LONDON — Bombs explode, nations rage and religions clash daily in the Middle East. For many outsiders, the steady drip-feed of violent images from places such as Gaza and Iraq has reduced the region to a trope of carnage and conflict.
A new exhibition has opened here in the British capital with the hope of offering an alternate vision: the Middle East as a source of lively, stimulating contemporary art -- informed by conflict, certainly, but not consumed by it.
Rather, the politics of gender, sexuality and religion are as much a part of "Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East" as armed confrontation. The dozens of paintings, sculptures and installations on view at the Saatchi Gallery in central London engage such topics as prostitution in Iran and the segregation of the sexes in Muslim rituals.
There is the roomful of women wrapped in chadors and kneeling in prayer, ghostly aluminum-foil figures that, when seen from the front, turn out to be hollow, with black voids for faces. Elsewhere, a burly would-be terrorist, his chest recently waxed, strikes a ridiculous pinup pose in a painting that puckishly blurs the macho with the metrosexual.
If such works by artists from nations such as Lebanon and Syria surprise some visitors, then all the better, say organizers of the exhibition, which is scheduled to run until May 6.
"We normally just hear about wars and religious controversies in the Middle East," said Rebecca Wilson, the gallery's head of development. "We may not even have a picture in our minds of what artwork from Iraq or Tehran might look like."
"Unveiled" does not, however, present a comprehensive or curatorial survey of art from the region. Instead, it's a snapshot derived from the eclectic personal collection of one man, Charles Saatchi, the advertising mogul turned art patron who owns the gallery.
Of the 19 artists featured, at least half are of Iranian descent. Countries such as Israel and Egypt, both of which have contemporary art scenes, are not represented. Many of the artists live and work in the West, including in the U.S. And nearly all of them are younger than 40, which mirrors Saat- chi's well-known connoisseurship of works by young Britons.
