‘Al Musawwirun: Artists Before Art’ Exhibition

This exhibition recreates, or simulates a landscape of images, pictures, and crafted objects that one might have come across a century ago in the area that includes present-day Lebanon. We catch a glimpse of a time when the Western model of autonomous art had not yet fully emerged in the Middle East, that is to say a time when there were no contemporary art centers and private galleries, art schools and museums, biennials, prizes, prices, dealers, critics and curators. We invite our visitors to imagine a cultural period in which very diverse modes of picture- and object-making, both utilitarian and non-, cohabited in the same cultural field.

The exhibition puts on display artifacts found today in Lebanon but produced all over the region between the second half of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. It is a landscape in which pictures – ranging from Christian iconography to traditional Islamic arts and vernacular or folk art and from Orientalist tableaux to photographic and cinematic representations – were distributed within one cultural field in accordance with ethnic, kinship, religious or class divisions. Those who worked within this field were known by various names. In addition to artistes and fannanun (artists), or rassamun (painters), the most employed word was musawwir—a term used from ancient times to refer first of all to one of the hypostases of God as giver and shaper of forms, fashioner and creator, and by extension, to all those engaged in religious or folk arts. Historically the word musawwir was used mainly to refer to the work of the painter (in particular the portrait-painter) but it could also mean decorator or sculptor, less often architect or alchemist, and in the modern age photographer and cameraman. The subtitle “Artists before Art” is meant to suggest that a rich, viable, and self-sustaining alternative existed prior to the rise of the Western autonomous art model, with its institutions that maintain and reproduce capitalist production and exchange.

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