To Avoid or to Embrace?: Wided Khadraoui

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To Avoid or To Embrace?

Wided Khadraoui

To Avoid or to Embrace?

March Meeting Papers

To Avoid or to Embrace?

Navigating and Negotiating Identity in the Global Art Market Wided Khadraoui

All views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Sharjah Art Foundation and its members.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Sharjah Art Foundation gratefully acknowledges permission granted to reproduce the copyrighted materials in this book. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyrighted material. The publishers apologise for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this publication.

MARCH MEETING 2021: UNRAVELLING THE PRESENT 12–21 March 2021 Organised by Sharjah Art Foundation President and Director Hoor Al Qasimi Vice President Nawar Al Qassimi MARCH MEETING 2021 PROGRAMME Conceived by Okwui Enwezor Realised by Hoor Al Qasimi Tarek Abou El Fetouh Ute Meta Bauer Salah M. Hassan Chika Okeke-Agulu Octavio Zaya ​ Programme Management Noora Al Mualla Wasan Yousif Programme Coordinators Ryan Inouye Jinan Coulter Lien Ismail Conference Coordinators Alia Al Amri Sana Haroon Nitin Alden Mathias Unnikrishnan Suresh

MARCH MEETING PAPERS Published by Department of Learning and Research Sharjah Art Foundation PO Box 19989, Sharjah United Arab Emirates www.sharjahart.org Editors Hoor Al Qasimi Noora Al Mualla Salah M. Hassan Managing Editors Ahmad Makia Wasan Yousif Coordinator Maria Mumtaz Editorial Consultants KMEC (Karen Marta, Todd Bradway, Madeline Gilmore) Design Dima Bittard Shaikha Al Maazmi Translator Mohamad Al Saadei Copy Editor Eti Bonn-Muller Printed in United Arab Emirates Publication © 2021, Sharjah Art Foundation Text © 2021, the author ISBN 978-9948-8694-2-9 For distribution and retail enquiries, please contact: publications@sharjahart.org Publications are available in SAF shops, located at Al Mureijah Square, the Flying Saucer and Arts Square in downtown Sharjah, UAE.

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n 2016, Saudi artist Nasser Al Salem exhibited his green neon art piece Arabi/ Gharbi (2016) in Jeddah as part of an avantgarde group of independent, unrepresented artists. They collectively rented an abandoned warehouse in the historical part of the city to showcase their work, calling their initiative ‘Al Hangar’.

The title of the artwork, Arabi/Gharbi, translates to ‘Arabic/Westerner’. In Arabic, the first letter of both words is differentiated only by a dot, which regularly flashes on and off.

Al Salem explained that his artwork was a comment on the current state of Saudi society, questioning the idea of ‘foreignness’ and how some individuals orient to the West whilst others to the East in a complex understanding of self, identity and global positioning.2 But Al Salem’s investigation into the categorisation of the ‘other’ is not new.

The ‘other’/minority identity is regularly on a pendulum, swinging between a tool of selfempowerment and a constricting label used to pigeonhole work created by artists from historically overlooked and undervalued regions and groups.

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The pigeonholing and diluting of complex identities is usually part of the forced conciliation that comes with wider recognition of minority artists. Ethnic classification, either externally imposed or intrinsically engendered, often defines people’s membership to a group.

The ease with which the adjective ‘other’ generated the verb ‘to other’ in recent decades is indicative of the usefulness, power and currency of a term that now occupies an important position in feminist, postcolonial, civil rights and sexual identity discourses.

In response to art-market trends, exhibition models exemplify prevailing models of Westernbased interaction with non-white artists.

Western interest in artworks from the region is at a high, but that can be a double-edged sword.

Artwork is selected, elevated or excluded, based on preordained standards. By positioning themselves as ‘mediators of cultural exchange’, the Western art world forces artists to stage ‘authenticity’ and to insist on the configuration of a particular cultural image.3 Most exhibitions organised by Western institutions only pay lip service to non-Western artists.

Curator and arts writer Maura Reilly reasons in her book, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, that the unfortunate reality is that the art world remains a stronghold of straight white males, whose patronage, curation and art-making result in a hierarchy that dominates exhibitions, galleries, collections and auction houses. In other words, ‘the so-called “global”

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art market is really not global at all: its signifier is always the West – the privileged centre of control’.4 It’s an unpalatable truth of the art market: whilst minority artists are enjoying greater representation, patrons from Europe and North America predominantly remain the ones who are selling and buying – and later curating and displaying their work.

Traditional gatekeepers of power who previously set the benchmarks of success are currently being eroded; the subtle ways their power operates in these contexts are being undermined.

Technology plays a massive role in creating alternative sites of creation and dissemination, where historically important art centres can potentially find their contemporary match in creating new hubs of cultural importance.

An integral part of the art market’s counternarrative includes stories from the periphery of the art world – from non-profit spaces, collective platforms, regional galleries and art fairs – that create satellites to this mainstream art world, and thus bring what was previously in the margins into the centre through their programming.

Efforts to expand the art market ecosystem to include a wider and more globally diverse group of artists, gallerists, curators and cultural workers are already underway. Collector taste is, undeniably, a driving force, fuelling art-business enterprises, exhibition projects and museum acquisitions. The changing and restructuring of the art market in accordance with buyer demand will also lead to changes in both academic and non-profit fields.

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If marginalisation is defined as the exclusion of certain cultural groups from the Western-centric art world, then the opportunity to see and value the art of the marginalised has triggered larger ideological shifts. This disruption is precisely what is currently helping to dismantle the mainstream art market.

The Other

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ismantling the binary of choosing either to be ‘othered’ or assimilated is an age-old issue, and a globalised art market creates perfect conditions for being othered. Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude LéviStrauss proposed that throughout human history, people have employed two strategies in dealing with ‘the other’ – the foreign, the deviant or the stranger. The first strategy is to incorporate them, as in the case of cannibalism, eliminating any boundaries between the same and the other.

The second is to expel and exclude them (‘spit them out’) by erecting strong boundaries and special institutions in which they are kept in isolation. These strategies can be observed in many contemporary situations.

The performative nature of cross-cultural exchanges is a central, problematic tenant in blocking genuinely inclusive cross-cultural exchanges. Reilly questions, ‘By bringing artists and marginal centers of art to the preview of the West, are mainstream curators simply constructing the conditions for a new

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appropriation of the Other by the West?’5 Money is a critical point – in her book, Reilly goes on to say that it’s equally problematic that ‘most cross-cultural exhibitions are financed and organized by institutions in the privileged centers, which is to say that an unequal divide is established between the curating culture and the curated culture’.6 Race, ethnicity and visual culture are inextricably linked and present a rich site for artists to actively engage with – or ignore – when creating their art. Whilst some artists want to be referred to simply as ‘artists’, without a qualifying racial identifier, others place their racial identity and their experience at the centre of their practice, challenging the established cultural stereotypes and generalisations. Identity is a complex construct, and art institutions and markets play a role in creating and responding to identities and are, thus, constantly in flux.

Using a perverse example to highlight paradoxical shifts of cultural power: the recent global art market interest in Orientalist paintings is mostly due to buyers from the Middle East. Most transactions and record prices can be attributed to private or institutional buyers originally from or based in the Middle East and, to a lesser degree, North Africa, after nearly half a century of art-world indifference.

How do we explain a regional collector spending a fortune – €2.5 million in 2008 for an 1876 painting, Femme circassienne voilée, by JeanLéon Gérôme (who Sotheby’s named amongst

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the greatest of all Orientalist painters)7 – to acquire a stereotypical, supposedly disparaging representation of their own society?8 The shifting conversation also encompasses contemporary artists, such as multimedia Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil, whose colourised photographs re-appropriate Orientalism with controversial subjects and are now part of global private and public art collections, clearly showcasing Orientalism 2.0 as part of an assimilated art world. Nabil’s artwork specially deals with breaking both antiquated Orientalist stereotypes as well as regional, specific taboos surrounding gender and sexuality. His artwork, which epitomises these identities as markers, is only one of many facets of the phenomenon of the art market and what makes art sell.

Art dealing is a notoriously closed scene, one with long-lasting effects, and the subtle powers behind-the-scenes – those who get to be included in the stakeholder conversations – as well as what ends up merely performative matter tremendously. The strategy of regaining control of the discourse on the self is an integral part of the regional art scene discourse.

‘Until we have a seat at the table, this is going to continue to be an exclusive club… We are not playing on a level playing field’, said San Francisco dealer Karen Jenkins-Johnson in a June 2020 interview with The New York Times on systemic racism in the art market sector,9 considering her twenty-four years of navigating the global art market as a Black gallery owner.

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Regarding recent efforts of galleries to diversify their rosters by taking on minority artists, she states that it does little to address structural racism in the market whilst still selling their work to predominantly white clients.10 Minority artists’ classification often defines their salability in the art market and, by extension, their role in the art world.

Museum studies showcase the high level of porousness between the choices of private art collectors and the shaping of public tastes.11 Private collections are instrumental in shaping the content and contours of a given museum’s collections; these acquisition choices are strongly influenced by donors and, more crucially, art dealers.12 These issues point to the changing context of art-making, curating, exhibiting and buying – it is contingent on an evolving world that is restructuring the status quo.

Commodification of the Other

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he global art market has a tendency to co-opt social issues into an asset for the wealthy. The art market’s system of value has been built on principles of exclusion and ownership. Many of the most commercially successful and critically established minority artists are represented by white gallerists, who have connections to important white and Western collectors.

Piergiorgio Pepe, founder of the consultancy firm Quantum Ethics, who teaches a course

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on ethics in the art market at Sciences Po university in Paris, believes that a key issue is that power in the art world is still held in the hands of a few, the ‘network of undue influence’.13 Pepe’s claim that the power in the art industry is still held by a coveted few can also be observed in public institutions. In a July 2020 opinion piece for Hyperallergic, David Balzer, writer, editor and educator, discussed the persistence of structural racism in cultural organisations: ‘the culture of cultural philanthropy – is a bastion of whiteness’.14 Whilst Balzer speaks specifically on the Canadian cultural landscape, the influence of money ‘doing the heavy lifting’ when upholding systemic racism is, undoubtedly, an inherent part of the West’s cultural landscape. He argues that the primary job of presidents, directors and CEOs at cultural institutions is to liaise and raise money, and this money is perceived to come primarily or exclusively from white liberals.

Since institutions rely on philanthropists and collectors, who, in turn, deal with art handlers who share the same class privilege, cultural clout remains cloistered in a small group of individuals. There have been some calls for galleries and artists ‘…to “dissent” from the fairs and auctions system that exhausts rather than supports them’.15 As the global art industry reconfigures to align with very narrowly defined notions of ‘diversity’, there will be an increase in opportunities for an artist’s identity and race to be manipulated to angle for bigger sales and validation through

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commercial success. The line between the non-profit art world and trade has always been blurred, and recent art fair trends around diversity provide insight into a notoriously opaque world.

Middle East Contemporary Art Market

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he art market is a huge global industry, currently valued at approximately $64 billion USD.16 The Middle East contributed a sum of $92.7 billion USD to the global art market in 2018, a figure predicted to rise to $111 billion USD by 2023.17

Historically, nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings by European artists such as JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme, featuring semi-clothed concubines in harems and swarthy men in turbans, were the only representations of the East in the West. The previously nameless and faceless of the region now have their own platform that goes beyond Arabic calligraphy, Islamic motifs and decorative arts.

Nowadays, Arab contemporary works have established their place in the international scene.

They are found in major European exhibitions, museums and global cultural institutions.

This expansion has been accompanied by the emergence of scenes and contemporary art fairs in Arab countries. Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Tunis and Marrakech each have their own annual events. In 2017, Christie’s Middle

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Eastern art sale in Dubai generated more than $8 million USD and set new world auction records for eighteen artists from the region.18 Yet, despite the rise in interest in the region’s art market, location is still crucial in actual impact on the global art market. According to The Art Market 2020, an annual global art market analysis report published by Art Basel and UBS, sales of galleries based in North America remained the largest market worldwide, with an estimated 44 per cent of the global art market.

The report analyses different segments, such as gallery business, auction houses, changing patterns of global wealth and art collecting, art fairs, online sales and the economic impact of the art market in general, to provide a comprehensive overview of the art market. The report also found that 28 per cent of global art fairs were hosted in the United States, whilst 51 per cent of art fair events took place in Europe and only 3 per cent were held in the Middle East.

The market reflects re-evaluations that have been going on for some time in the art world, notably in museums and cultural institutions.

Driven by seismic shifts in cultural politics, curators and scholars have been challenging the fixity of the West’s artistic canon. Part of that confrontation includes reinstating talent from a range of communities and cultures traditionally overlooked or underrepresented.

Driven by increased patronage of museums and rapidly developing art-market structures in the Middle East, Sotheby’s reported that the number

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of regional clients participating in its global sales rose by 76 per cent over the 2012–17 period. In the UAE, participation is up by 175 per cent.19 The growth in demand is creating a virtuous circle that will support the development of regional art. Additionally, the increase in an institutional and historical interest and reevaluation of these contemporary artists is having a wider impact. Previously undervalued artists gain more attention when their predecessors are incorporated into the broader discourse.

Yet, this new international attention does come with a caveat. In 2017, Yale University in the US hosted a two-day symposium titled, ‘Writing/ Curating the Middle East’, and invited curators and art historians to propose new discourses on art from the region. Sultan Al Qassemi, writer and founder of Barjeel Art Foundation, an independent art space in the UAE, highlighted the issue of regional visibility within the region.

In discussing the role of museums in facilitating the display of modern art of the Middle East and the division of contemporary art from its predecessors within the museum space, Al Qassemi highlighted the issue of historical entanglement and local visibility, stating, ‘[W] e must allow Middle Eastern work to be shown throughout the region itself and not only within the US and Europe’.20 By highlighting the need for context, Al Qassemi reminds us that focussing exclusively on the commercial aspect of the market’s recuperation

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is not enough. We must also keep in mind how private collecting can affect public taste with pivotal influence in the cultural non-profit sector as well on local audiences.

The New Normal Contemporary Art Scene

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egional artists, gallerists and institutions have managed to generate international and regional press, artwork sales and increased power by harnessing the power of digital. The last decade has seen the emergence of many 1.0 digital tools and platforms for engaging with art online – everything from sales platforms for galleries, collectors and auction houses to more open access to global conversations around art movements and trends.

The impact of COVID-19 has fast-forwarded efforts to engage audiences digitally. Art galleries have been scrambling to figure out how to stay in business as travel has been restricted.

Whilst websites have displayed a cursory digital portfolio of artwork and social media has been used to promote exhibitions, the pandemic has forced a different type of engagement. A digital-first world affects not only how artwork is presented, but also how relationships in a historically insular world are forged.

Art dealing has traditionally been an in-person exercise. Relationships between dealers, curators and collectors are forged at myriad art fairs and events globally. Buyers usually want

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to see the artwork before they invest. This is no longer the reality, and the market reflects this new normal.

Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s experienced a 79 per cent revenue drop in the second quarter of 2020. Despite the auction houses organising hundreds of online sales in the wake of cancelled spring auctions, they weren’t enough to make up for lost revenue. In a report from London art market analytics firm Pi-eX, as reported by Art Market Monitor, it wasn’t until June 2020, with the launch of the firms’ live hybrid sales, that numbers began to bounce back – around 85 per cent of Q2’s revenue came during that month.21 From large international museums to galleries and arts organisations, the art community is getting creative with how its members share their collections and programmes with the world, and widening their scope. Galleries and art fairs have had to redesign their websites, adding online viewing rooms. Art Dubai’s Planetary Feed, for instance, has been gathering special reports, interviews and insights from the Art Dubai community, including a recent report focussing on non-profit art foundations in the Global South. There now seems to be a more concerted effort in the region to highlight genuine inclusivity and conversations between non-historical art hubs.22 The 2020 virtual edition of Art Dubai showcased ninety galleries from thirty-nine countries, one of the most diverse art fairs globally.23

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We are now entering a 2.0 version of the art world online where artists, and their work, are increasingly accessible to a globalised market with artists increasingly at the helm.

Investigating the role that technology plays in disseminating increasingly commodified artists’ stories is central to understanding new models of engagement and power dynamics. Technology plays an extensive role in how regional artists are marketed/market themselves in order to sell. In the era of #woke culture identity, politics is a powerful tool to sell to the masses on a variety of platforms.

There has been a reckoning in the art world over the past few months. The economic and social upheaval imposed by restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has been coupled with global protests and public outcries against institutional racism and police brutality against the African diaspora.

The art world, which reckons itself as part of the progressive front line, was not exempt from this global reckoning. Letters from arts organisations and galleries, pledging their commitment to diversity, have been met with a backlash spotlighting the global mainstream sector’s almost exclusively white makeup.

Many organisations, in response to external pressures, increased attention and, quite frankly, an interest in a wider potential client base, are attempting to take responsibility, and have publicly committed to restructuring. According to an interview with The Art Newspaper,

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Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips have all set up diversity panels and task forces to field concerns over internal racism, with goals for hiring more BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) staff.24 The historical omission of people of colour from the global art sector has had devastating sociological implications, and offers an incomplete narrative of the world’s shared creative histories. Discriminatory and oppressive sector practices, as well as elements of cultural appropriation and commodification, have left a lot of space for improvement.

The Future Landscape

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he relationship between museums, art history and the social realities of racial prejudice and identity today will only get more complex. Given the multifactorial layers of identity in a global era – the boundlessness of individual diasporic and transcultural identities – how does contemporary art challenge our institutions and art history?

What would the art sector look like if it were neither culturally specific nor pretending to be universal in a way that is homogenising?

Karim Sultan, curator and director of Barjeel Art Foundation in the UAE, co-curated an international travelling exhibition in 2010, along with Mandy Merzaban, of modern art from the Arab World. Sultan highlighted the difference of judgement between the narrative of European

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artists and Arab artists travelling for their work (inspiration versus derivation) in an interview when asked what happens when ‘you put the center in a different place’.25 The same question stands for the art market.

Part of the art world’s counter-narrative features stories from the periphery of the art world, from community centres, regional galleries and community colleges that create roving satellites to this mainstream art world, and bring the margins into the centre through their programming. In order to shake up the art world’s structures, regional collectors, museums, galleries, platforms and studios can model cultural alternatives, challenge dominant discourses and exhibit new narratives by centring in the cultural zones of consumption those who have been excluded from it.

Part of that rearrangement should include a move towards self-reliance and a self-contained ecosystem. The Middle East and North Africa are well poised to unsettle an existing Eurocentric narrative of history and study of art and to welcome a new polycentric approach to art that is focussed on embracing non-Western cultural histories and self-referential practices.

In the words of late renowned critic and curator Okwui Enwezor, curator of the 2021 Sharjah Biennial, ‘[I]f we have an open mind, Western art doesn’t have to be seen in opposition to art from elsewhere, but can be seen in a dialogue that helps protect the differences and decisions that present the material circumstances and

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conditions of production in which artists fashion their view of what enlightenment can be’.26 It is in that open dialogue that fundamental questions about shifting margins, globalisation and nuanced identity can then be genuinely inclusive parts of reconfiguring the canon and the contemporary art sector.

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Endnotes 1 Title: Priska Neely (producer), ‘To Avoid Or to Embrace? How Actors Navigate Stereotypes’, audio podcast, 1 May 2013, https:// www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/05/01/180083329/ToAvoid-Or-To-Embrace-How-Actors-Navigate-Stereotypes.

2 Myrna Ayad, ‘With Al Hangar, 15 Young Artists Are Changing the Face of the Saudi Art Scene’, Artsy, 29 February 2019, https://www. artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-15-young-artists-are-changingthe-face-of-the-saudi-art-scene.

3 G. Mosquera, ed., Beyond the Fantastic: Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995).

4 Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018).

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Author unknown. ‘Orientalism through the Eyes of Jean-Léon Gérôme and his Pupils’, April 30 2019, https://www.sothebys. com/en/slideshows/orientalism-through-the-eyes-of-jean-leongerome-and-his-pupils.

8 Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33–59.

9 Robin Pogrebin, ‘Black Gallerists Press Forward Despite a Market That Holds Them Back’, The New York Times, 21 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/arts/design/art-baselblack-owned-galleries.html.

10 Margaret Carrigan, ‘How the art industry is grappling with its systemic race inequality’, The Art Newspaper, 10 July 2020, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/art-industry-systemicracial-inequality.

11 Dominique Poulot, ‘Musées, collections, collectionneurs’, Musées et collections: pour une histoire de la patrimonialité, Histoire de l’art, 2008 (62), 3–9.

12 François Pouillon and J. Vatin, eds., After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publisher, 2014), DOI: https://doi. org/10.1163/9789004282537.

13 Francesca Gavin, ‘The only way is ethics: The art world’s “networks of undue influence”’, The Art Newspaper, 7 June 2019, https://www. theartnewspaper.com/analysis/the-only-way-is-ethics.

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14 David Blazer, ‘The Persistence of Structural Racism in Canadian Cultural Institutions’, Hyperallergic, 29 July 2020, https:// hyperallergic.com/577899/the-persistence-of-structural-racismin-canadian-cultural-institutions/.

15 Margaret Carrigan, ‘How the art industry is grappling with its systemic racial inequality’, The Art Newspaper, 10 July 2020 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/art-industry-systemicracial-inequality.

16 Published by Statista Research Department, ‘Art Market Worldwide Statistics & Facts’, Stastita, 26 October 2020, https:// www.statista.com/topics/1119/art-market/.

17 Published by Statista Research Department, ‘Contribution of the Middle East to the global art market in 2018 and 2023’, October 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1063134/middle-eastart-market-contribution/.

18 Zahraa Alkhalisi, ‘Dubai’s art market is hotter than ever’, CNN Money, 13 April 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/04/12/news/ economy/dubai-art-boom/index.html.

19 Ibid.

20 Alejandro Nodarse, ‘Writing/Curating the Middle East’, review of the live event, Yale MacMillan Center, 12 April 2017, https://cmes. macmillan.yale.edu/news/writingcurating-middle-east.

21 Justin Kamp, ‘Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s experienced a 79 per cent revenue drop in the second quarter of 2020’, Artsy, 6 August 2020, https://www.artsy.net/news/artsy-editorialchristies-phillips-sothebys-experienced-79-percent-revenuedrop-second-quarter-2020.

22 Planetary Feed (March 2020). Retrieved from https://www. artdubai.ae/planetary-feed/.

23 Art Dubai 2020, https://www.artdubai.ae/wp-content/ uploads/2019/11/AD2020_GALLERIES-LIST.pdf.

24 Margaret Carrigan, ‘How the art industry is grappling with its systemic racial inequality’, The Art Newspaper, 10 July 2020, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/art-industry-systemicracial-inequality.

25 Melissa Gronlund, ‘Barjeel Art Foundation Curators Reflect on the West’s Reaction to Arab Art’, The National News, 13 May 2018, https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/art/barjeel-artfoundation-curators-reflect-on-the-west-s-reactions-to-arabart-1.729911.

26 Andrew Russeth, ‘Okwui Enwezor, Pivotal Curator of Contemporary Art, Is Dead at 55’, ARTnews, 15 March 2019, https://www.artnews. com/art-news/news/okwui-enwezor-dead-55-12150/.

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Biography Writer and art manager Wided Rihana Khadraoui works at the intersection of contemporary art and its production, research practice and development theory in the Middle East and North Africa. She works with museums and cultural institutions to integrate digital strategy to help create future cultural institutions.

She writes on art, culture and politics and her articles include ‘Don’t Forget the Women Who Forged Saudi Arabia’s Art Scene’ (artsy.net, 2018); ‘Arguing Semantics: What Exactly is “Arab Art”?’ (Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C. 2017); and ‘Art in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’ (ArtAsiaPacific magazine, 2015).

She speaks regularly at industry conferences on the subject of technology and diversity in the arts, especially on technology’s potential to foster the inclusion of non-traditional and historically undervalued stakeholders in the creative sector.

Khadraoui has produced several cultural events, including Art Riyadh, the city’s first art fair dedicated to unrepresented artists, as well as international communication campaigns and public programmes for Saudi Design Week. She is also an instructor at the Node Center for Curatorial Studies and the Abu Dhabi Curatorial Programme.

Khadraoui founded and directed Tazuri Projects, a digital-first curatorial platform focusing on the professional development of minority artists until 2020, before switching her efforts to helping integrate digital strategy with overall goals of cultural institutions.

She holds an MA in Art and Cultural Enterprise from Central Saint Martins, London (2018), and an MSc from the London School of Economics in Comparative Politics (2010).

March Meeting Papers March Meeting Papers is a series of essays selected from Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting 2021 Open Call, which invited artists, writers and thinkers to expand on curator Okwui Enwezor’s influential thinking about the biennial as a platform to engage with history, politics and society. Taken together, the series reveals the extent to which the biennial, such as the Sharjah Biennial now celebrating its 30th anniversary, has contributed to the realisation of new narratives and experiences of modern and contemporary art.

Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting is an annual convening of artists, curators and art practitioners from around the world who come together to discuss vital issues in contemporary art during a programme of panels, performances and events. The 2021 edition examines the thirty-year history of the Sharjah Biennial by bringing together former Biennial curators, participants and interlocutors as well as art historians and critics to discuss its role as a catalyst for critical dialogue and transnational exchange.

The World in Which We Find Ourselves Grace Aneiza Ali The ‘Free-floating’ Srinagar Biennale Melissa Carlson Art Biennials and the Mediterranean Conundrum Chiara Cartuccia Karachi Biennale 2019 Samina Iqbal Hatshepsut the Drag Queen Sarah Johnson The Biennials in Pakistan Sadia Kamran To Avoid or to Embrace? Navigating and Negotiating Identity in the Global Art Market Wided Khadraoui On the Verge of Now: The Crisis of the Future and the Urgencies of the Present in Contemporary Art Biennials Sabrina Moura Redefining the Art Institution’s Role: Democratic Art-Centric and Digital Approaches Silke Schmickl Against Art History Sadia Shirazi Lost Horizons: Revisiting CAMP’s Indian Ocean Projects Murtaza Vali

Sharjah Art Foundation March Meeting Papers March Meeting Papers is a series of essays selected from Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting 2021 Open Call, which invited artists, writers and thinkers to expand on curator Okwui Enwezor’s influential thinking about the biennial as a platform to engage with history, politics and society.

‘To Avoid or to Embrace?’ addresses the objectification of Middle Eastern and North African artists in the Western-centric art sector. The essay offers an opportunity to expand the art market ecosystem by encouraging the inclusion of minority artists, gallerists, curators, cultural workers and spaces operated by people of colour.

Wided Khadraoui​is a writer and art manager based in Riyadh.

sharjahart.org

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