This page Pieces by Turkish fashion collection Dice Kayek at The V&A Museum, London (top) and social designer Florie Salnot’s collection of jewelry (bottom) Opposite page Najla El Zein Studio’s “The Wind Portal”
A place for Middle Eastern artists in the grand museums of Europe and America
Headlines tell of how Middle Eastern works are being enthusiastically snapped up by the Euro-American world of international contemporary art. While this sort of attention may be better than none, many artistic producers from Arab countries are more interested in the weightier credibility and collaborative potential that engagement from canon-building museums can bring. Over the past decade, museums such as Tate Modern and LACMA have developed active curatorial policies for art and design from
the region, but such programs are still in their relative infancy. In the UK, the British Museum was the first to begin collecting contemporary Arab art, led by Venetia Porter since the ‘80s. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and Tate Modern opened comparable collections. Miriam Lloyd-Evans works alongside Porter in her role as head of international engagement for the Middle East. She explains that one issue is that these museums 199 A