The invisibility of Islamic art in Australia

The invisibility of Islamic art in Australia
Thursday 30 July 2015

Dr Sam Bowker, Lecturer in Art History & Visual Culture at Charles Sturt University, recently presented a  paper on 'The invisibility of Islamic art in Australia' at a CAIS conference. A version of the paper in now available on The Conversation website.

Islamic art in Australia – regardless of the era – is inaccessible and largely overlooked. It is sparsely displayed in our public galleries, rarely taught as a dedicated subject in Australian universities, and almost never seen beyond state capitals. Why so?

In part, because it has a well-deserved reputation as an “unwieldy field”. Simply put, it’s just too vast – across distance, cultures and time. Even the term “Islamic Art” has been challenged by curators.

In 2011, galleries formerly named Islamic Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum were renamed – deep breath – the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. What was once a rarefied field for specialists became politically and socially charged after 9/11.

We have much to learn from this vast field of art practice.

For some Australians, Islamic art might evoke artworks and architecture designed within religious contexts. These are usually centuries old and not located in Australia. Yet this field can also be read within a broader social context, emphasising the cosmopolitan exchange of objects and ideas, and playing important roles in the formation and critique of identities.

Phillip George - Inshalla surfboard, 2008, fibre glass, carbon and digital decal.
Image courtesy of the artist and the Islamic Museum of Australia.

The most recent contributions to this field include the extraordinary glitched carpets of Faig Ahmed of Azerbaijan, the feminist photography of Lalla Essaydi and Hassan Hajjaj from Morocco, and the complex mirrorwork of the Iranian sculptor Monir Shahroudy

Farmanfarmaian, which was recently celebrated by a retrospective at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. Imagining Islamic art only in terms of historic or religious contributions overlooks these critical contemporary innovations.

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