevant evidence survives from the ancient Near East, it has been exceptional for those studying women in the ancient world to stray outside the traditional bounds of Greece and Rome. Women of Babylon is a much-needed historical/art historical study that investigates the concepts of femininity which prevailed in Assyro-Babylonian society. Zainab Bahrani's detailed analysis of how the culture of ancient Mesopotamia defined sexuality and gender roles both in, and through, representation is enhanced by a rich selection of visual material extending from 6500 BC - 1891 AD. Professor Bahrani also investigates the ways in which women of the ancient Near East have been perceived in classical scholarship up to the nineteenth century.

Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

Women of Babylon

In The Infinite Image Zainab Bahrani makes a case for art and the aesthetic dimension being present in antiquity, particularly in Mesopotamia, and more generally in the ancient near Eastern and Mediterranean world. Such objects were seen in those civilizations as transcending time, becoming the focus of collective memory and reaching out to the infinite. This is contrary to accepted Western scholarship, which drew a line between the birth of art” in pre-Platonic antiquity and the ancient world. In the second half of the twentieth century art came to be defined as a modern or even Western category. Yet earlier in the 20th century artists like Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore and intellectuals such as Georges Bataille were captivated by the ancient sculptures they encountered newly displayed in Western Museums.

Zainab Bahrani

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