Women of Babylon

Representations of sexual difference (whether visual or textual) have become an area of much theoretical concern and investigation in recent feminist scholarship. Yet although a wide range of relevant evidence survives from the ancient Near East, it has been exceptional for those studying women in the ancient world to stray outside the traditional bounds of Greece and Rome. Women of Babylon is a much-needed historical/art historical study that investigates the concepts of femininity which prevailed in Assyro-Babylonian society. Zainab Bahrani's detailed analysis of how the culture of ancient Mesopotamia defined sexuality and gender roles both in, and through, representation is enhanced by a rich selection of visual material extending from 6500 BC - 1891 AD. Professor Bahrani also investigates the ways in which women of the ancient Near East have been perceived in classical scholarship up to the nineteenth century.

Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

History

Bahrani, Zainab

Ancient Civilizations

Routledge

This expert guide to the art of Mesopotamia, spanning more than 8000 years, is especially important as this ancient cultural legacy is threatened by contemporary conflict
Mesopotamia is considered the cradle of Western civilization, and the diverse societies that flourished there, nestled around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, were as culturally rich as this attribution would suggest. Spanning a significant historical period, from 8000 BCE to the arrival of Islam in 636 CE, Art of Mesopotamia explores spectacular structures and objects, as well as the techniques artists used, in order to gain insight into the beliefs and practices of ancient peoples. The volume also introduces the archaeologists who discovered these sites more than a thousand years later.
Richly illustrated with more than 400 full-color photographs, Art of Mesopotamia is an astounding record by award-winning author Zainab Bahrani of artworks from this region, many of which have in recent years been damaged or destroyed by war, and as such is of particular and lasting importance. It includes the most up-to-date scholarship and reflects significant new approaches to Mesopotamian art over the past few decades. 414 Illustrations

Art of Mesopotamia

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Thames&Hudson

Mesopotamia: Ancient Art and Architecture

Mesopotamia, the world's earliest literate culture, developed a rich philosophical conception of representation in which the world was saturated with signs. Instead of imitating the natural world, representation—both in writing and in visual images—was thought to participate in the world and to have an effect upon it in natural, magical, and supernatural ways. The Graven Image is the first book to explore this tradition, which developed prior to, and apart from, the Greek understanding of representation.
The classical Greek system, based on the notion of mimesis, or copy, is the one with which we are most familiar today. The Assyro-Babylonian ontology presented here by Zainab Bahrani opens up fresh avenues for thinking about the concept of representation in general, and her reading of the ancient Mesopotamian textual and visual record in its own ontological context develops an entirely new approach to understanding Babylonian and Assyrian arts in particular.
The Graven Image describes, for the first time, rituals and wars involving images; the relationship of divination, the organic body, and representation; and the use of images as a substitute for the human form, integrating this ancient material into contemporary debates in critical theory. Bahrani challenges current methodologies in the study of Near Eastern archaeology and art history, introducing a new way to appreciate the unique contributions of Assyrian and Babylonian culture and their complex relationships to the past and present.

The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria (Archaeology, Culture, and Society)

University of Pennsylvania Press

How artists have examined the legacies of American-led military engagement in Iraq
The 1991 Gulf War marked the start of a lengthy period of American-led military involvement in Iraq that led to more than a decade of sanctions, the 2003 Iraq War, and ongoing repercussions throughout the region. Though the Iraq War officially ended in 2011, artists have continued to examine these conflicts and their impacts. Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011 charts the effects of these wars on cultural production in Iraq and throughout its diasporas, as well as responses to the wars in the West, revealing how this period was defined by unsettling intersections of spectacularized violence and new imperialisms. The exhibition features more than 80 artists and collectives, including Afifa Aleiby, Dia al-Azzawi, Thuraya al-Baqsami, Paul Chan, Harun Farocki, Guerrilla Girls, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hiwa K, Hanaa Malallah, Monira Al Qadiri, Nuha al-Radi and Ala Younis. This catalog features newly commissioned essays by Zainab Bahrani, Rijin Sahakian, Nada Shabout and McKenzie Wark alongside texts by exhibition co-curators Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib. Excerpts from period journals by artist Nuha Al-Radi and anonymous blogger Riverbend detail life in Iraq over two decades of war, sanctions and occupation. Reprinted essays from Jean Baudrillard and Serge Daney provide additional context, delving into the effects of the conflict upon media and visual culture.

Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011

Wark, McKenzie

BAUDRILLARD, Jean

Riverbend

Eleey, Peter

Daney, Serge

Al-Radi, Nuha

Sahakian, Rijin

Shabout, Nada

Katrib, Ruba

MoMA PS1

In 2014, the Metropolitan Museum presented Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age, an unprecedented exhibition that offered a comprehensive overview of art, diplomacy, and cultural exchange in the ancient Near East and across the Mediterranean at the beginning of what is now known as the classical age. This volume extends the innovative scholarship that underpinned the exhibition and accompanying book of the same title. Focusing on a time of transition, upheaval, and globalization, 27 essays by internationally distinguished scholars explore the cultural encounters of diverse populations interacting through trade, travel, migration, and war during the first millennium B.C. in a region that spanned over 1,000 miles in a continuous swathe from Assyria (present-day northern Iraq) to the western Mediterranean and northern Africa.

Assyria to Iberia: Art and Culture in the Iron Age: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia

López-Ruiz, Carolina

Van De Mieroop, Marc

COLLINS, Paul

Aruz, Joan

Gunter, Ann C.

Finkelstein, Israël

Aubet, María Eugenia

Gubel, Eric

Tubb, Jonathan N.

Graff, Sarah

Killebrew, Ann E.

Gansell, Amy

Reich, Ronnie

Novák, Mirko

Özyar, Ash

Hill, Marsha

Winter, Irene J.

Boardman, Sir John

Feldman, Marian

Wolf-Dietrich, Niemeier

Caubet, Annie

Papalexandrou, Nassos

Matthäus, Hartmut

Stampolidis, Nicholas Chr.

Sannibale, Maurizio

Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the ancient civilizations of the Near East and Mediterranean, images were used as a way to create reality and reach out to the infinite. Reviving the fascination that gripped the avant-garde and the surrealists when confronted with the arts of the ancient Near East, The Infinite Image presents a radical new reading of Mesopotamian art as an aesthetic realm defined by objects that transcend time in order to carry traces of the past into the present. Zainab Bahrani’s book opens in the early twentieth century, when artists and intellectuals like Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Georges Bataille were captivated by the ancient sculptures they encountered in European museums―before the question of the aesthetic in ancient art was rejected by rationalist scientific archaeology later in the century. She then travels back through the writings of Derrida, Hegel, Kant, and Plato to Mesopotamia, using these thinkers to argue that ancient images formed an aesthetic dimension that was both historical and evolving. She also addresses issues of the politics of cultural heritage important to Near Eastern art in the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and current instabilities in the Middle East. With over one hundred illustrations, The Infinite Image will be necessary reading for anyone interested in the questions at the center of contemporary history and the anthropology of art.

The Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity

Reaktion Books

In the mid twentieth century, artists in the newly independent nation of Iraq experimented with a form of Modernism that they saw as a new and revolutionary artistic idiom for a secular national state. Combining ancient and Islamic forms and genres of art and with Western Modernist influences, these artists set out to create an art for the people. At the same time, they participated in what they saw of Western Modernism by bringing to it older forms of Islamic abstraction. In this way, they challenged both traditional indigenous forms and what they learned from modern art in Europe. Today these works continue to challenge the pervasive image of Iraq as a country with no modern artistic past. As the exhibition curators and authors of the catalogue, Zainab Bahrani, the Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, and Nada Shabout, an associate professor of art history at the University of North Texas, make clear, there are several reasons Iraq's modern tradition remains little known abroad. Access to the artworks themselves is one problem: The Iraqi Museum of Modern Art was looted after the fall of Baghdad, and most modern and contemporary works are now in private collections. The catalogue offers an unprecedented overview of the work of several generations of Iraqi artists, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, including paintings, sculpture, book arts, and videos by forty-five artists, among them Jawad Salim, Dia Azzawi, Hana Malallah, Nazar Yahya, Kareem Risan, Ghassan Gha'eb, Rafa al Nasiri, and Mohammed al Shammarey.

Modernism and Iraq

Shabout, Nada M.

The Wallach Art Gallery

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