without boundaries

Among the manifold pleasures of the Sunday NYT, there's a review by Holland Cotter of a new show at MOMA that I am desperately eager to see: Without Boundaries: Seventeen Ways of Looking. The show features the work of several artists from various parts of the "Islamic world," all of whom now live and work in the West, and tries to complicate the art world's simplistic categorization of their work as "Islamic art." Cotter writes,

Most of these artists are tagged Islamic because of their backgrounds. Yet much of their work is far less about Islam itself, as a religion or culture, than about their relationship to Islam — in some cases it is close and positive; in other cases, distant and critical. But in most instances, it is ambivalent — the opposite of how Islam is treated these days in the larger world.
[...]
So, is there an "Islamic" to be found in the picture that all these exhibitions together create? If there is, it is capacious, multifold, fantastically detailed and, of course, still unfinished; like Western art, it's a project in progress. The political fictions that have commandeered center stage represent only a part of the picture, though it is easy — and dangerous — to take them, or their Western counterparts, for the whole. If art does nothing else, it challenges us not to look at the world too narrowly. By its very breadth it reassures us that no image is the image. That culture is, always, about change. That sometimes collision courses can turn into open highways.

The artists include Shazia Sikander, whose neo-miniatures I've wanted to see for a long time (ever since hearing about the remarkable collaborative show Karkhana) and the Turkish video/installation artist Kutlug Ataman, who's done some very interesting work on the themes of urbanization and neighbourhood life in Istanbul. And I've been intrigued by Shirin Neshat's work, which juxtaposes photography and calligraphy, since seeing it at Modern Art Oxford's exhibition Veil a few years ago.