The Orlando Museum of Art (OMA) is pleased to present A Boundless Drop to a Boundless Ocean, an exhibition and accompanying catalogue which brings together the work of 21 prominent artists of Arab and Iranian heritage based in the US. The international significance of this exhibition is enhanced by an unprecedented collaboration between OMA and The American University in Cairo’s Tahrir Cultural Center which are presenting simultaneous iterations of the exhibition. This exhibition and collaboration reflect OMA’s ongoing objective to provide programing that is diverse and aspires to broaden the worldview and shared experience of our audiences in Central Florida and beyond.

A Boundless Drop to a Boundless Ocean was organized by lead curator Shiva Balaghi, Ph.D. with support from OMA Associate Curator, Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon. Dr. Balaghi is senior adviser to the provost and president of The American University in Cairo for arts and cultural programs. A cultural historian, she specializes in the visual arts of the Middle East and its diasporas. As she notes in her essay, the exhibition “was conceived as a kind of visual narrative, one that sheds light onto the diverse, complex and layered histories of the immigrant experience.” This overarching concept is further examined in the exhibition’s five thematic sections that include, the immigrant’s journey, questions of identity, marking moments of upheaval, tracing the aftermath of conflict and the search for belonging. Visitors will find the exhibition thought-provoking, while also encountering works of striking beauty, a quality which emerges throughout the exhibition with curatorial intention.

Experimentation with figuration and portraiture characterize the work of several artists in our exhibition. The body—posed, transformed, even erased—becomes a way to question fixed notions of identity. Sherin Guirguis’s sculpture El Sokareya (2013) is an exploration of feminism through the lens of history and memory. What may appear as purely decorative is actually a meaningful artistic choice. Interlocking pieces of wood cut with intricate arabesques designs evoke the mashrabiya. The latticework shutters were once a common architectural feature of Arab homes, serving as screens against the hot sun and shielding women from the gaze of passersby. The evocation of the mashrabiya in Guirguis’ art demarcates public and private space, highlighting a visible absence of the female body. Born in Luxor, Egypt, Guirguis moved to California as a teenager. In her artistic practice, traces of the Egyptian past find contemporary cultural expression. For the artist, cutting through materials becomes a kind of opening that pierces through fixed narratives. Her sculpture offers a gendered reading of lost histories, a declaration of the ways the past continues to inflect the present.

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