Let There Be Spaces in Your Togetherness Featured in Star Tribune

Art exhibition at SooVAC rejects ‘Middle East’ in favor of a more inclusive community.

SWANA is meant as a corrective to “Middle East,” a Western, colonialist term. Defining the region along geographic rather than political lines, its borders stretch from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan in the east, embracing a broader swath of countries, including Somalia.

That definition attracted artists such as Mansour, who would not have been included in a “Middle Eastern” show. Mizna, which also curated the recent show “History Is Not Here: Art and the Arab Imaginary” at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, even views the term “Arab” as “limiting and imperfect.” Not all of the artists in that show identified as Arab.

“We were having conversations almost weekly about how do we define ourselves and our region without becoming exclusionary, and also taking into account Arabs’ own colonial history in Africa and with Kurdish communities,” said Palestinian-American artist Lamia Abukhadra, whose work is in the show and also served as a juror for it.

“It is still an ongoing and difficult conversation — the idea of regions and cartography. All these things are based in colonialism.”
– Alicia Eler