Muslim artists rise to the 'no body' challenge
Artists in the Middle East have proved creative in the face of Islam's bar on depictions of the human body, as Fionnuala McHugh discovers
When curator Karin von Roques was a student in 1980s Germany, she became interested in Middle Eastern art.
In those days, Western teaching focused on classic Islamic work and halted in the 19th century (when, as Edward Said famously pointed out in his 1978 book Orientalism, the culture was hijacked by Western preconceived notions of exotic realms). Von Roques, however, was curious to know what was happening in the 20th century, so she began travelling through the region, beginning with Morocco; and she saw that there was an extraordinarily vivid art scene about which the West knew almost nothing and of which it was wary.
"In 1998, I made a poll," she says, on the phone from Bonn. "I asked about a hundred gallerists, in the United States, in Korea, in France, Beijing, why they didn't have these artists and there were two categories of answer: because they ban the human image or because it's such a different culture you need experts to prepare the field."
It was like with Chinese artists, von Roques says, when there was no interest until the Guggenheim staged the groundbreaking "China: 5,000 Years" in New York, in 1998.