28 March - 22 April '07

IMAGES FROM THE ARAB WORLD

NAZAR: Arab Photography
An exhibition of the Nooderlicht Foundation, Netherlands
Curated by Wim Melis
Presented by the National Museum of Singapore

NAZAR — Arabic for seeing, insight, reflection — is a striking look at life in the Arab world through the eyes of 18 Arab and Western photographers. From lavish weddings in Morocco, new progressive elites of Lebanon, unique rooftops of Cairo to divine pilgrimages in Mecca, the 2 video installations and 119 contemporary and historical photographs sketch a kaleidoscopic portrait of a culture often misunderstood by outsiders.

In the West, the Arab world has become synonymous with strife and violence. Terrorist attacks, the war in Iraq, Israel-Palestine conflict and the struggle between modernists and fundamentalists: these dominate the pages of foreign news media. But how representative is this Western image of a region comprising 22 countries, spanning from Morocco in the west to Oman in the east and from Syria in the north to Sudan in the south?

How do Arab photographers see their society and themselves? How do they use the medium of photography?

Working in a context laden with politics and culturally defined rules, the photographers in this exhibition express themselves and their culture in pictures as poetic as they are confrontational. The result is a photographic narrative of a world that outsiders assume knowledge of, but few understand.

While the Western photographers avail themselves of a hard, documentary approach, their Arab counterparts wrap their critique in a more personal and poetic style of photography.

An intimate picture of everyday life in the Arab world reveals itself here; a picture that too often remains hidden behind the headlines.