Leaps of Faith

Stacks of books bound with rubber bands are set on a table seemingly at random. Some lie horizontally; others stand vertically. But when the light hits them, the silhouettes they cast on the wall take the shape of the New York skyline of a decade ago, with the Twin Towers at its center. Forming the towers are the shadows of two slim volumes of the Koran printed in Arabic.

This table of books is Save Manhattan, 2006–07, part of a series by the Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi. Last October it sold for £12,500 ($25,600) at the first post-9/11 sale at Sotheby’s London devoted solely to modern and contemporary Arab and Iranian art. The session’s top lots tripled their estimates. Christie’s followed a week later with an international modern and contemporary sale in Dubai in which the vast majority of works were by artists from the Middle East and other Arab regions. The results, says William Lawrie, Christie’s Dubai-based expert in charge of the auction, were “just phenomenal.” The success prompted the house to plan an expansion of its new Dubai office and to add further sales in this category to its schedule. In March 2008, Bonhams’s inaugural Middle East auction, in Dubai, set three records, including the first $1 million sale of a work by a Middle Eastern artist: the Iranian Farhad Moshiri’s glittering calligraphic painting Eshgh (“Love”), from 2007.

September 11, 2001, focused Western attention on the Arab world as never before. The ripples from that day are still evident, not only in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in the popularity of books and films relating to the region, such as The Kite Runner and Persepolis, and in the growing interest in works by Muslim artists.

Yet despite auction triumphs and a flood of museum and gallery exhibitions featuring these pieces, many art world denizens aren’t sure how to categorize them. This is partly because the market is so new and partly because of the ambiguity of the terms Arab and Islamic.

Is the appropriate rubric “art from the Middle East”? Museum exhibitions and auction sales with this theme generally exclude Israeli Jews but embrace Muslims from North Africa. That raises the question of who should be included in the category, whatever its name. “Arab and Iranian,” the moniker preferred by some auction houses, excludes Turkey and the largely Muslim countries of Southeast Asia. And what about the many Muslim artists born in the Middle East and now settled in the West, or those who divide their time between the two?

Because of the difficulty of resolving such questions, the category remains undefined — and controversial. Maysaloun Faraj, an acclaimed Iraqi painter and ceramist and the owner of Aya Gallery, in London, dissects one frequently proposed solution: “Islamic contemporary.” This encompasses, she says, “art created from the essence of Islam. But not all the artists are Islamic. They draw from an Islamic heritage and from poetry and calligraphy, but the artists from Islamic countries are not necessarily creating Islamic art.”

Saleh Barakat, who organized the Lebanon Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale and founded Beirut’s Agial Gallery, which focuses on work by Lebanese artists, adds that national identities complicate the issue. A Syrian artist, for instance, will not necessarily follow the same cultural or aesthetic influences  as an Egyptian artist; this results in distinctive national styles and tastes. In fact, it is only recently that—stimulated in part by Christie’s arrival in Dubai—buyers from one Middle Eastern country will consider purchasing works by artists from another.

One thing is certain: However it is labeled or delimited, the market for Muslim artists is burgeoning. Experts generally credit a confluence of causes for this growth. “To some extent, it reflects the general boom in contemporary art,” says Dalya Islam, the Arab and Iranian specialist for Sotheby’s London. With few unexplored niches left in the contemporary-art world, Islamic works are on the verge of becoming the next big discovery. “People always turn to what is new and fresh. We’ve seen it already with China and Russia,” says Islam. “The Middle East is so topical at the moment.”