This text was intended to be a review on the recent large-scale Saatchi-initiated exhibition of Middle Eastern art entitled Unveiled. It was unavoidable to scrutinize the contemporary act of producing a geographically marked exhibition regarding its contexts of post-colonialism, construction of identity, notions of difference, binarism of the exotic and the primitive; and its two decades of presence in the field of art.
I will introduce selected gatherings and discussions on exhibitions as ‘culturally’ representative, on the institutional reproduction of localized art practice in relation to its conceptual positioning and on relevant production of meaning. Throughout the discussion I will focus on the exhibition Unveiled as containing a filtered variety of iconography and will conclude with the questions of what it means in our contemporary world of understanding diversity and positioning difference.