"Art Acts, Taswir, and Local Art History: Studying Lebanon through Modern Art and Vice Versa"
Joining an emergent literature of “local art histories,” Fantasmic Objects offers the first English-language study of modern art in Lebanon. It is, moreover, the first study of Lebanon through art. An historical ethnography of “art acts” which played a significant role in co-founding the nation during French occupation (1920-1950), Fantasmic Objects foregrounds the decolonizing and self-civilizing efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political and pious being. It thus recontextualizes the art of Lebanon’s recent “postwar period” by closely reading artworks and careers through the lens of Islamic theories of fantasm that informed twentieth-century civic experimentation. Focusing on the interactions that specific artworks, such as Moustapha Farrouk’s “Two Prisoners” and Omar Onsi’s “At the Exhibition,” prompted for a public seeking to “merit” its liberation, Fantasmic Objects registers the agency of art for Lebanese-to-be who both resisted French colonization and formulated a “modern-contemporary,” i.e. counter-Ottoman, translocal identity.
Kirsten L. Scheid is a Professor of Anthropology and Art Studies at the American University of Beirut. She has authored Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950 (Indiana University Press, 2022) and curated Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960 (Wallach Art Gallery, New York). She co-curated Historical Modernisms in the Middle East for ArteEast’s Virtual Gallery (2008), The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener (2016), and Jerusalem Actual and Possible (2018). She was the Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Williams College for 2019. She also co-founded a cultural resource center and an Arabic children’s book line (Hikayat Walad min Bayrut, 2004) in Beirut.
This event was organized by the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies on Monday, May 13, 2024.
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