Seeing Is Believing: More About the Exhibition

A Wider Lens, A New Gérôme

Curator: Emily Weeks

This display of paintings and drawings by Gérôme, complemented by generous international loans from institutions and private collectors, offers a unique opportunity to reconsider the artist’s Orientalist works in his bicentennial year.

The three galleries in this section aim to present Gérôme as a product of his time, a stylistic pioneer and something of a riddle, waiting to be solved. This mission is accomplished in three multimedia galleries, organised in loosely chronological fashion.

The first gallery begins in the 19th century, with an examination of Gérôme’s biography, including his influences and historical context. It asks the questions, What is Orientalist art? Who was Gérôme? How were his Orientalist works perceived during his lifetime? The latter question is answered, in part, by an introduction to his realistic, academic style. Visitors to the second gallery get to see the mechanics of that style - and its surprising creativity - and understand how it influenced his audience’s perceptions of his works as “real.” They then, in the third gallery, discover why Gérôme’s style was politicised in the 20th century, and how a new definition and discourse of Orientalism has complicated an appreciation of his art.

Through a series of five thematic groupings that dominated Gérôme’s Orientalist oeuvre between 1855 and 1904, competing interpretations of Gérôme’s works are offered, as a negotiation takes place between connoisseurship, or close looking, and modern academic and political theory. Finally, the visitor has a chance to ponder the questions, What meanings might we find if we widen the lens through which we view Gérôme’s works? How can we best understand Gérôme’s Orientalist art today?

Between Gérôme and Photography: Truth Is Stranger than Fiction

Curator: Giles Hudson

Gérôme and photography are often spoken of in the same breath, for a number of reasons. Firstly, because he based elements of his paintings on photographs; secondly, because his style is seen as photographic in its realism; and thirdly, because his Orientalist output and 19th-century photography from MENASA are viewed as encoding the same colonial constructs of power and Western ideologies of race, gender and cultural superiority. The challenge of this gallery has been to explore each of these issues, not only by examining the particulars of Gérôme’s relationship with photography, but also by assessing how Orientalist ideas are embedded in, and affect our reading of, the regional photographic archive more broadly.

Attention to questions of post-colonial theory helps us read beyond the surface of photographs and understand their underlying biases and assumptions. However, many issues of relevance to the interpretation of regional photography fall outside the confines of this paradigm. Orientalist influences are prominent in the image archive, but attenuated by artistic norms and tastes, technological considerations, market forces and other constraints. Multiple, contradictory histories of photographic fact and fiction are the product of these interwoven ideas – our task is to untangle them.

The photographic gallery is divided into three sections. The first looks at the tension between art and objectivity in the work of early French photographers in Gérôme’s circle. The second presents a cross-section of photographic stereotypes and counter-stereotypes in architecture and portraiture. In the third section, links between Orientalist painting and photography are explored through the theme of colour – a stereotype common to the two media but often overlooked. Uniting the sections are examples of photographs reproduced in print, notably of Gérôme’s art, which reflect the importance of the accurate reproduction of paintings to his creative enterprise and to photographic history in the period.

‘I Swear I Saw That’

Curator: Sara Raza

This section of the exhibition features the works of 25 intergenerational artists whose artworks provide an alternative avenue for questioning the racialising and patriarchal myopic readings of Orientalism embedded within the visual dialectics of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s artworks and the Orientalist project at large. Through drawing, installation, painting, sculpture and film and video, the works on view incorporate contemporary, modern and historical pieces from the collections of Mathaf and the Lusail Museum, as well as featuring new commissions and recent works by contemporary artists.

Sara Raza’s curatorial approach is informed by her attention to hybrid ideologies and geographical spaces, namely, her interest in global punk visual cultural aesthetics, which she explores as a method for constructing a new curatorial aggregate for rethinking Orientalism. The exhibition’s nonlinear and decentralised display presents collapsing ideas that allow for the reordering, rearranging and remixing of works from different time periods, geographies and historical contexts.

The title of this section of the exhibition is a reworking of anthropologist Michael Taussig’s 2011 book I Swear I Saw This, which examines the overlap between social investigation, art and ethnography, and questions the differences between seeing and believing. An important component of this section is to conceptually reevaluate the role of the artist as an ethnographer, and explore social topics relating to human geographies, language and spatial and non-spatial zones of mobility. Furthermore, many of the artists invert the Orientalist geographical focus from the East to the West to explore the ‘European idea’ as well as highlighting the constructed nature of landscapes. Throughout, the hand of the artist is an important tool for deconstruction, challenging outdated historical precedents and encouraging conscious visioning, subverting the field of Orientalism for the 21st century.

Audio Guide

A 17-stop audio tour offers additional context and curatorial insights into the exhibition.

Exhibition Catalogue

Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated catalogue that will include new research on the artist and essays on his impact, by the curators as well as Christine Peltre, specialist in Orientalist painting and professor of art history at the University Marc Bloch of Strasbourg.