Dis[Locating] Culture: Contemporary Islamic Art In America

From The Huffington Post:

Slide_18048_251692_large The power of art to reveal commonalities between seemingly distant sets of beliefs is powerfully displayed in an upcoming exhibit, entitled “Dis[Locating] Culture: Contemporary Islamic Art in America,” at the Michael Berger Gallery in Pittsburgh, Penn., and co-curated by Reem Alalusi. “Dis[Locating] Culture” will be the city’s first exhibit of contemporary Islamic art, and certainly one of the first in America’s Midwest. Held at a gallery owned by a Jewish American art collector, the show is a direct affront to the binary thinking and exclusionary conclusions, carried across the airwaves by an insistently normalizing, ever vocal talkocracy, that produces mistaken, typecast notions of Islamic art as a mutually incompatible field to that of the Contemporary project. Though Islamic art is conventionally considered a separate category from Western Art, the artists in “Dis[Locating] Culture” blur the categories and push the boundaries of each. This is neither Islamic nor Western, per se; this is Contemporary Art.

More here.