If news headlines bolster cultural stereotypes, art breaks them down. That’s, in part, the aim of “Persia, 30 Centuries of Art and Culture,” at the Hermitage Amsterdam (through Sept. 15), the Dutch satellite of the venerable St. Petersburg museum. Clichés of Iran as a dour, monocultural society erode amid such works as a jolly faience tile of a hunter on a horse, or a Western-influenced painting of 19th-century lovers snuggling. Technically, even figurative images of people and animals are forbidden by Islam, but Persian artists have long sidestepped the injunction. “The Prophet Muhammad … warned us not to have divine pretensions and breathe life into man and beast in images,” says a quote on the wall from the 19th-century Persian Shah Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar. “But our artists could not resist this temptation, for they desired to represent the Creation of Allah … to His greater glory and honour in the finest forms and images.” Even more surprising, given Iran’s current sexual politics, is the 15th-century illustration of the classical poet Nizami’s “Khamsa,” showing King Khusraw and his men spying on Princess Shirin, who’s shown bathing bare-breasted in a river, languorously combing her hair.
Similar surprises await those expecting to see the Gaza familiar from the news in a show at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. “Gaza at the Crossroads of Civilization” (through Oct. 7), which gathers 531 archeological finds drawn from the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and the private collection of Gazan entrepreneur Jawdat Khoudary, aims to illustrate the multicultural nature of the tiny region’s daily life over the centuries. Egyptian scarabs, sculptures of Poseidon and Aphrodite, mosaics from Byzantine churches and Muslim gravestones suggest the vast range of gods that Gazans have worshiped over the past 5,500 years. To those astonished that Gaza could support Geneva’s organization of a museum show during such tumultuous times in Israel, the Palestinian minister of foreign affairs, Ziad Abu Amer, retorted: “The people of Gaza also have a soul!”
There’s more proof of Mediterranean culture-melt on display in Bonn. The blockbuster show “Egypt’s Sunken Treasures,” which already drew more than a million visitors during stints in Paris and Berlin, now occupies Bonn’s Art and Exhibition Hall (through Jan. 27). On display is an astonishing array of statues, coins, friezes and other relics from the lost cities of Heraklian and Kanopus, discovered by French underwater archeologist Franck Goddio during excavations of the waters near Alexandria. Some of the displays, which offer up beautiful proof of the influence of Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman civilizations on ancient Egypt, were submerged in the Mediterranean for two millennia. The Stela of Ptolemy, a marble slab nearly 20 feet high, features inscriptions in both hieroglyphics and Greek. A statue of the Egyptian god Serapus is bearded and curly-haired like the Greek god Zeus.
The stutter-stop love affair between Europe and Russia is on display at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow’s premier museum of Russian art. “Europe-Russia-Europe” (through June 29) draws together works that explore the cultural trends Russia and the rest of Europe have swapped over the centuries. Since the show was built on the notion of national identities, most countries tended to stick to the classic self-images: the Spaniards sent a Picasso, the Italians dispatched a Titian and the Austrians a Klimt.
Other European shows also explore themes of cultural indentity. Parisians can go contemplate themselves—and modernity—at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Its “Airs de Paris” (through Aug. 15) uses artists as disparate as Marcel Duchamp and Nan Goldin, as well as international architects, to contemplate the changes at work in modern cities. Tate Britain explores Britishness on film in its first major photography show, “How We Are: Photographing Britain” (through Sept. 2). The huge exhibit, a sort of national photo album stretching back to the Victorians, includes shots of Queen Victoria, toffs on the town, militant suffragettes, Tesco supermarkets and Julie Christie.
The West’s image of itself, paradoxically, is one of the subtler themes of “Made in China” (through Aug. 5), a show of Chinese contemporary art at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen. On display are a hundred works from the Estella Collection, one of the world’s biggest collections of modern Chinese art. In the past two decades, Chinese artists have absorbed Western media like photography, video and conceptual drawing. But rather than simply assimilate these Western traditions, says the show’s curator, Anders Kold, Chinese artists are reimagining them, using them as a starting point for their own innovations. “Looking at contemporary Chinese art is also a way of looking at Western art,” he says. “We can see how we ourselves stand in a new, globalized world. We think that Western art will remain the vanishing point of any perspective. We’re wrong. There are so many other focal points. That’s the point of globalization.” The woman in Wei Dong’s “En Soldats Dans” from 2001, for instance, has the eerie qualities of a figure by the American John Currin, but also suggests a psychedelic take on Chinese revolutionary posters.
The Venice Biennale has never shied away from overtly political messages. Back in 1974, the contemporary art show was dedicated to Chile, in opposition to Augusto Pinochet’s coup the year before. This year’s show (through Nov. 21) features debuts by emerging countries like Azerbaijan and Tajikistan, as well as “Most Serene Republics,” giant panels by the Native American conceptual artist Edgar Heap of Birds that examine encounters between Europe and native populations—from the Crusades to the Native Americans who came to Europe on Wild West shows in the 1880s.
The Biennale will also feature a special exhibition devoted to Africa, a region this year’s curator, the American Robert Storr, concedes has been “too long overlooked in the international exhibition circuit.” No longer: this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement is to be awarded, for the first time, to an African, Malick Sidibé, a 72-year-old photographer from Mali. Working out of a small studio on a crowded thoroughfare in downtown Bamako, Mali’s capital, Sidibé has chronicled the city’s vibrant youth and music culture. In the 1960s and ’70s, he began shooting Mali’s young people in portraits: a group of freshly circumcised boys gravely regard Sidibé’s camera. Bell-bottomed hipsters assume extravagant poses with their beloved records or motorbikes. At the Biennale, he’ll be exhibiting work on a project called “Africans Sing Against AIDS,” with shots of musicians from Mali who wrote and performed songs on the disease for a countrywide competition.
There are, of course, big summer exhibitions offering shade from the glare of current events. In London, the Tate Britain offers “Hockney on Turner Watercolours” (through Feb. 3), with 150 of the 19th-century artist’s luminous renderings of landscapes from the Thames to Rome. The contemporary British artist David Hockney guest-curates part of the show, picking his favorites, including “Harlech Castle.” Tate Modern, its sister museum, is staging a multimedia show on “Dalí & Film” (through Sept. 9). While Salvador Dali’s work with Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel is famous, the artist’s collaborations with filmmakers Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock will surprise. But those really eager for total escape should head down the Thames to London’s County Hall, where “Star Wars: The Exhibition” promises that projected landscapes from the famous films will allow fans to be “immersed into the Star Wars universe.” It may not be art, but it’s a passport to simpler, less uncertain times.
