The (re)Orient

The artist and curator Fareed Armaly’s 1989 Paris exhibition, The (re)Orient, critically situated the role of contemporary exhibition-making within an emerging postcolonial discourse. Drawing upon the recently-built Grand Pyramid entrance to the Louvre Museum, The (re)Orient created spatial passages out of instabilities hidden in Western institutional legacies of representation, power, and knowledge, to engage with the “Orient” as narratives constructed through epistemic violence.

This publication is produced on the occasion of the artist’s update of The (re)Orient exhibition in 2021 at mumok, Vienna. In dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, Armaly brings together a comprehensive exhibition documentation with a timely reading of the exhibition themes through new contributions and key reprints including Derek Gregory, Sara Ahmed, Akram Zaatari, and Robert K. Beshara.