The Three Cultures Foundation offers the online summer course 'Visual arts in today's Arab world'
The Three Cultures Foundation offers the online summer course 'The visual arts in today's Arab world' for anyone interested in this subject. The main objective of this course is to offer a precise knowledge of the most relevant aspects of contemporary Arab artistic production, which has scarcely had a place in the Spanish academic world, despite its social, intellectual and economic transcendence.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the plastic arts in Arab and Islamic countries have achieved great development and a notable international projection, which has only increased throughout the twenty-first century, so that these arts deserve to be duly recognised and analysed both for their intrinsic cultural and aesthetic values and for their contribution to global culture. The proliferation of art movements, galleries, art fairs and studios in these countries, with the recent significant boost to the art world in the United Arab Emirates, has led to a growing interest in Arab art and artists in the art market and in some academic circles in the Arab countries themselves, Spain has also joined in, as evidenced by the exhibitions and other activities organised in recent years by Casa Árabe in Madrid and Cordoba, the Three Cultures Foundation in Seville, the Euro-Arab Foundation in Granada, and the Reina Sofía and Prado museums in Madrid.
This course, aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of Art History, Arab Culture, Anthropology and Sociology, and at all those interested in contemporary art and present-day Arab societies, aims to reflect on the conditions of creation, problems, yearnings and achievements of artists in the Arab world today, and on the specificity and conceptual and aesthetic characteristics of their works.
In order to study the rich panorama of the visual arts in the Arab world today, an excellent group of professors, researchers, art curators and artists from Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, the United States and Spain have been selected to give classes on the artistic avant-gardes of their respective countries and others in the region, They will analyse the artistic work of prominent artists and schools that have built, and continue to build, modernity or attempts at modernisation in their respective societies.
The course also focuses on the decisive contribution of Arab women to the world of art and reflections on the contrast between tradition and modernity, on cultural identity and on the expression and practice of the freedom that artistic activities give rise to in societies that have suffered external aggression, totalitarian or unstable political systems and renovating movements of the importance of "pan-Arabism" and the so-called "Arab Spring".
The summer course The Visual Arts in the Arab World Today will be held from 5 to 8 October 2021 in a virtual mode only and will last 25 teaching hours. There are 100 places available and the registration fee is 60 euros.
The full programme, as well as the timetable for the lectures, can be consulted at: https://www.unia.es/oferta-academica/cursos-de-verano/oferta-cv/item/las-artes-plasticas-en-el-mundo-arabe-actual
