Welcome, I'm Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum. And I have the great fortune of sitting here with my colleague Venetia Porter,
who's the curator of the exhibition Reflections: contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa, which is a revelation.
What is really striking, already on first sight, is the great variety, richness of styles, of approaches, of artistic attitudes, if you like.
Yes, this isn't one thing. You know, these are artists from across all this vast region we call the Middle East and North Africa, all these individual countries.
And within each of which, there are traditions, some of which go back to Islamic art, but this region, in these last 100 years or more, has suffered terrible conflict.
And you know, so many terrible things have happened there, wars and so on, and so what I find interesting is when you put it all together, like this.
You start to see a lot of different stories. And it's the stories behind the works that I find so fascinating.
We are placed right in front of a major work you acquired. A Nicky Nodjoumi. It is quite an impressive, monumental work, a brush drawing.
I chose it, in the first instance, because of its monumentality. And I wanted people coming up the stairs here to be confronted by this extraordinary work.
You don’t see an act of violence, really. But it still has that atmosphere, a menacing atmosphere. It’s very menacing.
So thank you Venetia for having done this extraordinary work, which I think makes a big difference for the British Museum.
And I think we should also thank the patrons from CaMMEA for their generosity and their engagement.
And their dedication to creating such an extraordinary collection.
Thank you and I think we're very lucky to have them.
What I want to do now, is just to highlight just a few works in the exhibition, and hope that you're going to be able to actually come and see the exhibition in person.
Now the first works we're going to look at now are by a Lebanese artist, Shafic Abboud. And he is a very interesting artist.
He studied at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts in Beirut, and he then went on to study in Paris.
Now he's principally known as an abstract artist, but he painted the figure, really on and off throughout his life.
And this is a very beautiful example that we have here from the 1970s.
The other really interesting thing about Shafic Abboud is that he was the first artist of the Middle East to make artist books.
Now, artist books are very much a tradition that started in France, and there are artists like Braque and Picasso who made artists' books.
But Abboud is the first Middle Eastern artist to make artist books. And this is a very wonderful example that we have in the collection.
And it was made in 1953/1954. And it actually brings the two facets of Abboud's life together because he's often regarded as an artist of what's called the École de Paris.
So he's both a French artist and he's a Lebanese artist, and you see this encapsulated in this book, because the book is a story. It's called Le Bouna. Le Bouna is a priest.
The two protagonists are these characters called Murr, meaning bitter, and Helou, meaning sweet.
And so he's combined a story from Lebanon with this kind of very traditional livre d'artiste style, these beautiful black and white etchings.
And the other wonderful thing about this book is that he's actually written the story in his own hand. And you can see the story unfolding across the pages.
The works we're going to look at next are actually from our Prints and Drawings department and they're works that I only discovered relatively recently,
by an absolutely extraordinary artist called Yehuda Bacon, who is a Holocaust survivor. And he came to Palestine in 1946.
He studied at this very famous school, which is called Bezalel, where he later taught. And what we're looking at here are two of his works.
And this first one here is really extraordinary. It's just a series of faces, sketches from what is called a workbook.
And, actually, you can see on the top of it, the perforations at the top of the page where obviously it was ripped out from this workbook.
And he was very keen on Rembrandt when he was studying art. And there's a very Rembrandt quality to these drawings.
And I learned from the world expert on Yehuda Bacon, who is called Dr. Glenn Sujo, that actually a couple of the faces here are recognisable.
So one of them, on the right, is his wife Leah, and the other is somebody called Käthe Becher, who was his landlady.
The second work here is his very, very personal story. So, most of his family had perished in concentration camps,
with the exception of his sister Rivka, and himself. And so this is a very important work from the 50s, from 1957, which is called Four Figures.
And so what we have here is evoking the memory of his family, and what you see is this arm, which is as though he is protecting them.
And what's very interesting also about him is that he would make these etchings from these zinc plates that were cast-offs from the Bezalel workshop. But it's a very, very moving work.
There is a general misconception that there is no figural representation, either in Islamic art or in the art of the modern and contemporary Middle East.
So I was wanting to challenge that misconception, because certainly the artists that we're looking at here were all painting the figure.
Many of these artists are ones that we would call modernists. They were training in art schools in Rome, or Paris where they studied life drawing.
And it's certainly true that in some cases, it was difficult to study the figure in art schools in the Middle East.
So what we've got in this section are artists who are using the figure in lots of different ways.
So sometimes they are sketches for sculpture like Michel Basbous, sometimes they are just from a life drawing class like the Tunisian artist Khayachi.
This is a work by Palestinian artist, Laura Boushnak. And it's part of a series called 'I Read I Write'.
And Laura Boushnak has been very preoccupied by the general lack of literacy amongst women across the Middle East.
And so she's undertaken a series of projects in different countries, and this is part of one where she sat in on a literacy project in Cairo.
And she then talked to the women about why it was that they wanted to learn to read and write. You know, how did it change their lives, the fact that they could do that.
And so, in this one, we have somebody called Rasha Badr el-Din, who talks about why she needed to learn to read and write,
and she talks about how embarrassed she was that, you know, her niece came to her and said she needed to communicate with the school and she couldn't do that.
And it was all those little things that you take for granted, you know, you want to write a note to the teacher, but you can't actually do it.
And what is really touching is that once the photographs were made and printed, she then went back to her subjects, and she asked them to write the text,
of what actually reading and writing meant to them. And there we see, on the top left there, the signature of Rasha, there.
So this is an extraordinary work by an Iranian artist called Y.Z. Kami. And it's doing so many different things, this work.
So when you look at it closely, you'll see that it's a piece of linen, and all around in concentric circles, what we have are little pieces of text, which have been pasted on.
The pieces of text are from what's called the Masnavi of the mystic poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, who is extremely well known.
So what Kami has done is he's interspersed the pieces of text with these little blue squares.
Which is as though you're standing underneath a dome, in a mosque in Iran. Traditionally, many of these domes were built of brick.
And sometimes they would have little bits of colour, like this, which are made from the tile work. So this is a very multi layered work.
So each of the works in this section are telling different stories, but they're using abstraction in very interesting ways.
So sometimes it's just the love of the pure line. Sometimes it's geometry evoking architecture. It could be script which has become abstracted.
Or playing with the notion of illumination. There are so many ways in which abstraction provides such a rich resource for these artists.
In this part of the exhibition, which we've called Tangled Histories, we have artists who are looking through the prism of their own experience,
at different events, conflicts, revolutions that have been occurring throughout the region.
We have artists who are evoking the Lebanese Civil War. We have works which talk about the problems of Israel - Palestine.
We have works focusing on the Iranian Revolution, and a particular body of work that we started to collect, which was artists responding to the conflict in Syria from 2011.
What we're looking at here is an artist called Rafa Nasiri, an Iraqi artist, and he is evoking a particular moment in time,
which is the destruction of the National Library of Baghdad that occurred in 2003. Now we see this in a very interesting way.
This is an abstract work, there's colour, there's text, but when you scratch the surface, you realise that there are so many stories here.
The text is by a poet - 10th century poet - called Mutanabbi. And he's taken these verses which talk about him being friendless and homeless and so on.
Rafa Nasiri had to leave Iraq in 1991. So he really felt that condition of exile really keenly. So just in this one work, we've got the burning of the libraries,
and we've got his own story there, through the prism of the poetry of Mutanabbi.
We are now in the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World, which we opened in 2018.
One of the many wonderful things about this gallery is that we are able to regularly show works by Middle Eastern artists in this gallery.
These works are called Faces and they're by Lebanese artists, Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas, and they're a very interesting work.
So these artists were very preoccupied by the Lebanese Civil War, and its aftermath, the war that went on for 15 years, it started in 1975.
And one of the things that you find actually across the Mediterranean is when somebody dies, they'll put up their picture,
and then they'll put a black line around it. And often you'll find multiples, as well of these pictures.
And it could be in the neighbourhood of where somebody dies, or further afield. So what they did, which was so extraordinarily interesting,
is that they captured through photographs these posters. And what fascinated them was actually the degradation of the image.
And then in some of them, they go back to the image, and they start drawing over them. So you might see, actually, the eyes have come out, or a nose.
So, even though actually this is work which is very poignant and sad, there were so many people who died in the Lebanese Civil War, and its aftermath.
And it's as though actually they are in some way, bringing them back to life.
So this exhibition has been a huge opportunity. It's a big thank you to the patrons of CaMMEA who not only have supported the acquisitions, so many of them,
but actually have enabled us to do the exhibition. And it's just very exciting to be able to show the work of these Middle Eastern artists that we have in the collection.
Their work is so rich, and multifaceted. And the way that they will talk about literary tradition, or they'll talk about politics,
or whatever it is that they are interested in, and that affects them, and you just see a whole series of worlds in these works.