Inspired by the East: When you cannot escape the discourse of Orientalism!

Zeinab Abdelhamed

The British Museum's new exhibition 10 October 2019 –26 January 2020,Inspired By the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art, attempts to present orientalist art as not only one where western artists traded in cliché, but also to show how portrayals of the East in the West were more than just racist pastiches. It attempts to present orientalist art as a sort of cultural exchange, rather than plunder, more of a long-term interaction between east and west that influenced not just paintings, but also ceramics, travel books and watercolor illustrations of Ottoman fashion. It also presents orientalism as an effort to understand other cultures at a time when there was not much travel, and perhaps an idealized longing for a life in an Islamic world that had not yet been untethered from the familiar by industrialization and secularization.

Inspired by the East - the first Orientalism show in the UK since 2008 - casts its net further than art, referencing ceramics, architecture, photography, even theatre. It closes with responses from four of the biggest contemporary female artists of the region to the Orientalist cliché, including Iranian-American Shirin Neshat and Morocco's Laila Essaydi, both of whom are well known for boldly confronting the stereotyped role of Muslim women in art. I am actually working on the same concept for my Anthropology paper, Orientalism and Islamic art and Architecture. I was very surprised to see such an exhibition. And I believe if Edward Said, the Palestinian writer and academic, were alive, he would have a heart attack! The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia. The focus of the exhibition is, “how the Islamic world influenced Western art -- includes generous loans from their extensive collection of Islamic and Orientalist art”.

Orientalism as a concept

I assume that you are already familiar with the concept of “Orientalism,” but let me introduce you to the concept in a nutshell. Orientalism is a very important term that has been widely used after Edward Said’s book Orientalism, 1978. Many authors regard it as a major intellectual contribution and a very important book. The book is now being translated into twenty-six languages and is required reading at many universities and colleges. Said argued that patronizing Western depictions of the East, and especially Arab culture, were bound up with imperialism, creating stereotypes of “the other”. It is also worth mentioning that Said made Orientalism a dirty word, and the book is a major intellectual contribution rigorously posing the problems of the East/West problematique, in fact, of any form of polarity thinking which, in many cases, obscure the actual complexity of the picture.

Closed circuit: Exchange a western depiction of the East to the West 

Julia Tugwell, the exhibition's co-curator, explains: “It’s an East-West exchange and we want to talk about the influences of Islamic art, not just [on] Islamic art but from the Islamic world, Islamic culture, on the West.”..... to be continued!

Reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g56M4dDOde4

• Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.