Traveling exhibition aims to bury stereotypical ideas
Art in the service of peace and reconciliation is the idea behind «Breaking the Veils,» a large group exhibition currently being hosted by the Benaki Museum at Technopolis in Gazi. The exhibition includes contemporary artwork by 51 women artists from more than 20 Islamic countries (among them Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey). The show is based on an idea by Aliki Moschi-Gauguet who, several years ago, instituted the Pan-Mediterranean Women Artists Network (FAM), a network that focuses on issues of culture and politics (as a kind of cultural diplomacy) with the objective of promoting cross-cultural exchange and understanding. FAM is one of the principal organizers of the exhibition at the Benaki along with the Royal Society of Fine Arts, founder of the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts from where the works in the exhibition originated. The exhibition, now showing in Athens, will travel to UNESCO headquarters in New York, and then tour various large cities of the Western world, ending at the United Nations. The tour began in Rhodes, where the exhibition was shown this past fall on the occasion of the second International Forum for a Culture of Peace by Mediterranean Women Creators, organized by the FAM network. As the exhibition’s title suggests, the show is an effort to understand cultural, political and racial differences, to appraise «otherness» and to help lift stereotypical, «veiled» notions of the world – both the Western perception of Islam and vice versa. «Breaking the Veils» at Technopolis in Gazi, 100 Pireos, to February 23.
