ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL

CALL FOR PAPERS

VISUAL ARTS AND PRACTICES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Deadline: 28 August 2009

The last decade has seen tremendous changes in the Arab and Middle Eastern
artscape(s). These changes have played out on numerous levels. Regionally,
there has been a mushrooming of "independent" art spaces, artist-run
initiatives, and large-scale annual festivals. In terms of international
exposure, artists from the Middle East have gradually been gaining access to
Western art capitals‹albeit under the guise of large, all-encompassing
regional shows‹and are making increasingly regular appearances on the
biennale circuit. Most recently, the region has witnessed the burgeoning of
a Gulf-based art market, supported by an impressive infrastructure of
commercial galleries, individual collectors, and world-class museums. Such
transformations have of course been the subject of numerous art
publications, in attempts to consolidate a growing audience base and
generate a critical discourse surrounding art practices in the region.
Scholarship on the Middle East, however, has largely neglected artistic
practices and aesthetic concerns as socially, politically, and culturally
formative sites worthy of examination. Similarly, the field of art history
continues to restrict scholarship on artistic production from the region to
the pre-modern era under the rubric of Islamic art.

The Arab Studies Journal is soliciting scholarly contributions that
critically assess the visual arts and art practices in Middle East from a
range of disciplinary backgrounds. We seek papers that consider the
relationship between art practices and art institutional imaginings, in
either an historical or a contemporary sense. We are particularly interested
in cross-regional comparative approaches that consider the possible
interplay of visual arts and art practices outside the Middle East.

Submit manuscripts online at: www.arabstudiesjournal.org

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Dina A. Ramadan
MEALAC
Columbia University