Art Middle East (AME) will debut this week during Armory Arts Week in New York. It’s a program made up of exhibitions, studio visits, panel discussions, and collector tours in partnership with The Armory Show. Whitewall spoke with AME founder Nazy Nazhand before its debut to talk about the Middle East as an emerging market and how classifying artists geographically can lead to marginalization.
WHITEWALL: Why did you decide to found Art Middle East?
NAZY NAZHAND: I had been working with Artnet, was in the art scene and was really watching what was happening and emerging in the contemporary art world in the Middle East. Naturally, I had a very special interest in that as in I am from there and many of my friends are [Middle Eastern] artists that are here in New York and Europe. You could tell that the seeds were in place for this to be the next big thing. Little by little Iranian art it started getting ahead of the pack. It makes perfect sense starting with the fact that there are about 60 million people in Iran. There’s this very Westernized youth movement and there’s also this dictatorship and that of course is going to breed a lot of creativity with that kind of oppression and being censored and how do you translate that into art. Take that and combine it with Iranian cinema which was a strong force in the international scene a few years back and it was only natural a matter of time before the visual arts happened.
WW: Can being labeled a “new, emerging market” have a downside?
NN: I can only say, “Okay are these artists truly being nurtured the way they should be?” Labeling artists geographically ends up marginalizing them. There’s a big difference between me, an Iranian American who grew up here, and an Iranian artist who lives and works in Iran, and an Iranian artist who left before the revolution. You can’t put all of us in the same room and expect to find a very direct similarity. Its very difficult to do that, it shouldn’t be done that way. So my interest was how do we work with partners that are very much indeed mainstream contemporary art world and where do these artists fit independently? How is the art being measured against that?
WW: Is that why you wanted to debut Art Middle East during Armory Arts Week?
NN: The Armory Show seemed like a very natural next step. It’s a time when there’s so much focus in the art world here in New York—dealers and collectors and those who write about art, who look for art, it’s all happening now. The Armory has been amazing, they’re a fantastic group. From my very first conversation with them they got it, they knew where I was going with it and what I wanted to do. I’ve been very careful to narrowed down our program to 5 or 6 things only. I don’t want to introduce too many different things from too many different places at the same time. It’s about introducing a market and also putting the spotlight on amazing artists that are doing amazing things and that’s the long term goal of it. You’ll also get a chance to see New York based collectors who collect Western based work and work from the Middle East and see how these live next to each other just beautifully.
WW: Tell us about the artists you’ve chosen for the studio visits.
NN: In the future I’m going to highlight some of the more up and coming artists but these are artists who have been working for over 30 years, like Nabil Nahas. His studio is absolutely stunning in Chelsea. He’s very much an established artist without being termed “He’s Iranian or middle Eastern.” A lot of his work is going to be in the studio – work that was recently created to work that was shown a few years back to one of his first pieces from 1975. Same thing with Julia Mandle, a performance artist is Brooklyn and she did her series on Julia Mandle in Iraq in 2005 I believe. It’s the most haunting and visually arresting performance piece and she’s going to discuss parts of it and showcase it and she’s an American artist.
WW: On Thursday, March 4th at 4PM there will also be a panel discussion at The Armory Show’s Openforum Lounge called “Emergence Of A New World: Collecting Contemporary Art From The Middle East.” Who will be speaking and what can we look forward to in the discussion?
NN: Speaking at the panel are two artists: Diana Al-Hadid and Kamrooz Aram. They’re both New York based artists with a gallery in Chelsea. The dealers that are speaking are Thaddeus Ropac and Andreé Sfeir-Semler who are both exhibitors at The Armory Show. Thaddeus Ropac happens to represent three of the biggest Iranian artists that are out there. Andreé Sfeir-Semler has an amazing gallery in Hamburg and her space in Beirut that is truly an amazing experimental space. It is very much my intention to showcase these artists the way they co-exist in the contemporary art scene. No one is criticizing them, they’re not being marginalized, they’re not just being reduced to a region and that was my intention.
