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The discursive landscape of Western metropolitan art criticism and curatorial practice is dominated by a monolingualism that assimilates the aesthetic diversity of non-Western art to its own frames of legibility. This monolingual attitude lacks the sensibilities to recognize those practices and objects of art that articulate meaning, value, and desire according to their own worlds, both linguistic and cultural. Subject to trite overpoliticization, contemporary Middle Eastern and North African art is regularly expected to inform viewing publics about the plight of the region in terms dictated by the West.
This panel seeks to look beyond the boundaries of monolingualism to address the following concerns: How have artists from the MENA region resisted the monolingualism of Western institutions? What happens when this resistance manifests in a grammar that may be illegible to the discursive frame that reduced the non-West in the first place? To what degree does the ethos of “benevolence” among the First World public determine the distribution of institutional attention to artists from outside the West? What are the horizons for studying contemporary art of the MENA region without limiting this geography to local expressions that putatively hold no claim to universality? Beyond the indubitable challenges of textual and cultural translation, how does monolingualism regulate the relevance or irrelevance of art-historical knowledge? Is it possible to broadly reshape the uneven landscape in which, as Timothy Brennan has warned us, “one knows the other and the other sees in the one only a closed book”?