Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists

"Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists" features recent work by seven important contemporary artists who come from the region stretching from Egypt to Pakistan, but who have lived much of their lives in Europe or the United States. The artists, Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Mona Hatoum, Y.Z. Kami, Walid Raad, Michal Rovner, and Shahzia Sikander, draw on their experiences of displacement and knowledge of multiple cultures to offer alternative visions of the contemporary world. They have crossed or collapsed political, cultural, and religious borders, and disrupted conventional and stereotypical representations of time and place, and of history and geography. Their art offers new kinds of intercultural understanding. David O'Brien and David Prochaska write sensitively of how these artists address various experiences of travel, exile, diaspora, alienation, and integration, feelings of longing and belonging, memories of place and people, encounters with divergent views of sexuality and gender, alternate political understandings of the world, and cultural practices that both divide and unite us.