It was precisely this \u201cOrient\u201d that the Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said cast in his book Orientalism<\/em> (1978) as \u201cadjectival.\u201d For visitors it was a place of \u201csensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aa seduction to which major European, and later American, powers would lay claim.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Edward Said, Orientalism <\/em>(New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 88, 118\u200a-\u200a19.<\/span> In Said\u2019s view, the wildly descriptive imagined Orient passed on from authors such as Gustave Flaubert and T. E. Lawrence tells us much more about the appetites and privileges of these men than it does about the people they encountered during their travels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some diasporic Canadian artists with ties to the Middle East, touristic views of the region are held in tension with documentary images of its geopolitical conflicts. I\u2019ll consider works by Nour Bishouty, Jayce Salloum, and Rehab Nazzal that give us more than distanced sightseeing glimpses of Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine, respectively. In their work they reclaim something like a touristic vantage point for the purpose of critique and, importantly, to encourage solidarity with the people of the region. At this time of writing, it is the Palestinians who feel this need most acutely. The theme of tourism has been taken up successfully by other artists to make appeals for justice on their behalf. From the diaristic works in Emily Jacir\u2019s series Where We Come From<\/em> (2001\u200a\u201303) to Larissa Sansour\u2019s fantasy of an Arab-futurist respite beyond the Israeli occupation in her Sci-Fi<\/em> Trilogy <\/em>(2009\u200a\u201316), artists have made brave efforts to cut through the mire of a worsening conflict in the Middle East and imagine better futures. The artists I discuss here share another goal: to point beyond stubborn Orientalist tropes to a present-focused and embodied position of empathy with Palestinians and others in the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\n

In Bishouty\u2019s Gallery 44 exhibition Nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had<\/em> (2022), curated by Toleen Touq and Lillian O\u2019Brien Davis, a critique is aimed at the legacies of Orientalism. Masterpieces such as G\u00e9r\u00f4me\u2019s The Snake Charmer<\/em> (1879) and Delacroix\u2019s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment<\/em> (1834) provide a distant backdrop for a painting by Bishouty\u2019s own father, Ghassan, and pictures produced by Jordan\u2019s Ministry of Tourism. In the view of art historian Linda Nochlin, G\u00e9r\u00f4me\u2019s painting sets a standard for European representations of the Middle East with its dazzling verisimilitude and iconography, but also, crucially, through what it leaves out of the picture: the modern industrial and colonial realities that profoundly shaped the region during the nineteenth century.^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Linda Nochlin, \u201cThe Imaginary Orient,\u201d Art in America<\/em> (May 1983): 119-\u200a91.<\/span> It\u2019s this picturesque view of Jordan, fixed in time and available for touristic consumption, that Bishouty breaks down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Near her father\u2019s painting, Bishouty arranged some photo-collages based on images of Bedouins in Jordanian tourist pamphlets. In one, we see the weather-beaten feet of a man tending to a fire in the desert, a watch dangling from his wrist quietly reminding us of his modernity. In another, leathery, modestly bejewelled hands are crossed over a partly obscured picture of a woman in a burka. Her gaze is arresting, cutting through layers of visual barriers as if to contest the passive gazes of Delacroix\u2019s Women.<\/em> Here too, we remain in the grip of Orientalist imagery, albeit an Orientalism devised by bureaucrats and not nineteenth-century painters. The images in the original tourist material project the Jordanian desert and its nomadic peoples into a romantic, ahistorical past. But Bishouty\u2019s treatment of them draws attention to labouring hands and feet and expressive faces, shattering the fantasy of a pristine Bedouin culture. The ad campaign was part of an initiative to increase heritage tourism to places like Petra, Wadi Rum, and Umm Qais\u200a\u2014\u200alocations in which displaced Bedouins are settled around sites of archaeological significance for local flair. Bishouty\u2019s reworking of these figures is also a rescue of twenty-first-century subjects from a carefully curated past to which they have been confined.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n