[MEI Salon] Selling Out? Fighting Over Art in Syria (Past and Present)

What are the costs of participation in the global art world? This talk highlights recent debates about the value of art in Syria both before and after the 2011 uprisings, regime reprisals and devastating wars. Professor Anneka Lenssen will be drawing on her fieldwork in Syria between 2008 and 2010 to discuss the acute changes in Syria’s national art scene after Bashar al-Asad’s regime opted to open the controlled arts sector to private galleries and international auction houses.

As dealers grew rich while artists remained penniless (and fakes flooded the market), members of the Syrian art world fought bitterly over their divergent understandings of art objects. Are they a form of personal expression, a social good or a private investment tool? This talk aims to contextualise the criticism of market value we find in these fights — including repeated accusations that the artists were “selling out” — in longer patterns of trade in art and artifacts extracted from the region.

As a conclusion, Professor Lenssen will turn to consider image politics in an activist register, with an emphasis on the emergence of important new thinking about the right to a dignified self-image. After the regime crackdowns of 2011, younger artists from Syria, most prominently the filmmaker collective known as Abounaddara, proposed to rethink the costs of art on ethical rather than economic grounds.

Event details: 26 August 2020, 10.30am to 12.00pm (SGT)

Speaker: Anneka Lenssen, Associate Professor, Global Modern Art, History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley