PUBLICATION
“Between Affect and Concept: Nostalgia in Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture from the Middle East and North Africa”
by Laura Hindelang and Nadia Radwan
in Thomas Gartmann, Cristina Urchueguía, and Hannah Ambühl-Baur (eds.), Studies in the Arts II. Künste, Design und Wissenschaft im Austausch. Bielefeld: transcript, 2023.
Although the term “nostalgia” is becoming ever more present in art and architectural practices and their discourses, it has not yet been comprehensively defined, situated, and explicated in relation to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s cultural production. This lacuna encourages Laura Hindelang and Nadia Radwan to reflect on the relationship between nostalgia and long-established themes in this area of study, such as colonialism, nationalism, and orientalism, as well as more recent debates around movements such as Gulf Futurism. We investigate the ways in which nostalgia can challenge canons, theories, and methods, and how these in turn can be expanded and decolonized to adequately incorporate cultural productions from the MENA region, and in so doing we consider current discourses on global art histories and the decentering of Western art history.
This chapter resulted from the research seminar “Nostalgia and Belonging in Art and Architecture from the MENA Region,” spring 2021. The project was published on the academic blog Manazir, here.