The NYU Abu Dhabi archive working to preserve history of modern Arab art

Al Mawrid Arab Centre for the Study of Art has digitised more than 56,000 materials, including press clippings and personal writings by artists

Egyptian Artist Salah Taher, left, and Umm Kulthum from the Salah Taher Collection of the Arab Art Archive. Photo: NYUAD

Al Mawrid Arab Centre for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi has released thousands of newly digitised documents on its online Arab Art Archive. These include images, personal writings, exhibition materials and press clippings that give insight into the practices of Egyptian painter Salah Taher and Iraqi artist Hanaa Malallah, among others.

The new collections come as part of the centre’s mission to bolster studies into modern Arab art by making primary documents accessible online.

Lack of documentation has long been an impeding factor in the research of Arab art from the 20th century. This is not so much due to the absence of writings related to the topic, but rather difficulty in finding or accessing these primary documents. Plenty of essays, articles and even personal writings by artists exist, but a major portion of these materials are beyond public reach.

This has often left swathes of art history unexplored and overlooked. It has also brought up issues of attribution, authenticity and provenance, sometimes with major repercussions – as was the case of the 2007 Christie’s sale of Mahmoud Said’s La Fille aux yeux verts (The Girl with the Green Eyes), which involved the Egyptian government and Interpol. The painting, the Egyptian government claimed, actually belonged to the state and should have been displayed at a diplomatic residence in New York. However, after a stringent research process, it was revealed that Said had painted two almost identical versions of the same subject, the first in 1931 and a second in 1932, named La Fille aux yeux verts (replique). The second painting was the one that had been featured in the 2007 auction. Had there been more accessible documentation from the start, it is easy to see how this issue could have been circumvented altogether.

In the digital age, these challenges have become all the more urgent and with an added dimension, as differences of online accessibility often determine what stories are told today.

Al Mawrid Arab Centre for the Study of Art is dedicated to addressing this gap.

The institution at NYU Abu Dhabi was established in late 2020, through a grant from the university’s research institute. Despite being hamstrung in the early years of its launch by the Covid-19 pandemic, the centre has, to date, digitised tens of thousands documents. Most of these are materials dated between 1850 to 1995, a time window that particularly suffers from an online scarcity of documentation.

“We currently have 16 collections and 56,000 documents that we digitised in approximately two and a half years,” Salwa Mikdadi, director and principal investigator at the centre, says. “The centre started in November 2020, but the pandemic delayed our work because we couldn’t access these artist papers, which are all located in the homes of the custodians of these collections, with their grandchildren, descendants or the actual artists who are still alive.”

However, over the past two and a half years, the centre has been hard at work to make up for lost time. “It took a while to establish the infrastructure for the centre,” Mikdadi, who is also an art history professor at NYUAD, says, referring to the centre’s organisational chart as well as developing a system to digitise documents.

“There were two conditions I put when we started,” Mikdadi says. “This centre would not remove original documents from the countries of origin. We make sure that we digitise on location. That's why it takes more time and requires more funding.”

The centre has so far developed collections dedicated to Syrian artist Mahmoud Hammad, Iraqi critic and poet May Muzaffar and her late husband Iraqi artist Rafa Nasiri, Palestinian-Jordanian artist Ahmad Nawash, Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla, as well as Taher and Malallah. The collections include artist writings, press clippings, exhibition materials, as well as images of artworks and art events. There are several examples of historically significant materials, such as notes on the inaugural 1993 Sharjah Biennial by Kuwaiti artist Khalifa Al Qattan and photographs from the opening of Salwa Zeidan Gallery, the first art gallery in Abu Dhabi.

The centre has also managed to bring important but now-defunct journals and periodicals into its collection, such as the Egyptian magazine Gallery 68 and the Syrian publication, Al Hayat Al Tashkiliya.

However, the digitisation of documents is only one part of Al Mawrid’s mission. The centre divides its tasks across three categories, including research, archiving and pedagogy. The three are interconnected, Mikdadi says. “If the archive stands alone and isn’t activated, it doesn’t fulfill its purpose.”

“We sit in an academic institution,” Mikdadi says, referring to NYU Abu Dhabi. “It is the ideal location for such a centre, for a number of reasons, including research and role in pedagogy. Without these kinds of archives, the students do are limited to literature review if they want to write a paper. But with this center now, and I am talking specifically on subjects related to the artists of the Arab world, then they have access to primary documents for the first time.”

For a long time, there was an “inequity”, Mikdadi says, to accessing these archives. “Those who can afford it, or have connections, had better access to these primary documents than others,” she says. The digitisation initiative, she adds, has changed that.

Al Mawrid Arab Centre for the Study of Art has a number of other programming elements designed to activate the archive. These include lectures by prominent art historians. The centre held an online symposium dubbed The Generative Archive II: Art and Transformation. The symposium, held on February 26, brought together artists who delved into archival research as part of their artistic process. These included Afra Al Dhaheri, Abdullah Al Mutairi and Amina Menia, among others.

The centre also has a publication arm. Song of Water and Fire, written by Muzaffar, delves into her life with the artist Nasiri, while also providing a glimpse into the social and artistic scene in Baghdad in the latter half of the 20th century. Yasser Alwan: Egypt Every Day brings together a range of the Nigeria-born photographer’s works that offer a multifaceted perspective of Egyptian society.

The centre is also planning on soon launching a podcast that delves into its archive and highlights its potential for research. All these initiatives, Mikdadi says, is aimed at propagating more research into Arab art, while also positioning the UAE as an intellectual and academic hub.

“At this point, we have digitised documents, oral histories, produced publications and collaborations,” Mikdadi says. “All this does place Abu Dhabi on the map, as far as a hub for scholarship.”