Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria

Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria
ISBN-10
0520343247
ISBN-13
9780520343245
Category
Art
Pages
296
Language
English
Published
2020-09-29
Publisher
University of California Press
Author
Anneka Lenssen

Description

In modern Syria, a contested territory at the intersection of differing regimes of political representation, artists ventured to develop strikingly new kinds of painting to link their images to life forces and agitated energies. Examining the works of artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres, Beautiful Agitation explores how painters in Syria activated the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world. Drawing on archival materials in Syria and beyond, Anneka Lenssen reveals new trajectories of painterly practice in a twentieth century defined by shifting media technologies, moving populations, and the imposition of violently enforced nation-state borders. The result is a study of Arab modernism that foregrounds rather than occludes efforts to agitate against imposed identities and intersubjective relations.

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