The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the US, is holding But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, the third exhibition of the Guggenheim Map Global Art Initiative.

Organised by Sara Raza, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator for Middle East and North Africa, the exhibition will feature work by a broad selection of artists that illuminates contemporary creative practice in the region and its diaspora. Following its presentation in New York, the exhibition will travel to the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2017.

Abbas Akhavan, Study for a Monument.Abbas Akhavan, Study for a Monument.

The assembled works investigate narratives of origin, ideologies of architecture and the politics of migration throughout the Middle East and North Africa, as embodied by But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, a 2014 work by Rokni Haerizadeh that lends the exhibition its title.

Sourced from news media, this series of works on paper examines the viral capacity of digital communications, articulated through the visual entanglement of politics and fable.

Installed on two levels of the museum, the exhibition features a selection of works, many of them installations of large or variable scale, in a range of mediums and formats including painting, photography, sculpture, video, and work on paper.

Abbas Akhavan’s Study for a Monument (2013-2015), which is comprised of intricate cast bronze flora specimens arranged on domestic cotton sheets and resembling a funerary display, occupies the floor by windows that overlook Central Park.

Other works represent striking interventions into the museum’s galleries. These include Kader Attia’s Untitled (Ghardaïa) (2009), a reincarnation in couscous of the Algerian city from the ancient Mzab region that inspired influential French architect Le Corbusier. Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s monumental Flying Carpets (2011), a suspended stainless steel grid that casts a matrix of geometric shadows, is modelled after a central bridge in Venice where undocumented migrant street vendors of mainly African, Arab and South Asian origin sell counterfeit goods on rugs to tourists.

Kader Attia, Untitled (Ghardaïa).Kader Attia, Untitled (Ghardaïa).

According to Raza “the exhibition forms an intricate jigsaw puzzle, representing a fragmented and shifting geographical region. With a cross-circulation of current ideas drawn from science, mathematics and philosophy as they were developed in the area, and references to geometry as a metaphor for both physical and conceptual space, the works explore how the past informs the present. This confluence of narratives thus smuggles certain inconvenient truths about history and memory into the realm of the exhibition, articulating the value of artistic strategies within the broader context of contemporary culture in the Middle East and North Africa”.

The assembled works investigate narratives of origin, ideologies of architecture and the politics of migration

As with all phases of the MAP initiative, But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise features artworks that have been recently acquired for the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. Curatorial research for the exhibition was developed with an eye toward building on the Guggenheim’s history of internationalism as well as providing new scholarship on visual culture from the Middle East and North Africa and its diaspora.

Artists represented in the exhibition include Abbas Akhavan (Tehran, Iran), Kader Attia ( Paris, France), Ergin Çavusoglu (Targovishte, Bulgaria), Ali Cherri (Beirut, Lebanon), Ori Gersht (Tel Aviv), Mariam Ghani (New York, US), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (Beirut, Lebanon), Rokni Haerizadeh (Tehran, Iran), Susan Hefuna (Cairo, Egypt), Iman Issa (Cairo, Egypt), Nadia Kaabi-Linke (Tunis, Tunisia), Hassan Khan (London, UK), Mohammed Kazem (Dubai, UAE), Ahmed Mater (Tabuk, Saudi Arabia), Zineb Sedira (Paris, France) and Ala Younis (Kuwait).

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Flying Carpets.Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Flying Carpets.

The Guggenheim Map Global Art Initiative was developed with the financial services firm UBS in 2012 to increase exposure and access to contemporary art from the culturally dynamic regions of South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa. The first Map exhibition, No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, was organised by June Yap and presented at the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore, following its New York debut in 2013. The second exhibition, Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today was organised by Pablo León de la Barra and was on view at Museo Jumex in Mexico City until last February. It will be presented at the South London Gallery in June.

To date, Map’s acquisitions programme has brought more than 107 works by 85 artists and collectives into the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. More than 7,000 students, teachers, families and art enthusiasts have participated in over 80 interactive education programmes, developed jointly by the Guggenheim and its institutional partners across the world specifically for local audiences.

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise takes place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the US, between April 29 and October 5.

www.guggenheim.org/MAP

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