AMMAN, Jordan — Amman has a reputation as a sleepy city. The quiet capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, located in a tough neighborhood between Israel, the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, is known for its beige buildings, steep hills and village-like atmosphere.
But Amman is changing — and with it the art and culture scene is blooming, experts say. In recent years, tens of new galleries and art spaces have opened in the capital, while more artists and cultural activists from Jordan and the neighboring Arab countries have gravitated here for work, shows and conferences.
There are now more than 25 recognized art galleries in Amman, while in the mid-2000s there were only three, says Aseel Sawalha, an associate professor of anthropology at Fordham University, who’s studied the growth of the arts in the city.
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“The (Amman) art scene has been really growing,” says Reham Sharbaji, the public program manager at MMAG Foundation, an Ammani newcomer that houses a gallery space, public library and art school. “There are new smaller spaces that are independent, experimental… It’s still infantile,” she adds. “So there’s more space to grow.”
Amman’s main university, the University of Jordan, launched an independent Faculty of Arts just a decade ago. Now Sharbaji, 35, plans for the MMAG Foundation to offer art workshops and residencies, with the ultimate goal of a free master’s art program.
When Sharbaji was a younger, budding artist, Amman’s main independent art space, Darat al Funun (House of Arts), founded in 1988, had been her model. She’s excited that the next generation of artists in the city will now have more, such as Spring Sessions, a yearly experimental arts residency founded in 2014, and artmejo, Amman’s first online arts magazine, launched this summer.
Mu’ath Isaeid is another new leader in the art scene, which has developed in an increasingly expensive neighborhood at the seam of the more affluent west and poorer east sides of the capital. The 28-year-old Palestinian Jordanian artist and events planner from Amman runs the Baladak Street Art Graffiti festival, among other projects. Started in 2013, the festival features muralists painting their designs on the city’s walls.
Isaeid says the arts community has to balance engaging with art abroad with developing a “more independent, more progressive art” scene in an “Ammani” way. That means not just embracing Middle East stereotypes of embroidery or calligraphy or trying to simply replicate Western art, Isaeid says, but rather seeing Western influences as one resource Ammani artists can use to develop their own style without abolishing their own cultural elements.
While Amman’s art scene is growing, it has so far largely steered away from controversy.
Isaeid says overt references to politics and religion are avoided in the mural festival, for example, to prevent alienating Amman’s conservative communities or to appear as though it’s pushing a political agenda. We “don’t want to be perceived as against the country,” he says.
The Region’s Refugee Camp — and Arts Capital?
Cairo, Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad have long been the Middle East’s cosmopolitan centers, leaving little room or need for Amman to join the scene. But in recent years, population growth has fueled the economy and helped make the art scene a more popular, profitable and available outlet, experts say.
Amman has grown from 1.5 million people a decade ago to 4 million today, according to the
Greater Amman Municipality. Some of the growth is tied to an influx of Jordanians from rural areas or villages, though many new residents have come from outside the country — most as refugees, and some as international aid workers.
“Sadly, the reason why Amman is developing and growing, and not just in the art scene, is because of the unrest in the region,” Sharbaji says. “We are seen as the stability in the region. We are becoming an alternative.”
Jordan, which gained independence in 1946, is often called the refugee camp of the Middle East. At least half of Jordanians are of Palestinian descent, having fled or been expelled after Israel’s founding. In the 1990s and 2000s waves of Iraqis fleeing war made their way to the country, and now hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees live in and around the capital.
Many of the refugees who have arrived over the decades have been impoverished, but some have been established artists. These artists, many of whom are affluent Iraqis, in turn have pushed the art scene to develop through competition and sharing of expertise, Sawalha says. The works of prominent Iraqi artists like Sina Ata and Shayban Ahmad now hang in Amman’s galleries.
Jordanian women have also taken a leading role in the scene, Sawalha says. Most galleries are run or co-run by women, like Dar Al-Anda (Home of the Giving), which promotes and exhibits visual, auditory and sensory art . “It’s women, mainly upper class women, who are running the show,” she says.
Still, Syrians and poorer Jordanians and Palestinians are often not represented in these elite spaces. The government restricts where Syrian refugees can live and work and, while there are no doubt many artists among them, they are disconnected from the Amman scene.
“It’s economic,” Sharbaji says. “People with money have more access. It’s shaped by privilege.”
Amman’s developing art scene has also underscored growing physical divides between the rich and poor parts of the city.
The Economist ranked Amman the most expensive city to live in the Arab world in 2018. And among the capital’s most pricey areas are the neighborhoods of Jabal al Weibdeh and Jabal Amman — the center of the current art boom.
As those areas have become more expensive, some longtime residents have been priced out, Sawalha says. Since there’s no popular term for the phenomenon in Arabic, artists themselves use the English word: “gentrification.”
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Amman?s Population Growth Fuels an Expanding Arts Scene originally appeared on usnews.com
