Cubist counterpoint: Transnational aesthetics in video, sculpture and installation art by mounir fatmi

Abstract

This article addresses distinctively visual means of presenting 'Islam' in ways that resist singular readings. It focuses primarily on the work of Paris-based artist Mounir Fatmi (b. 1970 Tangiers, Morocco). Drawing on a combination of visual studies and postcolonial studies (both Francophone and Anglophone), this article asks how contemporary artwork draws on features specific to the media of video, sculpture and installation to produce visual, or multisensorial, 'creoles', in parallel to its more commonly studied literary counterparts. It shows how artwork in such media exceeds postcolonial concepts such as 'transculturation' and 'counterpoint' in an uneven, globalized frame. It argues that 'postcolonial', transnational art resonates both with postcolonial thought and with enduring artistic preoccupations and practices in its forging of a visual language with which to evoke alterity, or to 'represent the unrepresentable'. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved.