The exhibition explores a different history of modern art, illuminated by a wealth ofhistorical audio and visual archive material. Organised chronologically, it begins in 1908, the year in which the Lebanese poet and artist Gibran Khalil Gibran arrived in Paris and the opening of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Cairo. The period ended in 1988, with the first exhibition devoted to contemporary Arab artists at the Institut du Monde Arabe (officially opened a few months earlier) in Paris and with the exhibition Singuliers: bruts ou naïfs, featuring among others Moroccan artist Chaïbia Tallal and Tunisian artist Jaber Al-Mahjoub, at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. As art historian Silvia Naef writes in the catalogue for the Arab Presences exhibition at the MAM, "How can we create a modern Arab art? A real aesthetic project was set up in the course of the 20th century, one that broke away from academic art, echoed the Western avant-gardes and was conceived within the framework of a specific national identity, without returning to an Islamic art form.
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