A new history of Arab art to begin at London’s Whitechapel Gallery

On Tuesday, an exhibition billed as “the broadest single overview of Arab art to be shown in the UK to date” opens at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

By the time it finishes in 2017, more than 100 works from Sheikh Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi’s Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation will have featured in Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary in a series of four separate chronological exhibitions that will chart the development of Arab art and aesthetics from their 20th-century origins to the present.

The show’s curator, Omar Kholeif, has described the exhibition as an attempt to outline “a possible trajectory of recent Arab art” at a “time of hyperactivity across the Arab art world”, which in plain English amounts to an ambitious statement of intent.

As curators go, the Cairo-born and London-based Kholeif is uniquely qualified to make such statements, being both a product of and participant in the “hyperactivity” he describes.

Original article by Nick Leech

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A new history of Arab art to begin at London’s Whitechapel Gallery