Modern Arab Art in a (Post)Colonial Context: Subjectivation, Independence, Emancipation
In the long twentieth century of (post)colonial transformation, art across North Africa and West Asia became a field of negotiation, between tradition and modernity, exile and belonging, the spiritual and the political. From Saloua Raouda Choucair’s geometric abstraction to the visionary experiments of Mohammed Chabâa, Huguette Caland, and Shakir Hassan Al Said, this lesson traces how artists forged plural modernities that resisted both colonial universalism and cultural essentialism. Their work reveals modern art not as imitation, but as a continuous act of translation across histories and languages.
Artistic production in North Africa and West Asia during the 20th century unfolded within the complex and often ambivalent conditions of (post)coloniality. Artists emerging from Arab and colonised territories became active agents in these historical processes, articulating forms of cultural and political renewal. At the same time, their work registered the dilemmas of subjectivity and the existential impasses generated by exile, whether lived as geographic displacement or experienced internally as alienation within repressive or rapidly changing societies. Saloua Raouda Choucair is considered as a key figure whose abstraction drew on Islamic geometry while engaging with modernist experimentation, thereby linking cultural specificity with universalist ambitions. In Morocco, artists such as Mohammed Chabâa and Ahmed Cherkaoui redefined abstraction through the integration of vernacular motifs, calligraphy, and ornament, grounding modernist vocabularies in the textures of local visual culture. Their work reveals how the project of national independence also unfolded on the aesthetic plane, as a negotiation between tradition and international forms. The lesson also turns to Lebanon and Algeria, looking at artists like Aref el Rayess and Mohammed Khadda, who offer two distinct responses to political and social upheaval. Concurrently, artists like Huguette Caland in Lebabon and Ramsès Younan, active within Egyptian surrealism, explored subjectivity and corporeality as sites of emancipation. In Iraq, Shakir Hassan Al Said developed the theory of al-bu’d al-wahid (“the one dimension”), combining Sufi philosophy with abstraction to articulate a vision of art as both spiritual and political renewal. Together, these trajectories illustrate how modern Arab art was not a unified movement but a constellation of practices. Abstraction, symbolism, and figuration became vehicles for negotiating independence, subjectivity, and political consciousness.
March 7, 2026 - from 3 PM to 5 PM CET.
