Across Cultures and Beyond

Zarina, Home Is a Foreign Place, 1999

Born in Aligarh in 1937, she grew up in a Muslim family before leaving for Karachi following the Partition of India in 1947. She later returned to Aligarh, where she studied mathematics, before marrying a diplomat. Through this, she lived and worked across several cities, including Bangkok, Paris, and Tokyo, where she developed her printmaking practice. In 1977, she settled in New York City, where she remained until her passing in 2020.

It traces the development of modern art across different centres in the Arab world, including Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad, each shaped by distinct historical and political conditions.

Rather than presenting a single narrative, it moves across contexts, showing how these scenes evolved in parallel and in relation to one another.

It moves through artistic movements, country-specific trajectories, and institutional contexts, while also examining how Arab artists engaged with and responded to Western modernism, and how the history of the region’s art has been written and understood.

Here, “Arab art” is approached not as a religious category or an externally defined geography, but as a cultural framework shaped from within the region itself.

What becomes clear is that modern Arab art is not fixed. It is formed through movement, exchange, and negotiation between local conditions and wider global influences.