Leaps of Faith

Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam

Lalla Essaydi’s "Les femmes du Maroc #10" (2005) is among the Islamic-themed pieces made by female artists.

HIDDEN TALENT

The Iranian painter Naser Arasteh isn’t known in the West—yet.

Shirin Neshat Hana MAl-AllAh Y Z Kami Louai Kayali Jawad Selim Farhad Moshiri Paul Guiragossian Ahmed Moustafa

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Moreover, interest in art and culture has grown exponentially within the Middle East itself as the region’s wealth has exploded. This is evidenced by the plans for branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and by the scheduled November opening in Doha, Qatar, of the Museum of Islamic Art, the brainchild of Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the board chair of the Qatar Museums Authority.

Museums worldwide have also played a part in the rise of this market. Inspired by a desire to build bridges between Islam and the West after 9/11, the institutions have in recent years taken pains to exhibit art, both contemporary and ancient, from Muslim countries (primarily Middle Eastern), thus bringing such works to the attention of Western audiences. In 2006, for instance, MoMA staged “Without Boundary,” displaying videos, paintings, sculpture and even comic-strip drawings by 15 Islamic and two American artists that reflected on the visual and spiritual traditions of Islamic art, from Arabic calligraphy to Persian miniatures. Later that same year, “Word into Art,” at the British Museum, presented paintings by 80 artists who work with Arabic script and lines from Sufi and other Arabic poetry.

Many artists shown in these exhibitions — including Maysaloun Faraj, the Egyptian Ahmed Moustafa and the Iranians Mohammed Ehsai and Charles Hossein Zenderoudi — are, in fact, among the top sellers in this category. Paris-based Zenderoudi brought the second highest price at Bonhams in March: $504,000 (est. $150–200,000) for his 1968 Untitled, in which lines of thickly scrawled Arabic march across a multihued canvas; Ehsai’s Zekre Allah, 2007, sold for $336,000 (est. $100–120,000), putting it in the top 10 for the night. Dealers specializing in this material are also emerging, from London’s Aya gallery to Pomegranate Gallery, in New York.

Whatever economic and cultural factors have boosted interest in the category in general, the artists themselves take several distinct approaches in their work. Many of them, for instance, address the conflict between the West and fundamentalist Islam.

Iranian-born Shirin Neshat, who has lived in the U.S. since 1974, is one of the best-known of these practitioners, having been shown in New York at the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, as well as at the Tate Gallery, in Britain, and the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg. Neshat frequently superimposes traditional henna patterns or erotic or violent texts, written in Persian calligraphy, across the hands and faces of Muslim women in photographs and films that address cultural and individual, particularly female, identity. Lalla Essaydi, a Moroccan artist based in New York, drapes women in white and, using henna, writes passages from her diary in Arabic on their bodies, hands and faces, then photographs them posed against sheets also covered in calligraphy — traditionally a man’s art, forbidden to women. Often the artist, who exhibits with New York’s Edwynn Houk gallery and Schneider Gallery, of Chicago, adds other items, such as eggs or lilies, again adorned with script. (A large number of the political artists are women, perhaps because women are most affected by the constraints of conservative Islam.)

Also concerned with political issues is the Iraqi artist and activist Rashid Selim, nephew of Jewad Selim (1919–61), an icon of the Iraqi modernist movement known especially for the Freedom Monument, which still stands at the center of Baghdad. The younger Selim is one of the most celebrated of the contemporary Iraqi artists. His paintings, performances and installations, some of which were included in “Word into Art,” comment on his nation’s battered history and culture. Selim’s compatriot Hana Mal-Allah — who, like Selim, exhibits both at Aya and at Pomegranate Gallery — burns, creases and folds paper to express the ruin and desecration of Baghdad. (Mal-Allah recently relocated from Iraq to London.)