Held in conjunction with the exhibition All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, this panel will feature scholars and curators who will speak to one of the central concepts of the Baghdad Modern Art Group: istilham al-turath.
Organized by Lara Fresko Madra featuring Saleem Al Bahloly, Alma Chaouachi, Clare Davies, and Anneka Lenssen.
A founding principle of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, istilham al-turath “encouraged innovation through Iraq’s unique history and heritage and also presented a means of counteracting Europe’s dominance over modernism,” as scholar Tiffany Floyd has written. Discussing case studies from the exhibition as well as geographically expanding the reach of istilham al-turath, the panel investigates how artists negotiated modernism and nationalism in relation to tradition, influence, inspiration, and transformation.
This is a 90-minute panel with four 15-minute presentations and a Q&A.
All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group is curated by Nada Shabout, Regents Professor at the University of North Texas and Visiting Professor and Investigator at NYU Abu Dhabi, with Tiffany Floyd, Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of North Texas. The exhibition is organized at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, by Lauren Cornell, Artistic Director, with exhibition design by Ian Sullivan, Director of Exhibitions. Zuhra Amini (CCS Bard ’25) and Truth Murray-Cole (CCS Bard ‘26) contributed curatorial research and editorial support to the project.
Topics and biographies
Anneka Lenssen, “Assembly Artists”
“This paper engages the models of art and recursivity found in the 1951 manifesto of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art from the point of view of the wartime acts of hospitality extended by artists in Baghdad over the period 1941 and 1944 (a period of British reoccupation that brought many foreign artists to the city in uniform) to a small cohort of Polish post-Impressionist painters. One feature of these interactions, I show, was a rethinking of the material status of “ancestors’ early efforts”—to quote the (Baghdad Modern Art Group) manifesto—by means of new assembly logics of articulation and reticulation. While they worked under the sign of ever-deferred liberal freedoms, leading artists in Baghdad cared little for problems of medium specificity. Theirs was an ethical project of reassessed connections, and it traversed sculpture, painting, archaeological objects, and art historical narratives alike.”
Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press 2020) and co-editor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (MoMA, 2018). Presently she is at work on a book she hopes can be titled Modernism in the Breach: Baghdad, 1941-1945.
Saleem Al Bahloly, “The Fertility Paradigm: Thirty-Five Years Later Shakir Hassan Al Sa'id Re-reads Jewad Selim’s Children Playing”
“The concept of istilham al-turath opened the practice of modern art in Iraq to a succession of different sources—decorative crafts, Assyrian reliefs, manuscript illustration, folk painting, Arabic writing, etc.—but Shakir Hassan Al Said’s encounter with prehistoric pottery at the beginning of the 1980s brought about a decisive shift in his practice and in that of his students by providing a model of the artwork in relation to the environment. This pottery was painted with human figures and animals moving in a square-formation that, in the historiography developed around the pottery, was tied to the birth of a concept of fertility: an invisible life-giving power that operates behind the appearances of nature.
During the 1980s, as Al Said was developing his ideas about the environment and fertility, he went back to Jewad Selim’s painting, Children’s Games (1953). He argued that it was the first work where Selim made the "Sumerian turn,” and he re-interpreted that turn, with its use of geometric shapes, in light of the concept of fertility to suggest that these forms had some vital content. This presentation describes the inspiration that Shakir Hassan Al Said found in prehistoric pottery in the early 1980s and highlights the re-reading of Children’s Games (1953) that came from that inspiration.”
Saleem Al-Bahloly is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the American University of Beirut, where he researches and teaches the history of art in the Middle East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Clare Davies, “Histories of Reclaiming Arab Artistic Heritage: The Baghdad Modern Art Group in Context”
“When the Baghdad Modern Art Group issued its first manifesto in 1951, it drew upon a concept central to the emergence of modern art in the Arab world over the first half of the 20th century. Artists were to draw inspiration from local cultural and artistic heritage to develop an art that was both true to its roots and fully modern. This presentation situates this concept of istilham al-turath as it was articulated in mid-20th century Baghdad in the context of its emergence in Egypt some decades earlier and its evolution during the Cold War as former colonial territories in the region gained independence. While this approach often informed artists’ choice of subject or style, it also helped shape how artists and others understood the fundamental nature, or ontological basis of the modern work of Arab art.”
Clare Davies joined the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met in 2015 as the museum’s first curator of art from the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey. Since then, she has built the foundations of The Met’s collection holdings in these areas, acquiring major works from across the region and curating exhibitions. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and devoted her dissertation to thinking through the methodological demands of the colonial and postcolonial site on art history in a study of 19th and 20th century art in Egypt.
Alma Chaouachi (CCS Bard ‘26), "The Politics of Heritage: Postcolonial Imaginaries of l'École de Tunis”
“Istilhām al-turāth—seeking inspiration from heritage—has had echoes beyond Baghdad, tracing parallels and divergent negotiations of heritage across the Maghreb, with a focus here on Tunisia in the late 1940s and 1950s. In this period, l’École de Tunis positioned itself at the center of Tunisian modern art, often celebrated as a pioneering collective. Yet its project was marked by tensions: between inherited colonial frameworks and emerging national identities, between the search for authenticity—what was then called “Tunisianité”—and the universalist claims of modernism. Unlike the Baghdad Modern Art Group, which turned to Mesopotamian heritage to articulate a distinctly local modernity, Tunisian artists worked within and against a colonial system that placed Paris’s idea of modernity as a measure of value, even as they sought new visual vocabularies to express national aspirations and postcolonial futures.
By placing Baghdad and Tunis side by side, I ask: how does istilhām al-turāth translate across geographies, and what kinds of fractures or blind spots emerge in these processes? What do these case studies reveal about the politics of heritage and modernity in the SWANA region? Ultimately, I suggest that the question of heritage is less about continuity or rupture, and more about the shifting conditions under which artists claimed, reworked, or understood “tradition” in relation to both local realities and the gravitational pull of the West.”
Alma Chaouachi is a French-Tunisian art historian and cultural worker, whose research focuses on contemporary practices in the SWANA region and its diaspora. After two years of Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Ecoles, she completed a Bachelor’s degree and a research Master’s in art history at La Sorbonne. She then has worked as a studio manager, and more closely with Randa Maroufi with whom she still collaborates, devoting time to reflection and research on common concerns. She next worked at KADIST in Paris, as Programs Manager, and is currently completing an M.A. in curatorial studies at CCS Bard, NY. Chaouachi has also run individual research projects in collaboration with other artists and researchers such as Moad Musbahi and Sara Bouzgarrou through l’Art Rue in Tunisia, and wrote for multiple artists from the diaspora.
