Islamic Art Exhibition, Orientalism, and Contemporary Socio-politics

Abstract

Most of the Islamic art collections in American and European museums have been reinstalled and reinterpreted in the past twenty years. Contemporaneously, there has been an increase in the politicization of Islam and Muslims, which reinforces societal ideologies like Orientalism. As a reaction to this, it is claimed that Islamic art exhibitions can ‘tell another story,’ ‘bridge divides,’ and ‘combat’ negative media narratives. Although this conflation has often uncritically been commented on by curators and scholars, there has not yet been a study of the museological role in these connections. In a close reading of exhibition interpretation, this chapter investigates the possible relationships between contemporary media representations and exhibition interpretation of two Islamic art collections: Arts of Islam at the Louvre (2012) and the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011). Through this exploration, this chapter seeks to expose and demystify the dialogical and sometimes reflective relationships between media representations of Islam/Muslims and Islamic art exhibitions.