by Ilene Dube
A dark-haired woman leans over a bridge to gaze at a river that runs like a wound between two worlds: on one side flow mountains of tapestries in traditional Islamic designs, and on the other, a grid pattern suggests contemporary buildings. The sky, too, is filled with Persian patterns painted in gold.
The artist, Negar Ahkami, is that small figure set against the enormity of the divide in “The Bridge,” on view at the Bernstein Gallery at the Woodrow Wilson School through October 20. Ahkami is expressing her feeling of being a conduit between two worlds. Born in Baltimore to a family of Iranian heritage, and raised in northern New Jersey, Ahkami is assumed by everyone she meets to have an Iranian identity. She studied Middle Eastern languages and cultures at Columbia, and the references to Islamic pattern embody her reverence for Persian art.
“…my approach to Persian art reflects the neuroses of our time,” she says. “My images of mosques double as radioactive power plants. The cartoonish meltdowns satirize the brutal Iranian regime at the same time that they satirize Islamophobic anxieties about a nuclear Iran.”
The exhibit at the Bernstein Gallery is one of five core exhibits making up The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art and Society, curated, conceived and produced by Ferris Olin and Judith K. Brodsky, co-directors of the Institute for Woman and Art at Rutgers. The other core exhibits can be seen at Princeton University Art Museum, the Arts Council of Princeton, and Mason Gross Galleries and Mabel Smith Douglass Library at Rutgers.
Beyond exhibits, the project includes screenings, poetry readings, symposiums, lectures, concerts and an opera, taking place at venues from New Brunswick to Trenton, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the Princeton Public Library, the West Windsor Arts Center, The College of New Jersey, and public libraries in East and New Brunswick.
The Princeton Public Library has selected three books as community reads and invited a scholar to talk. Rutgers will host an Iranian Film Festival, and the Rutgers Jewish Film Festival will screen Israeli films by women.
The New Jersey Film Festival will show Amreeka, directed by Cherien Dabis, about a Palestinian Christian banker who, after being harassed at check points, wins a green card in a lottery and emigrates with her son from Ramallah to Illinois, where the only job she can get is as a waitress in a White Castle; and Caramel, directed by Nadine Labaki, set in a beauty parlor in Beirut, where a woman seeks an operation to become a virgin again.
Beginning in August and continuing through January 2013, most events are free to attend, and are sequenced so that, theoretically, one could go to each and every one; a full description can be found on the Fertile Crescent website. It is overwhelming, to be sure, but Brodsky and Olin are going full throttle.
As if the colleagues didn’t have enough to keep them busy during Brodsky’s “retirement” and Olin’s sabbatical year, they also produced an accompanying catalog to be published in November; advance copies will be available at select event venues. The cover is a single panel from a four-panel piece by Parastou Forouhar. A black damask fabric becomes a curtain, and from the folds of that chador emerges a single female hand, signifying the presence of a human body beneath.
Through the arts, Olin and Brodsky hope to provoke dialogue that will encourage a greater understanding and acceptance of a region that has been under the shadow of prejudice since 9/11.
The 15-mile New Brunswick- Princeton corridor is home to many Muslim and Middle Eastern immigrants, as well as a large Jewish community.
Brodsky cites the following statistics from the Arab American Institute, a public policy organization: New Jersey ranks fifth among Arab-American population centers. Egyptians represent the majority of Arab-Americans in the state; Lebanese and Syrian communities represent 18 percent each; and Palestinian expatriates make up 6 percent of New Jersey’s Arab community.
“Thanks to oppression, ethnophobia, and military conflict, precarity (an unpredictable condition that can affect well-being) is a daily experience for Middle Eastern peoples, especially Middle Eastern women and women of Middle Eastern descent, whose gender, ethnicity and religion compound the prejudices to which they are exposed,” write Brodsky and Olin in the catalog.
The title “Fertile Crescent” is intended to be ironic, a pun, say the organizers. The term was used by grade school teachers to describe the Middle East, where agriculture was said to have originated. The archaeologist James Henry Breasted first identified the early world of the Middle East and North Africa in 1906. Through his writings, people began to recognize the significance of the region in the development of language, agriculture, law, art and civilization.
The artists of Fertile Crescent do not want to be pigeonholed by national or religious identities. The work challenges Western stereotypes of Middle Eastern women as oppressed sexual objects, their bodies disappearing under veils. They have multiple identities as women, as Muslims, Christians, Jews, or other secular identity, and as members of the diaspora. Many live outside their country of origin.
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