From the Middle East, a Rarely Heard Chorus

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/nyregion/from-the-middle-east-a-rarely-heard-chorus.html

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NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J.

BEFORE visitors reach the sculpture by Laila Shawa of a female torso festooned with chains and a red grenade, part of an exhibition at the Mason Gross Galleries here, they are likely to be stopped in their tracks by a sound not often heard in art galleries.

It comes from “Jawbreaker,” a video near the entrance by the Turkish artist Ebru Ozsecen, showing a woman’s face in close-up as she slurps on a giant ball of candy.

The idea behind it is that “women in the East are often thought of as sexual beings by Western eyes — Westerners look at the East as a region of the world where there are either exotic women or candies, like Turkish delight,” said Judith K. Brodsky, who, with Ferris Olin, conceived, curated and produced “The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art and Society,” a sweeping exhibition in five locations along with other programs centering on contemporary arts by women with roots in the Middle East.

Besides the Mason Gross Galleries on the Rutgers University campus here, where the art can be seen through Sept. 9, the main exhibition is taking place (dates vary) at the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries at the Douglass Library at Rutgers; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Bernstein Gallery of the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and the Arts Council of Princeton. Other programs will be presented at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the West Windsor Arts Council, and public libraries in East Brunswick, New Brunswick and Princeton.

“Jawbreaker,” one of 14 videos mingled with photographs, sculptures and paintings at Mason Gross, represents the artist making a connection between the two ideas — the woman as exotic object in the eyes of the West, and the East as a source of sweets — Dr. Brodsky said, during a recent tour of the show. Similarly, Ms. Shawa’s female suicide-bomber sculpture, “Disposable Bodies No. 3: Point of Honor,” from the installation “The Other Side of Paradise,” juxtaposes “the stereotype of women as nurturers” and violence, Dr. Brodsky said. That — the bridges between multiple ideas — is a unifying theme, she said, among the 24 female artists from 11 countries, including Israel, Kuwait, Iran, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, who, combined, will show 120 works of art in various mediums before “The Fertile Crescent” closes in January.

“One of the things with Ebru’s work, like a lot of the work you’ll see in the shows, is that the artists are critical of their own culture. The way they feel is that their own cultures have been corrupted by consumer values. But at the same time, they’re critical of Western culture and the idea of Orientalism,” in which Westerners look at the East as subordinate, said Dr. Brodsky, 79, a Princeton resident.

Dr. Olin and Dr. Brodsky, longtime collaborators and both professors emerita at Rutgers, started planning “The Fertile Crescent” — the name plays off a term for Mesopotamia that they both learned in their elementary school geography classes — five years ago, after Dr. Olin attended the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey.

“I came back and told Judith we have to do something,” said Dr. Olin, 64, who also lives in Princeton. “The work I saw was beautiful, and I thought, if it’s unfamiliar to me, it’s probably unfamiliar to a lot of people in New Jersey and New York.”

The two had already set up a vehicle for ambitious exhibitions. In 2006, they co-founded the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers, a center focused on promoting equality and greater visibility for female artists. “The Fertile Crescent” is being presented under its auspices, together with the partner organizations.

The five years spent planning exhibitions and events, such as an Oct. 4 “Fertile Crescent” art walk through Princeton, including stops at the Arts Council of Princeton, the Princeton University Art Museum and a performance artwork by the Turkish-German artist Nezaket Ekici at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, was not without surprises for the organizers. In addition to obtaining grants, doing research and winnowing potential contributors — the key artists, several of whom will be on hand for talks during the project’s run, were selected from an initial pool of at least 200, Dr. Olin said — the organizers had to make allowances for unfolding events.

“We had the Arab Spring, and that impacted the work,” Dr. Brodsky said. “Some of it was subsumed by more current work,” reflecting changes in the region, she said.

But politics is only a component of what the collected artworks address, albeit an important one, Dr. Olin said. Gender issues, religion and the tentacles of heritage, problematic for many of the artists who were exiled from their native countries or who left voluntarily, like Ms. Ozsecen, who now lives in Munich, are also well represented.

And, just as important, they are distinct.

“There’s still a tendency of Americans to assume the Middle East falls under one unitary subject,” Dr. Brodsky said. One of the goals of “The Fertile Crescent” is to erase that perception.

“You can’t make broad generalizations,” Dr. Brodsky said. “It’s a major show, and one of the things that makes it groundbreaking is that the artists themselves have gotten more nuanced about the issues they’re looking at. Other exhibitions that have been done on the Middle East have come from a particular perspective of trying to find a theoretical base that will cover everything. What we’re trying to say is, you can’t do that. It’s a much more individualized situation. You can’t take one theoretical position about the Middle East and apply it across the board.”

That is one of the reasons Parastou Forouhar, 50, an Iranian-born photographer who has three works on display at the Princeton University Art Museum and the Bernstein Gallery, chose to participate.

“What I like about what they’re doing is they’re challenging presumptions,” said Ms. Forouhar, who lives in Frankfurt, Germany. “They’re emphasizing the differences of women from the Middle East. That was important to me.”

Because the geographic area in which the bulk of the programming for “The Fertile Crescent” takes place — a 15-mile corridor in central New Jersey — the organizers anticipate that many visitors will already have an understanding of the cultural distinctions when they go in.

“There’s a large Jewish population in the area, and New Jersey has the second-largest population outside of Detroit” of recent immigrants from the Middle East, Dr. Olin said. “They may not be familiar with the artists, but they’ll recognize that they’re creating from their own heritage.”

Those without ties to the Middle East are likely to be drawn “just by the quality of the artwork, simply because it’s beautiful,” Dr. Brodsky said.

“We have a slogan at Rutgers, which is ‘Jersey Roots, Global Reach.’ I think we’ve done the reverse with this project,” Dr. Olin said. “It’s ‘global roots, local reach.’ ”

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>For full details on “The Fertile Crescent” exhibition and other programs: fertile-crescent.org or (732) 932-3726.