It is frequently said that there are no images in the countries of Islam. However, these have always existed and have been part of the daily lives of people who, from the Maghreb to the Middle East, recognize each other, unite or oppose each other around these markers of identification.
This project starts with the important chromolithographic collections held at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. Religious or epic, they build an imaginary that spreads in shops and houses from the late 19th century to recent times. The exact counterpart is found in the paintings under glass (collection of MUCEM). These funds, almost unheard of, open a new chapter to the knowledge of the culture of Muslim countries.
Religious figures, heroes of the political struggles of the twentieth century but also stars of cinema, music and dance, or characters of comics, all are bearers of identification, values and ideals for a population that from the Maghreb to the Middle East recognizes itself in Islam, pan-Arabism, the struggles of decolonization, the defense of Palestine or closer to us, wish to appropriate themselves on the basis of their own values, the mechanisms of western pop culture.
The exhibition will open on religious imagery. It will highlight its special relationship to Shiism around the figure of Ali. A second part will focus on political figures or facts that, at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, founded a common consciousness through educational comics and movie posters. Recently, artists have seized these phenomena to analyze them. The video by Marwa Arsanios Have you ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila, 2013/2014 and the series by Ahlam Shibli Death (Palestine, 2011–12) revisit the social echo of these images.
Between 2006 and 2011, two super-heroines, Malaak Angel of Peace by Joumana Medlej and Qahera by Deena Mohamed, were born from the experiences of women designers respectively. The Lebanese civil war for the first and the demonstrations in Cairo in 2011 for the second. Full of humour, the tradition of shadow theatre and Karagöz, the character of a popular buffoon carrying a philosophical view of the world as it goes, find an echo both in the press drawing (Slim in Algeria) that in the offbeat adventures of Ahmed Hijazi’s Tarabilat or in the recent achievements of the Egyptian comic (Shennawy) or Lebanese (Mazen Kerbaj).
Three slideshows will evoke religious mural images and graffiti born during the 2011 uprisings in Syria, Tunisia and Egypt that have traveled the world through social networks.
After the exhibition Morocco: a modern identity that brought together the crafts and the works and teaching of the artists of the Casablanca School, the IMA-Tourcoing continues its exploration of popular culture in a wide cultural area from the Maghreb to the Middle East.