The Chest of Treasures
published in canvas magazine
"The British Museum’s (BM) founding charter of 1753 set out “to enable citizens to think about the world they live in”. Two and a half centuries later, BM curator Venetia Porter still looks to this edict as her guiding principle. She has responsibility for one of the world’s finest assemblages of objects from the Islamic world, but since the early 1990s has also masterminded the development of a more unusual initiative: the acquisition of Modern and Contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa that relates to the BM collection generally. “From the past until now, we have collected works that speak of their time in some way or another, and this collection enables us to do the same,” she explains. This is the context for the very recent acquisition of a set of 35 prints produced in Jaffa by 35 Palestinian and Israeli artists and entitled 35 Years of Occupation; the set highlights how – in terms of any museum collection – the line between history and art is invariably an indistinct one.
Artists represented in the Contemporary art collection come from Turkey, the Levant, Iran, Iraq and the Gulf, and the extended Arab world through Egypt and North Africa: a meeting-place of the Muslim, Christian and Judaic worlds. Their works are selected solely on the criterion of quality, regardless of point of view or cultural difference or ideology. “This is not a collection of ‘Modern Islamic art’,” insists Porter. “Although much of the work is shown in the Islamic gallery, what I want people to see is that when they look at the Middle East and view ancient things alongside Modern art, [by doing so] they look at both in a different light. It enables them to see correspondences and make connections which they might not have considered before.”..."