Symposium: Celebrating the Postwar Avant-Garde in the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean

Front cover: Jewad Selim, Woman Selling Material, 1953, oil on canvas, 53.5 x 43.5 cm, Barjeel Art Foundation.

This symposium focuses on post-1945 avant-garde and non-conformist artistic practices in the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean region. Often overlooked, anti- and postcolonial art movements in the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean area actively engaged with the artistic avant-garde, particularly in the wake of decolonization and national independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s. The postwar era saw intensified cultural exchanges between artists from the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean regions and Europe (both Eastern and Western) as well as North America. The period also witnessed the emergence of new art groups and schools at a local level, developing their own avant-garde and non-conformist artistic practices. Through these layered and often ambivalent dynamics, artists not only engaged with but also contested and redefined the aesthetic and theoretical foundations of the avant-garde, expanding its meanings beyond a Euro-American frame.

Program (PDF, 2 MB)

For more information, please go to the project’s website