ORIENTS SANS FRONTIERES, an Exhibition at the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, 60 rue de Bassano, 101 avenue des Champs Elysées, Paris, 8e, 9th February – 10th May 2008 

By Janet Rady.  www.janetradyfineart.com

Exhibiting artists:  Adel Abidin; Lida Abdul; Amal Saade; Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige; Malekeh Nayiny; Yin Xiuzhen; Mohammad Ali Talpur; Chen Shaoxiong; Bita Fayyazi; Abdessiam Oulahbib.

To utter the words ‘Orient’, ‘Frontiers’ ‘Silk Route’ and ‘Croisière Jaune’ (Yellow Journey), the legendary Citroën expedition, in one breath instantly evokes a certain exoticism; add the House   of Louis Vuitton and, finally, contemporary Middle Eastern / Asian art and you   cannot but avoid totally igniting your imagination.

The historic 1931 Croisière Jaune expedition from Beirut to Beijing instigated by André Citroën is the setting for the current exhibition at the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton on the Champs Elysées in Paris.

The expedition consisted of two groups each of forty three French scientists, archaeologists, naturalists, painters and photographers who set out to retrace the route of the Silk Road. One group departed from Beirut in a convey of seven specially adapted Citroën caterpillar trucks, Autochenille, furnished with Louis Vuitton trunks, covering 11,000 kilometres across the plateaux of Persia, the perilous passes of the Himalayas, the Karakorams and the Mongolian steppes and desert to arrive twelve months later in Beijing. Whilst the other left from Beijing, and travelled in reverse to meet up with the first. Each step of the journey was followed internationally by daily wireless transmissions as well as being documented by a National Geographic journalist and photographer.

Were it to stop here, as an exhibition wholly devoted to documenting an expedition founded on an essentially ethnocentric and colonialist view of the world by showing vintage film, photographs, maps and an antique car with associated relics, it would not install a sense of inherent originality or curatorial skill. But it doesn’t stop, it goes beyond the simplified Orientalist viewpoint.

What makes this exhibition so fresh and exciting is Herve Mikaeloff’s, the Curator, invitation to ten emerging artists from the countries traversed on the Croisière Jaune expedition to invert the meaning of this journey by expressing their own vision of their countries of origin. This in itself, as the Curator acknowledges, is fraught with difficulties.

Do we, the audience, have a predetermined concept of what we expect artists in these war torn countries to be producing? If so, how does this differ from our forebears’ own ethnocentric vision? As individuals living in an ever increasingly frontierless world, why should it be incumbent upon the artists alone to provide answers to the universal questions of identity and territorial belonging?

To have any meaning at all the exhibition avoids the didactic and draws together the artists’ impressions and feelings. This ‘expedition’ of the mind is realised by a red line painted on the ground. Starting on street level the line guides the viewer up to the gallery and round the exhibition. At each stop, we are confronted by a different artist’s personal vision of their world. This is not a rose tinted vision; we face depictions of exile, rootlessness, loss of cultural heritage, hybrid identities, futility, destruction and transformation.

By the end of our expedition, we are left with the artists’ strong sense of individuality in their otherwise totally fragmented worlds.

Janet Rady is a fine art Curator representing Middle Eastern Arists www.janetradyfineart.com

All images coutesy of the artists and Louis Vuitton