NEW YORK, NY.- From April 29 to October 5, 2016, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presents But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa, the third exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Organized by Sara Raza, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Middle East and North Africa, the exhibition features a wide range of artistic voices and critical concerns from a rapidly evolving region through installation, photography, sculpture, video, and work on paper. Interwoven with questions and ideas about the region’s colonial histories, the exhibition investigates such themes as architecture and geometry, modernism and migration, and the process of unearthing hidden ideas.

As with the two previous exhibitions in the MAP initiative, which focused on contemporary art practice from South and Southeast Asia and Latin America, But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise features artworks that have been recently acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection. Under the auspices of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund, the collection has now grown by over 125 works from more than 85 artists and collectives. Curatorial research for the exhibition was developed with an eye toward building on the Guggenheim’s distinguished history of internationalism, as well as fostering new scholarship and conceiving a range of educational initiatives and public programs within the museum and online. On-site and digital programs have served more than 14,000 adults, families, educators, and students worldwide. Following its presentation at the Guggenheim, the exhibition will travel to the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2017.

Sara Raza said, “The exhibition enables viewers to experience a range of concerns among artists from a variety of access points to showcase the cross-circulation of knowledge. One of them is the migration of ideas and peoples in an age of anxiety, when civil liberties and freedom of movement have come under repeated attack. Another is architecture seen as an ideological tool and in reference to the former colonial powers that shaped the region. The exhibition’s artworks also embed numerous proposals—we might think of them as ‘conceptual contraband’—that contradict the mass media’s highly politicized representation of the Middle East and North Africa. As such, But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise highlights the formation of the present while acknowledging the continued influence of the past.”

“This exhibition bristles with challenging ideas and uncompromising artistic strategies, all of which help us to reflect upon a crucial region of today’s world,” said Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “It is a superb realization of the ambitions of the MAP initiative in particular and the Guggenheim’s global program in general. We are grateful to our long-term collaborator and supporter UBS, to Sara Raza and our curatorial and education team, and to the artists in this exhibition for helping us rethink and expand the traditional purview of European and North American art museums. By working on the ground in different regions of the world with artists, arts professionals, and audiences, we can open the discussion to multiple histories of art and create a museum that more faithfully represents the world in which we live.”

“Artists rooted in the vibrant cultures of the Middle East and North Africa are currently addressing some of today’s most critical issues, and doing so from within a region at the center of sweeping global change,” said Jürg Zeltner, CEO, UBS Wealth Management. “The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative provides an exceptional opportunity to encounter the crucial ideas and insights of some of the best of these artists, and to engage in the kind of international dialogue that contributes to positive change. At UBS, our support for this exhibition, and for the MAP initiative as a whole, parallels our holistic approach to business relationships. We take pride in enabling our clients, employees, and the public to participate in the provocative and exciting creative community of the arts, much as we facilitate our clients’ informed involvement in the complex global economy.”

Exhibition Overview

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise features 18 works—many of them large-scale, mixed media installations—by 17 artists. The exhibition, installed on two levels of the museum’s Tower Galleries, draws its title from an artwork by Rokni Haerizadeh, which in turn is quoted from German philosopher Walter Benjamin in a noted essay from 1940. Haerizadeh’s But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise (2010) is a suite of works on paper based on images appropriated from mainstream news sources. By overlaying these photographs of collective gatherings with gesso, ink, and watercolor, the artist employs fable to transform human protagonists into part-animal hybrids while rendering a grotesque view of downward descending contemporary events promulgated by the mass media.

Other works that implicitly challenge existing representations of the Middle East and North Africa include Latent Images, Diary of a Photographer, 177 Days of Performances (2015) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, an installation of 354 books, displayed on 177 metal shelves, that purport to contain written descriptions of pictures taken by a fictional photographer, Abdallah Farah, during the Lebanese Civil War to illustrate the fine line between the process of mythmaking and the “real.”

Among the works that touch on the urgent subject of the migration of people and ideas is Flying Carpets (2011) by Nadia Kaabi-Linke, a stainless steel structure installed overhead that casts shadows in the gallery that evoke the outlines of the carpets on which undocumented migrants from North Africa and Asia display the goods they sell to tourists in Venice.

Architecture figures as a key element in the formation of modernism in the region and is prevalent in several works including Untitled (Ghardaïa) (2009) by Kader Attia, a scale model in couscous of the Algerian World Heritage Site of Ghardaïa, the traditional buildings of which influenced the modernism of Le Corbusier; Building (2009) by Susan Hefuna, a suite of nine drawings that suggest both cartographic diagrams and sketches of architectural elements such as the mashrabiya or traditional latticed window; Plan for Greater Baghdad (2015) by Ala Younis, a large installation of archival materials and architectural models of the gymnasium designed for Baghdad in 1957 by Le Corbusier and inaugurated in 1980 as the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium. By contrast, Abbas Akhavan’s Study for a Monument (2013–16), a series of bronze casts of plants native to the Tigris-Euphrates river system that are placed on the floor atop white sheets, suggests a range of alternative ideas around the culture and dissemination of public monuments.

A hybridized view of past and present is presented by Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s work Crystal & Flame (2010), which draws on literary texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to meditate on social norms and moral codes through the depiction of three outwardly disparate but ultimately complimentary narratives that probe systems of value and polarity in contemporary society. Similarly, Ahmed Mater’s Disarm (2013) and Disarm 1–10 (2013), present video and photographs taken by the artist from the cockpit of a Saudi military helicopter scouting for unauthorized pilgrims approaching Mecca, thereby highlighting an urban landscape undergoing rapid structural and social change.

To showcase the breadth of videos acquired, two will be rotated halfway through the installation: A Brief History of Collapses (2012) by Mariam Ghani, a two-channel video installation that contrasts the eighteenth-century Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany (now restored from the damage it suffered in World War II) with the Dar ul-Aman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan (built in 1929 and now a ruin), will be on view through July 6, along with Çavuşoğlu’s Crystal & Flame. Zineb Sedira’s Gardiennes d’images (2010), a multichannel video that explores the archive of Algerian-French photographer Mohammed Kouaci (1922–1996), who was active during the Algerian war of independence, and the reminiscences of his widow who is interviewed by the artist, will be on view from July 8 through the close of the exhibition. Evaders (2009), a two-channel video installation by Ori Gersht, which chronicles the 1940 flight into exile and subsequent death of Walter Benjamin, returns to the pertinent subject of migration and will also be on view beginning on July 8.

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa is organized by Sara Raza, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Middle East and North Africa. Joan Young, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, provides curatorial oversight for the MAP initiative with Amara Antilla, Assistant Curator.