ArteEast is excited to launch its Virtual Gallery with Egyptian-American artist Amina Mansour, whose work embodies the spirit of ArteEast’s interest in the intersection of different histories and cultures within and through the Middle East. Mansour’s mixed media works explore the relationship between the antebellum U.S. South and the cotton-growing Nile Delta, and the overlaps and disjunctures that this connection produces on both personal and collective levels. The critical value of Mansour’s work lies in her sophisticated examination of the interwoven themes of wealth, taste, gender, and nostalgia in this longstanding traffic across cultural boundaries. Mansour refuses to reduce cross-cultural issues to identity politics, declarations of radical alterity, or simplistic critiques of tradition. Rather, she reveals a story filled with complicated, and often contradictory, alliances and dissonances. The works shown in this exhibition are but several chapters of a larger chronicle that the artist is still in the process of disclosing, and that forces us to reconsider our standard narratives about U.S.-Middle East relations.
Born in Alabama, USA, in 1972, Amina Mansour lives and works in Egypt.
