The Lure of the East exhibition at Tate Britain is currently showing paintings made by British artists of the ‘Orient’ (4th June – 31st August 2008). In this context ‘Orient’ meant those parts of the eastern Mediterranean world, which could be accessed relatively easy, particularly after the development of steamboat and rail travel in the 1830s: Egypt, Palestine and Turkey but predominantly Muslim world that was under the Turkish Ottoman Empire coming up to our own Iranian doorstep. According to the exhibition outline in 1970s the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said published his treatise on Orientalism, initiating a global debate over Western representations of the Middle East. For many, such representations now appeared to be a sequence of fictions serving the West’s desire for superiority and control over the East. This debate resonates today as it did 30 years ago. The exhibition was divided under six different themes: >>> FULL TEXT 
