Artists of the Middle East

New book on Middle Eastern art 

Arab art expert Saeb Eigner explores the work of more than 250 Modern and contemporary artists spanning diverse art movements across 22 countries in the Middle East

The Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri’s Cherry Orchard (Bagh-e-Gilas), 2008-09. Courtesy of artist and The Third Line, Dubai, and The Art Newspaper.

Interview by Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper

Saeb Eigner’s ambitious, timely overview of Middle Eastern art from 1900 to today features more than 250 prominent and lesser-known artists, spanning Morocco in North Africa to Iran in the East. It includes detailed biographies focusing on key Modern artists such as Shafic Abboud and Bahman Mohassess as well as contemporary trailblazers such as Nabil Nahas and Shirin Neshat. Eigner tells us how he approached this complex book.

The Art Newspaper: Why was it important to write this book?

Saeb Eigner: The book’s introduction and preface provide a substantive historical overview of Middle Eastern art over the past century. The preface also reflects on my personal engagement with the region, my relationships with artists and the broader art ecosystem—including galleries, curators, museums, biennials, collectors and institutions.

I have been privileged to witness first-hand the remarkable evolution of Modern and contemporary art from the Middle East, and this book aims to share that journey with a wider audience.

The book sheds light on areas that have not been widely covered in a single volume—spanning some 22 countries, major art movements and gender representation. It serves as both a complement to previous scholarship and a valuable resource for those passionate about Modern and contemporary art from the region, while also contextualising the vibrant contemporary art scene.

“O Chimera O Chimera” explores gender and transformation in Iran

The Mine is presenting O Chimera O Chimera, Feathers Whisper, Talons gleam, Mortal Flesh And Mythic scheme a solo presentation by Bita Fayyazi.

Bita Fayyazi, Untitled 14 (O Chimera O Chimera), Ceramic, 25 x 22 x 19 cm, 2024. Courtesy Alserkal.

In the ongoing rupture of Iran’s social and political landscape, the framing of gender has acquired renewed urgency – demanding not only visibility, but reinvention. Bita Fayyazi has long operated within this space of tension and transformation. Her sculptures, often imbued with a dramatic, theatrical presence, do not simply capture the female form – they wrestle with it. Through her interventions, the body becomes a site of resistance, a vessel for resilience, and a move toward metamorphosis.

Fayyazi’s practice does not rest solely on the human. Her forms often slip into the hybrid creatures that blur the lines between species, between myth and material. Totemic and uncanny, these beings echo the intimacy of our everyday entanglement with the animal world, even as they challenge our definitions of what it means to be human. In these amalgamated bodies, Fayyazi creates a charged terrain where personal and collective memory coalesce, where the fantastic becomes a way of reimagining the real. Her work insists on the porousness of boundaries – between gender, form, self, and the world.

Between Shadow and Light

Yosra Mojtahedi (b. 1986) is a Tehran-born artist based in France who explores various fields at the intersection of art, science, and technology with her work prompted by Iranian censorship. Coming from a country where the body is taboo, Mojtahedi’s art reacts with sensuality, tactility, olfaction, and even eroticism and feminity at times. Steeped in a surrealist, obscurantist atmosphere – “a space free of places and times” – her work’s objects and elements all become deeply symbolic.

Yosra Mojtahedi, Lilith, Kinetic, sculptural, and sound installation, Private collection of Fondation Francois Scneider 2023. Courtesy Contemporary Lynx.

by Berenika Balcer, Contemporary Lynx

A Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains graduate, she studies the human being in all its dimensions—physical, cultural, social, religious, and psychological—and its relationship with nature. Through sculptural and interactive installations, drawings, and photographs, she creates organic, sensual, and mystical landscapes. With a focus particularly on soft robotics – deformable robots and a perspective rooted in anthropology and through her research on nature and the place of the human body (especially the female body) in society, she questions the border between the living and the non-living. Through sculptures conceived as “human-machines” and “fountain-bodies”.

“I am enough and whole as I am”:

Bea Dero casts hybridity onto the streets of London

Bound by Two Homes blends Iranian cultural iconography with quintessentially British spaces to dissect identity

© Bea Dero. Courtesy 1854 | British Journal of Photography.

by Dalia Al-Dujaili, 1854 | British Journal of Photography

For Bea Dero, a British-born Iranian artist – as for most diaspora – hybridity presents itself as a method by which one practices their identity as they go. The artist’s debut solo show Bound by Two Homes materialised through a deeply personal journey of self-acceptance, an effort to reconcile two halves of an identity that the world so often forced apart. “When I’m in Iran they call me English and when I’m in England, they ask me where I’m from. I needed to find a way to create a representation that would help me see myself as whole as opposed to in-between things or never enough as either or,” Dero says. “I am enough and whole as I am, I just exist as something new.”

The tension of duality, the inescapable contrasts and parallels of heritage, is not unique but Dero’s response offers a particularly distinctive visual declaration of belonging, an assertion that identity does not have to be fragmented but can instead be layered, complex, and proudly held in its entirety. 

The body of work – co-curated with Green Tble – brings together a portrait series and a reworking of family photo-album images, forming Archive Trellis, an installation that underscores the role of memory and nostalgia in shaping identity. “Through this piece, I’m reinforcing how memory and nostalgia inform my sense of self and in-turn, my practice. It further contextualises the project as my recent explorations have also rooted in my yearning to return to my motherland, which I can no longer do due to political safeguarding reasons,” she explains.