It is striking to note that Iraq and Egypt were the driving force in the emergence of modernity in the Arab artistic scenes since the 1930s. As the exhibition "Picasso and the Arab Vanguard" shows, these two countries were the cradle of the first Arab manifestos proposing to build a modern Arab art and to reject academicism imported from the West. The awareness of a history of its own following the archaeological rediscoveries of the beginning of the century and a favorable local and international political context partly explain that this movement - which will eventually win the entire Arab world - left Iraq and Egypt. This is what this round table will show through the interventions of Francesca Rondinelli for Egypt and Zouina Aït Slimani for Iraq.
The interveners

Francesca Rondinelli
Francesca Rondinelli is Scientific Advisor at Zamân Books & Curating (monograph «Ramses Younan: The Share of Sand»; exhibition «Monaco-Alexandria: le grand detour. Cities-worlds and cosmopolitan surrealism», New National Museum of Monaco until May 2, 2022). Doctor of the University Grenoble Alpes and author of an interdisciplinary thesis on the birth of avant-gardes in Egypt, she is responsible for the archives of Georges Henein. A specialist in the work of Joyce Mansour, she works on publishing the correspondences of these authors and continues her research around the Egyptian Allophone press.
Zouina Aït-Slimani
PhD student at the ENS/ University of Geneva, with the thesis topic: Art criticism in Iraq (1931-1982): At the heart of the discursive, transnational and social construction of the Iraqi artistic field. Member of Manazir, the leading Swiss platform for the study of visual arts, architecture and heritage in the MENA region.