The Short Century

Barjeel Art Foundation presents The Short Century, an exhibition of modern Arab art from throughout the 20th Century at the Sharjah Art Museum.

The exhibition presents a period-based framework to view Arab art in a broad sense, focusing on major movements, artists, and changes of the 20th Century; with a focus on pre-contemporary mediums of painting and sculpture; narratives of nation-building, national mythology, urban life; the development of modern “hurufiyya”; and the advent of abstraction.

The concept of using a broad historical frame allows the viewer to follow directions taken by artists at the beginning of the century and explore how they develop over the following decades. This provides an entry point for understanding modern art from the Arab region over the past century, and provides a rich and diverse context for the contemporary art currently produced in the region and beyond.

Artists include foundational painters Mahmoud Said and Seif Wanly, Egyptian modernists Abdel Hadi El Gazzar and Inji Efflatoun, Iraqi modernists Dia Azzawi and Shakir Hassan Al Said, and Lebanese abstractionists Saliba Douaihy and Saloua Raouda Choucair, amongst many others.

The Short Century refers to a historical way of thinking of the 20th Century as taking place between two major events, the First World War (1914) and the fall of the Soviet Union (1991). Similar events simultaneously frame the Arab region, such as Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) and the fall of the Ottoman Empire (1920) and the Gulf War (1990–91), and provide a backdrop for the artistic development and cultural trajectories of the region.