Stefano Carboni

Collecting ‘Islamic’ Art in Southeast Asia and Australia: Past, Present and Future
November 4, 2017

Southeast Asia includes a major portion of the Muslim population in the world, yet for students of Islamic art, Southeast Asia has always been perceived as highly peripheral, remote, hard to pinpoint and somewhat uninteresting and unexciting. This is also due to the fact that the area is amazingly rich in diverse local aesthetic traditions and multiculturalism which, when mixed and superimposed with more familiar Islamic artistic modes of expressions, still appear dominant and end up confusing the traditional scholar of Islamic art.

Australia sits today in an odd place in this panorama, not having a Southeast Asian dominant population and being the result of British colonialism over the local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In this presentation, Stefano Carboni discusses the work of contemporary Muslim Australian artists or artists of Near-, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian background within the context of the current widespread Islamophobic environment, from which Australia is certainly not immune.