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.