Come this June (2017), Tate Modern celebrates the life and works of Fahrelnissa Zeid, an artist who can rightly be seen as one of the female pioneers, in the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, of both modernism and abstraction in a western sense, responsive to western aesthetics and sensibilities. Abstraction, through reinterpretation of Arabic/Farsi/Osmanli/Urdu calligraphic forms, isn’t new to a region that, in Asia alone, stretches from Afghanistan, post-Mughal South Asia and Iran to the Arabian peninsula and the Levant. The wider MENA region, which skirts the Atlantic through cultural cross-fertilisation right up to Mauritania and further south in an area with present-day Mali at its centre, is receptive to this even as it has its own channels to Europe. The modernism that Fahrelnissa Zeid embraced is rooted, however, in an ongoing phenomenon which is one part dialogue and another part dichotomy. This of course is the westward reach of a region in flux and turmoil, empires in decline through 19th and 20th centuries, the hybrid fruits of western colonialism and eastern cultural and military forays into mainland Europe. It is also a perennial quest and yearning of a people which lives in thrall to creativity, dynamism and above all freedom of expression in Europe. A native of post-Ottoman and pre-republic proto-Atatürkist Istanbul, Zeid was the product of an era when the cultural boundaries between contiguous nation states emerging from the First World War fused and flourished. What the Tate calls the first retrospective of Fahrelnissa Zeid may come as a surprise to those of its patrons who may never have heard of her, let alone considered her work in an international context. Now they are invited to reappraise her work in the selfsame framework. But that’s what Tate does. Validation by virtue of display is a kind of anointing that is both privileging and appropriation, in this case a benign and benedictory embrace of the artist in a milieu many MENA artists young and old expressly aspire to. The fact that Zeid’s merit has already been acknowledged in the marketplace over the years, with one sale at Bonhams London realising more than two million pounds sterling, reinforces that elevation of status. Zeid’s scroll-like Towards A Sky, 593 x 201cm, also sold recently at a healthy price, GBP 992,750. Zeida was born in Istanbul in 1901...