From Ithaca to Doha

Lvy, recipient of the TRAVERSES -Grant for Art Criticism 2022, inaugurates with her essay the new framework of the partnership that exists since 2016 between the Institut franais, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture's Direction gnrale de la cration artistique, and the Archives de la critique d'art, which aims to promote French criticism and theory. Following an annual call for applications, TRAVERSES supports the writing, publication and dissemination of a critical essay focusing on an international event in the field of visual arts. The idea is to offer crossroads to enable original intellectual projects to be rapidly carried out. The grant allows the beneficiary to travel to one or more artistic events, to benefit from Critique d'art's editorial support and to be published in French and English for a wide international readership. For her survey, Marjolaine Lvy decided to explore abstraction in the Arab world, combining three destinations that have made it their focus: Mathaf [Arab Museum of Modern Art] in Doha (Qatar), the Belgian contemporary art centre WIELS, which foregrounded the work of Lebanese artist Huguette Caland in a large-scale solo exhibition, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca (USA), the fourth location of the travelling exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s. Her overview brings to light the curatorial and theoretical difficulties that occur when trying to address an aesthetic phenomenon that disrupts Western interpretative frameworks. Disappointments and discoveries alternate in Marjolaine Lvy's essay, which reveals the breadth of the artistic worlds and generations she examines, questioning the tradition of the new and drawing attention to the position of female artists. The scope of this topic emphasises the need for future writings

Abstraction · Epistemology · Political science · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy

• Taking Shape

  Bruno Nassim Aboudrar•Critique d’art•2020

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