Baya (Bordj 1931- Blida 1998), Inji Efflatoun (Cairo 1924 – 1989); Saloua Raouda Choucair (Beirut 1916 - 2017) are three women artists linked to the Arab world that could easily be included in what Stuart Hall identified as «the stakes that «margins» have a new cosmopolitan, vernacular, post-national and global sensibility.” From Algeria, Egypt and Lebanon, these artists have produced a work in relation to lived aesthetic and political debates, which question the present of artistic narratives. Pioneers in many ways, these painters and sculptors who have worked alongside illustrious figures in the history of the arts (Picasso, Fernand Léger, etc.), and very early took place in major international exhibition spaces (Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Galerie Maeght, Biennale de Venise…), are well present in public collections but seem to have long been removed from visible narratives of artistic modernity.
Beyond the «simple reactive expression of an indigenous or colonized subjectivity», looking at these artists today reinscribed in an interconnected art history of the twentieth century invites us to think of new historiographical and curatorial approaches. These new perspectives question, filling absences, the share of subjectivation and the limits of a canonical modernity atavically linked to the social and political construction of a margin and a center in a certain genealogy of the worlds of art and representations, which it seems necessary to go beyond.
With and beyond the space of the Arab world, this study day aims to return to the returns of these female figures of artistic modernity in recent exhibitions, while considering the resonance of their journey with other contemporary artists who work in their creation and also go beyond canonical narratives and categories assigned to the present.
Thanks to new historiographical, curatorial and artistic approaches, and in support of these three commitments and three positions, the perspective of this day of exchanges with researchers, curators, publishers and artists want to update the contemporaneity of the issues of a third-party dialogue space to think of other anchorages and the possibility of polyphonic readings, to understand without assigning a contemporary discursive creation.
Accesses

University of Lille campus Pont-de-bois - Research house - Conference room
Program
Moderation: Mario Choueiry > 9h45 Home – Véronique Goudinoux (CEAC, University of Lille) > 10h Presentation - Françoise Cohen (director of IMA-Tourcoing) > 10h15 Introduction - Émilie Goudal, art historian (CEAC – University of Lille) > 10h30 Inji Efflatoun in prison Nadine Attalah, art historian (laboratoire In Visu - CNRS/INHA - Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne) > 11h Pause > 11h15 (Re)découverte de l'oeuvre de Baya Conversation avec Anissa Bouayed, historian and curator (CESSMA - UMR 245) and Émilie Goudal
Moderation: Véronique Goudinoux > 1:30 p.m. Saloua Raouda Choucair: Out of the studio, into the world Kaelen Wilson Goldie, art critic and historian (Stony Brook University, New York) – in English (videoconference from New York) > 14h Conversation with the artist and filmmaker Marwa Arsanios (via videoconference from Berlin), and Natacha Yahi – art historian (CEAC - Université de Lille) >14h30 Break > 14h45 -16h Expose, undo, transcend geographical, disciplinary and curatorial boundaries. Round table with - Estefania Penafiel Loaiza (artist - Morad Montazami (art historian, curator and publisher – Zamân Book & Curating) - Annabela Tournon-Zubieta (art historian – CRAL/EHESS, curator and director of research at ENSAPC- Cergy) > 17h30 – 18h30 Visit of the exhibition Picasso et les avant-gardes arabes (IMA-Tourcoing) with Françoise Cohen and Mario Choueiry, curators.
Under the direction of Mario Choueiry (IMA-Paris), Françoise Cohen (IMA-Tourcoing) and Émilie Goudal (CEAC – Université de Lille)
A day organized by the Institut du monde arabe-Tourcoing/Paris and the Centre d'étude des arts contemporains (ULR CEAC 3587) of the University of Lille).
This study day takes place in the context of the exhibition «Picasso and the Arab avant-gardes» (IMA-Tourcoing, April 2 > July 10, 2022) and the seminar «Art, exhibition, globalization» the Master of Arts of the University of Lille led by Ariane Carmignac and Véronique Goudinoux.