Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art
British Museum, London

IN A refreshingly subversive pose, Palestinian artist Raeda Saadeh reimagines the reclining woman from 19th-century male fantasies of the harem. In her work, on show in Inspired by the East, she dresses in copies of the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds, turning what was once an erotic Western obsession into a confrontational witness to today’s turbulent Middle Eastern politics.

By so doing, she sabotages both the patriarchy that defined the so-called Orientalist painters who shaped appetites for the exotic as the West expanded its colonial reach and appropriates their genre to make her own statement.