New Arab art study centre opens at NYU Abu Dhabi

The Arab Centre for the Study of Art opened at New York University Abu Dhabi after three years of hard work.

The centre is devoted to the visual art of Western Asia and North Africa and will support research in the form of publications, postdoctoral fellowships and symposiums.

It will store and digitise art history archives from the Mena region, while there will also be conferences, workshops and an artist residency.

The centre is led by Salwa Mikdadi, a professor of art history at the university. She is joined by May Al Dabbagh, an assistant professor of social research and public policy, and Shamoon Zamir, a professor of literature and art history and the head of the Akkasah photography archive.

“We need to set our own standards, our own historical narrative about this region from this region. We’re looking at revising the canon of art history for this region,” Prof Mikdadi said.

The university has about 80 labs and research centres. The latest will seek to show how the Arab cultural context must be understood differently from that of other regions.

“There are so many links between art and literature among other disciplines that may be lost on those who are looking at this region in a very summary way, or always in reference to the West,” Prof Mikdadi said.

“We have a different context, different history, different modernism. It’s not parallel to modernism in the West. We have to look at it from the ground up.”

Another important aspect of the centre is archives, a problematic area for the study of Arab art because much has been lost during unrest.

Prof Mikdadi pledged her archive to the centre and said she hoped it would attract others. She has been working in her field since the 1980s and has assiduously preserved the material she amassed over the years.

The centre also administers Akkasah, an archive of 33,000 photographs founded at the university in 2014. “The idea for the centre started in the US in the early 1980s,” Prof Mikdadi said.

“But the art world wasn’t ready for it or willing to acknowledge art of the Arab world. I am glad the centre found a home in the UAE at NYUAD.”