Independent charity The Art Fund announced this week that it has embarked upon the creation of a national collection of recent Middle Eastern photography, to be shared jointly by the V&A and the British Museum.
The collection will be known as The Art Fund Collection of Middle Eastern Photography at the V&A and the British Museum. It is to embrace both celebrated names and emerging talents, and to cover subject matter as diverse as documentary-style reportage shots to more experimental, digital pieces.
In total, the charity is allocating £100,000 to enable the two museums to build the collection. It is to encompass photography from the Middle East spanning the 20th century to the present day and to embrace work by artists from across the region, whether living in their countries of origin or in diaspora.
Works acquired already demonstrate a diverse spread across the Middle East – from Morocco to Lebanon and Palestine to Saudi Arabia – and across the decades.
Stephen Deuchar, Director of The Art Fund, said: "The Collection will celebrate the photography of richly diverse countries, each sharply distinctive yet bound together in their cultural and historical heritage. Shared by the V&A and the British Museum, we hope it will enable a wide public to discover the wealth and variety of Middle Eastern art and culture, and gain a sense of the pace of change it is currently experiencing."
Featured artists include: Egyptian Artist Youssef Nabil; Moroccan-born Hassan Hajjaj, an artist who divides his time between Marrakech and London and whose output includes fashion and design as well as photography; Jerusalem-based Palestinian artist Raeda Saada, whose work explores Palestinian identity through video and performance; and leading Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian, whose works address issues such as censorship and religion.
Once the collection is complete, the two museums will work towards a major showcase exhibition in 2012.
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, said: “This funding allows us to add to our unparalleled collection of Middle Eastern Art in the significant area of photography”
Mark Jones, Director of the V&A said: “This is a wonderful opportunity to showcase the best in established and emerging talent from the Middle East. We are excited to be part of building a new national collection of photography that will reach new audiences in the UK.”
The proposal to build up a body of work by Middle Eastern photographers was presented in a joint bid to The Art Fund by the V&A and British Museum in 2009, in response to a recent surge in interest in visual art from the area. The British Museum has been collecting contemporary Middle Eastern material for many years and showcased examples of work in the 2006 exhibition ‘Word Into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East’.
The initiative for building up a core collection of Middle Eastern photography, an area thus far under-represented in UK collections, was welcomed by The Art Fund. The charity exists to enrich UK museums and gallery collections with works of art of all kinds, and campaigns on behalf of museums and their visitors.
In the summer of 2009 The Art Fund agreed to give £100,000 on condition that all works proposed for acquisition were approved by its Board of Trustees, as is the case for its standard grant-giving operations.
Prior to their joint funding bid to The Art Fund, the British Museum and V&A had been meeting regularly with representatives from other museums in the UK in order to look towards a long-term collecting strategy for Middle Eastern art, ensuring the best works are acquired for public collections, and to avoid duplication.
Aside from the £100,000 allocated to the new collection, three photographic works have been generously given through The Art Fund by Rose Issa, London-based curator, writer and producer.
The Art Fund will announce the completion of the collection once all the funds have been allocated.
www.artfund.org
