A new exhibition at the Middle East Institute Art Gallery called Arab Pop Art: Between East and West offers a timely reminder that in spite of the conflict and turmoil in the region, there is a lively, vibrant, and cosmopolitan culture at play throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
The pop art movement challenged fine art traditions by employing imagery from popular culture with a focus on comic books, advertising, and everyday mass-produced objects. It first emerged in the mid to late 1950s, in the United Kingdom and United States, as both a reaction to and an expansion of abstract expressionism. In the West, the work of Andy Warhol and his famous Campbell’s Soup Cans series became emblematic of the genre.
In the Middle East, a leading pioneer of pop art was Iranian sculptor Parviz Tanavoli, who shocked the bourgeois sensibilities of 1960s Tehran with his first show, almost causing a riot. Even the Tehrani intelligentsia, cloistered as it was at the time, perceived his clever subversion of straightjacketed tradition — namely, the use of a toilet ewer inserted into a handmade Persian rug — as an insult to the art world. The Borghese Gallery, a cutting-edge art space run by a Frenchwoman, exhibited his work in 1965 but had to close its doors after a mob threatened to burn it down.
“I was fed up with pretty art, pretty women, pretty objects, pretty paintings,” Tanavoli told me in 2015, adding, “I wanted to show that what we are ashamed of in our daily life could be art.” To that end, faucets, locks, pieces of textile, old shoes and mattresses, and a variety of found junkyard treasures became his palette. While his work celebrates everyday objects, he also has embraced devotional devices, such as the locks fastened by worshippers to the lattice grillwork of Shi’a shrines and saqqakhanehs (public water fountains). At once irreverent and deeply respectful of folk tradition, Tanavoli’s art moves deftly between the sacred and the quotidian, finding something of each in the other.
During a tour of the MEI Gallery show led by the institute’s Arts & Culture Center director, Lyne Sneige, and her co-curator, Laila Abdul-Hadi Jadallah, I was reminded of Tanavoli’s thoughtful fusion not only of the sacred and the everyday but also, as suggested by the exhibition’s title, of East and West. The exhibition, featuring the work of 14 artists from different generations and across the region, is particularly timely and relevant, according to Sneige. As she reflected, “Amidst the immeasurable suffering and pain in the Middle East now, the show is a testament to the vitality and creativity of Arab artists who produce outside the confines of war and conflict. The work is clever, vibrant, and critical.”
While some Western iterations of pop art are less overtly political, Jadallah noted that Arab pop art “looks colorful and striking, [but] the work contains cultural commentary and criticism of a lot of social and political taboos in the region. It counteracts the reductive way that the region has been perceived by the West but in a multi-layered and subversive way.”
There are some hints in the works on display of the political pop movement merging with social realism that emerged in China in the 1980s as a way of dealing with both the Cultural Revolution and rapid modernization. While that iteration of pop art was often criticized for employing stereotypes that appealed to the Western market, the MEI Gallery show succeeds in subverting those tropes with an engaging irreverence.
The exhibition opens with a piece by Egyptian Armenian artist Chant Avedissian, whose work with iconic images of President Gamal Abdel Nasser and renowned singer and actress Oum Kalthoum from the early 1990s led the way for many young artists in the region. His monotypes on paper illustrate a flair for blending Islamic geometry, popular media imagery, and folk symbols. Avedissian, who was influenced by his art school studies in Montreal and Paris as well as by architect Hassan Fathy’s take on local traditions and materials, explores 20th-century Egyptian identity through a unique lens and is a fitting introduction to the exhibition.
Across from Avedissian’s seminal contributions, the work of Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj — known as the “Andy Warhol of Marrakech” — is presented in all its street-smart glory. In a delightful melding of fashion photography, pop culture, video, and traditional North African aesthetics, the multidisciplinary artist dances between his Moroccan heritage and his second home in London’s multicultural milieu.
Hajjaj’s portrait, Omar Offendum, presents the eponymous celebrated Syrian American rapper with one foot atop a Louis Vuitton-Takashi Murakami accessory stacked on a Coca-Cola crate and sporting a custom-designed robe created from flags of the MENA region. The 44 x 30-inch metallic Lambda print on Dibond features a sprayed wooden frame decorated with 56 small cans of harissa, a smoky red chili paste — the Moroccan equivalent of Warhol’s soup cans. An accompanying work, Lamp #2, comprising recycled Arabic food tins and symbolically illuminating the exhibition, reimagines the traditional Moroccan lantern with irreverent and colorful panache.
In the trajectory of Middle Eastern pop art, if Avedissian represents the old school, then surely Hajjaj — whose works have been acquired by the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum — heralds the future of the movement, which is increasingly governed by trends on Instagram. In the brave new world of social media, pop eats itself in a feeding frenzy of borrowed references where image trumps authorship and identities blur.
More food for thought arrives via a gorgeous triptych by Lebanese artist Rana Salam evoking the glamour and optimism of post-independence 1950s Beirut. The collages of Arabic typography, vintage imagery, and ephemera manage to be sexy and subversive all at once.
Multi-disciplinary Saudi Arabian artist Yusef Alahmad reimagines heritage as something both sacred and playful with reinterpretations of the traditional stringed oud and even the Ka’ba, the sacred Meccan center of Muslim pilgrimage. He blends traditional Islamic patterns, Arabic calligraphy, and regional motifs with bold color and contemporary forms. In that vein, Alahmad transforms skateboards into totemic objects decorated with colorful Arabic script and traditional design.
Two daring works by multidisciplinary Yemeni American artist Yasmine Nasser Diaz are also noteworthy. In Ritual, Diaz uses devoré, a textile technique that dissolves velvet fibers, to reveal translucent silhouettes of a woman dancing. Inspired by North African dancer Esraa Warda, the work is framed with shimmering fabric as layered as the non-binary body’s identity. 3eib, a neon and archival inkjet print on wood portraying the artist as a young girl nearly obscured by the Arabic word for shame, challenges traditional expectations of young women. The innocence of girlhood contrasts with the harshness of societal judgement.
Palestinian artist Rasha Eleyan’s two giclée prints on fine art paper, Revolution Is Female and Resist Don’t Resist, as well as Summer Fruit (Egypt, a Revolution), a large oil and acrylic on canvas, offer up sumptuous subversion in the form of still-life depictions rife with underground meaning. Symbols of Palestinian resistance and literary references to author Ghassan Kanafani entwine with everyday objects like vases of flowers.
Two works by artist Ilyes Messaoudi are part of his ongoing project, The Nights of Scheherazade, comprising 1,001 paintings exploring identity, irony, and contradiction in a Tunisian reinterpretation of the classic tales. In Night 128: Medicine Shortage, Scheherazade stands before an empty pharmacy, watching as the last bits of medicine are stolen by a corrupt politician while a sequined snake undulates through the frame of the painted collage. In Night 126: Morality Police, Scheherazade refuses to relinquish her bottle of wine to a “morality cop,” who claims it is illegal for women to drink but secretly covets the contraband.
Lebanese American artist Helen Zughaib’s work from her Changing Perceptions series, created to counter post-9/11 stereotypes about Arab women and Islamic dress, neatly embodies the exhibition’s goal of showing how pop art can be employed to resist tired cultural tropes. Her insertion of the abaya into her re-imaginings of famous pieces by artists Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, and Piet Mondrian give agency to the female figures she portrays, distinct from the Western narrative of “oppressed Muslim women.” The Picasso-esque figure sporting a red ball cap (perhaps a Make Arab Art Great Again subversion of MAGA?) appears on the verge of winking at the viewer.
In this moveable pop art feast that was clearly a labor of love, one is left satiated yet still craving more of the delicious treats on display. The talented artists featured in the MEI Gallery through January 23, 2026, and their future projects are certainly worth following well beyond that date.
Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey Through Iraq, a past editor at New Internationalist, and has been reporting from the Middle East on culture, society, and politics for two decades. Her book in progress, Between Two Rivers, is a travelogue of ancient and sacred sites in Iraq.
Top image: Gallery shot of Arab Pop Art: Between East and West at the MEI Art Gallery. Work left: Rasha Eleyan, Summer Fruit (Egypt a Revolution) (2011-2017). Courtesy of the artist. Works right: Tony Khawam, top: South Beach Belly Boogie (2021), bottom: Blue Dream (2023). Courtesy of the artist.
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