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Of the several hundred images Morimura Yasumasa (b. 1951, Osaka) produced thus far, only three represent Asian men: Mahatma Gandhi, Mao Zedong and Eddie Adams photograph of "the shooting on Saigon street." While the Vietnamese image is famous for photographic and political implications, the two Asian leaders, were famous and influential. Quetioning why did Morimura create such a small number of Asian figures, and the possible meaning of this absence in relation to Japanese Orientalism and racism, within the context of Japan's position in the global context and its relations with Asia. Using Iwabuchi's concept of "Trans-Asia", and Stefan Tanaka's writings in "Japan's Orient", I position Morimura's work in this context. I argue that Morimura's numerous representations of Western icons is part of Japan's dedication to following Western values, as part of the long process, from Meiji Restoration onwards, in which through the association with Western values, Japan alienates Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antoine-Ignace Melling's engraving Inside the Harem of the Sultan (c 1810) depicts women's everyday life and their relationships, rituals and spatial practices in the Ottoman harem. Two centuries later, İnci Eviner, one of the leading contemporary artists internationally acclaimed for her solo and group exhibitions as well as for her contribution to numerous biennials, animates the same anonymous women in her video Harem (2009) by displacing the spatio-temporal nexus of Melling's work and exposes, in the manner of a visual parrhesia, the desires, the revolting gestures and the violence inherent in the harem. To discuss the nature of this displacement, we open with a few initial remarks on Melling's Harem. Then we focus on Eviner's Harem, elaborating on the forms of subjectivity and spatiality it evokes. In this discussion we pay special attention to the role of becoming, sacrifice, resurrection and the virtual in Eviner's work. The power relation specific to the harem, that of between the despot and the female slave, plays a pivotal role in this context. To end with, we turn to another significant work by Eviner, The Parliament, which, rather unexpectedly, relates the subjective and spatial nexus of the Oriental harem to Western politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a reading of Jumana Manna's feature-length film, Wild Relatives (2018), this article explores the geopolitics of seed saving, reading global efforts to preserve genetic biodiversity in the face of climate change through the logic of the pharmakon (ie, as both poison and cure). The film follows the journey of seeds between the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard (Norway) and the Bekaa Valley (Lebanon), where seeds from Syria are being cultivated due to the ongoing civil war, probing the relationship between the preservation and (re)patriation of seeds on the one hand and global conflict and humanitarianism on the other, and considering local cultivation practices vis-à-vis the lasting legacies of the developmentalist, geopolitical agendas of the US-sponsored Green Revolution. The article situates the film within Manna's broader oeuvre, problematising the epistemological and temporal logic of heritage practices that seek to preserve both cultural and natural diversity. As such, the article demonstrates the neo-orientalist and neo-colonial logic of cryopreservation as a form of 'imperialist nostalgia' or techno-capitalist wizardry. Adapting anthropologist Michael Taussig's notion of 'agribusiness writing' to the institutionalised, globalised images and narratives of productivity, bio-conservation and peacemaking, Wild Relatives is interpreted as a form of 'apotropaic' ('countermagical') film-making that warns against the appropriative, 'green banking' and 'green washing' logic of techno-scientific sorcery and celebrates the reciprocal, co-evolutionary plant–human relations of which the seed itself is an archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her videoA Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch's Last Masquerade)(2013), artist Jumana Manna reanimated a striking group portrait from 1924 astableau vivant, bringing the original photograph of wealthy Palestinians dressed in Pierrot clown costumes to life as a theatrical narrative. In this article, the author explores how Manna's work repeats and augments particular Orientalist uses of time, inspired by the Orientalist practice of cultural cross-dressing apparent in the photograph. She use Manna's artistic intervention as an occasion to explore the history of the Christian Palestinian community under the British Mandate in more depth. Echoing theorist Ariella Azoulay’s call to stop ‘looking’ at photographs and start ‘watching’ them instead, Manna's video reveals the archival photograph as more than just proof of flourishing Palestinian urban life before the formation of Israel. As the author argues, it exposes the image as a potent sign of the continuing consequences of Palestine's colonial experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Henri Matisse and Hilda Rix left Paris in early February 1912 for the Moroccan city of Tangier. They stayed in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France for most of February and March. Matisse visited again in October of that year while Rix returned in 1914 accompanied by her sister. Rix's painting style took a new turn, developing a post-impressionist style in oils that incorporated abstraction, a primary palette and a flattened picture plain. Both artists executed portraits, working with the same models, in an unused room provided by the owner of the hotel, that became a temporary studio space. Matisse complained that his radical compositions met with derision from the hotel's guests. Their art and letters produced in Tangier reveal the challenges they experienced in finding models and painting in public and in private. They were both representatives of European colonising cultures and committed advocates of modernism and of Morocco. Rix adopted a counter-orientalist position in lectures and articles upon her return to Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores three art exhibitions held in Europe in the last three years to unveil the traces of orientalism informing their conception and organization. ‘Orientalism in Europe: From Delacroix to Kandinsky’ (Munich, 2011), a journey through the formation of orientalist aesthetics, is here analyzed as the opposite double of ‘Migrations: journey into British contemporary art’ (London, 2012). The second exhibition, displaying heterogeneous works from immigrants living in the UK across four centuries, reveals that orientalism is a dispositive of the images of self and otherness produced by and central to the construction of Britishness. The article next turns to the ‘Open 14’ (Venice, 2011) focusing on Ronni Ahmmed's installation The Tomb of Qara Köz(2011), which contests the fixed constructions of identity and belonging, and thus deorientalizes official and historical narratives. This exhibition tackles the question of orientalism through artistic reflections on the mobility of cultural boundaries dividing East and West. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The films of the Tanjawi Moumen Smihi elaborate the need for an Arab cinema that critically engages its cultural and political environs not through the singularity of nationalist, postcolonial or religiously-driven identity but by exploiting and further exploding the contradictions and heterogeneity that mark cinema's existence in the Arab world. This article argues that in working toward an aesthetic of an Arabo-Islamic culture, Smihi's films evince his desire to build a history of the cinematographic image in the Arab world which is not commensurate with Euro-American or other cinematic traditions but instead raids them, transforms them, and ultimately addresses them from within localised traditions, of which Arabic language and culture is an important but not exclusive aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will relate the photographs of tortured prisoners from Iraq's Abu Ghraib gaol to the work of the Iraqi painter, Ayad Alkadhi. Whilst the images from Abu Ghraib have had an enormous impact around the world, it is argued that our ability to empathise with the suffering of Iraq's war victims is nonetheless undermined by popular Orientalist misconceptions regarding the ‘Arab mind’, the way such images are treated within the commercial media, and by the official self-exculpations of the former Bush administration. By comparison, Alkadhi's ‘Father of No One's Son’ series seeks to contextualise themes relevant to the Iraq war, so combating simplistic generalisations about Arab culture. In doing so, it is argued that Alkadhi's images indicate the proper conditions for empathy. Only when we have first contextualised the suffering of another people may we then place that suffering within the universal categories of human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking the Nakba of 1948 as the most traumatising and Kafkaesque event of the modern history of Palestine, this article explores Palestine's condition in the post-Oslo Accords era in which both the idea and reality of Palestine has changed. This condition, that is not pre-colonial, colonial or post-colonial, is a tunnel condition that has attained the evils of all three. The transformations of the idea of Palestine intensified nomadic trends in all aspects of life, and art was no exception. Using a Deleuzean framework, the lines defining the location of art - between the official establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the deviant part of civil society and those who do not identify with either - are drawn. Nomadic art exists as an alternative mode of knowledge and practice that is still loyal to the original idea and reality of Palestine, yet immune to the local Orientalism that produced a de-Palestinianised Palestine. The works of Jawad Ibrahim are used as a seminal contribution to this condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the perspectives of the author on the emergence of alternative Russian art. The author presents the perspectives of Orientalism in Russian art. Several artworks presented at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art were examined and criticized.

Focuses on the visual representation of the orientalism seen through the gaze of indigenous artists and expressed through the creative application of Western modes of representation. Common factors of visual representations in Orientalism; Questions of the editors on the counternarratives and resistant modes of expression on Orientalism; Impact of the Orientalism on postmodern cultural criticism.

Focuses on the views of Ernest Binfield Havell on orientalism in India. Policy for art education; Superiority of European civilization in the country; Arts and Crafts movement initiated by Havell.

The article focuses on the notions of Media-Tribalism and Techno-Orientalism, specifically related to Rave culture and Japanese animation in cinema, called Japanimation. The analysis of the author focuses on various views of globalisation and its basis on cultural diaspora, urban and media tribes, the idea of the psychedelic trance, and the theory and ideology of transversal issues and similarities in Japanimation and trance cultures.

The article discusses the politics of interculturalism in a global context, focusing on the communalisation of politics and culture in contemporary India. The author describes the significance of a Somebody and an Other in the context of Orientalism, and laments the global indifference to the specific contexts of other cultures.

The article discusses orientalism and Algerian nationalism and its colonial influences in connection with the traditional veil worn by women in Algeria. Also presented is a detailed discussion on the political and personal implications of the veil as worn by women in Algeria according to Marjorie Garber, Gustave Flaubert, and Edward Said.