Morad Montazami - Modern Arab Art in Postcolonial Context

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the full course.

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.

Morad Montazami is an art historian, a publisher and a curator. After serving at Tate Modern (London) between 2014-2019 as curator « Middle East and North Africa », he founded the platform Zamân Books & Curating, committed to transnational studies of Arab, Asian and African modern and contemporary art. He published several essays on artists such as Zineb Sedira, Walid Raad, Latif al-Ani, Bahman Mohassess, Michael Rakowitz, Mehdi Moutashar, Behjat Sadr... He recently co-curated Casablanca Art School, Tate St-Ives, Sharjah Art Foundation, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2023-2024 and Présences Arabes. Art moderne et décolonisation. Paris 1908-1988, Musée d’art moderne de Paris, 2024.