YARAT presents lecture by Olga Nefedova

YARAT Contemporary Art Space has presented a lecture by Olga Nefedova, an art historian specializing in the Orientalist art movement and the founding director of the Orientalist Museum in Doha, Qatar, at the International Center of Mugam in Baku.

Morocco - the real world, rich in culture and history, traditions and beliefs, innovations and novelties. And at the same time - the imaginary world, built upon and referential to the works created by the Orientalist artists. This land, in the 19th and 20th century,

proved pervasive for artists, offering tremendous stimulus to their creative oeuvre, which was expressed in a multitude of ways reflected in the Orientalist art movement. Not only a source of inspirations as artists were prompted to travel to far-off lands for a variety of reasons: for some, natural curiosity and a quest, for others - forced immigration, or a new adopted 'native' life for the third. Nevertheless they all concentrated on a spiritual vision of an imaginary world, represented as fantastic, jewelled surfaces of a dreamlike world, through the vibrant luminosity of an oriental light, creating not just exotic, but poetic image of the country and its people.

The world of women, which many orientalist artists so longed to see and encounter, is presented to us by a true Moroccan - Lalla Essaydi. Born in Morocco, Essaydi, unlike any Orientalist artists, had no need to discover the orientalist world; it was her native land, the place where she had grown up, surrounded by Muslim culture, traditions and Islam's artistic heritage. What is especially significant is that Essaydi's works are well received in both the West and the Arab World. One universal aspect is of course the beauty of her works, the aesthetic pleasure we perceive. The value for the Middle Eastern audience lies in the fact that using the perspective of an Arab woman living in the West, Lalla Essaydi, with intimate knowledge, reexamines and questions this representation of the Arab female identity in the past and in the present. As for the Western audience, the works

surprisingly bear very distinct note of nostalgia. The Orientalist art of the early 21st century, very different from the 19th and even 20th century subjects, brings a new future for art, in the form of critical dialogue linked directly with political events. The harsh reality enforces a sense of inevitable loss in the European perceptions of the East, perhaps because it sublimated unattainable desires and ever haunting appeal.

In her lecture Olga Nefedova will not only talk about the history of the Orientalist art movement, its brief history and heritage, but will explore and analyze the art of Lella Essaydi in the context of the Orientalist art and will discuss the understanding and contemporary perception of the Orientalism in the Middle East and North Africa.