Burrows, Isabelle (2025) Remembering, (Re)-forgetting, and Revisionism: Corporate Marketing and the Rhetoric of Progressivism in Tate Modern’s 2017 Fahrelnissa Zeid Retrospective. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
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Abstract
This thesis addresses the perennial problem of exceptionalism in exhibiting women artists and examines such exceptionalism as a product of the institutional political and economic agendas imposed by corporate and state investors in art museums. Using the 2017 retrospective exhibition of Fahrelnissa Zeid’s oeuvre, which concluded the four-year International Arts Partnership between Tate Modern and its sponsor Deutsche Bank, I interrogate Tate’s characterization of Fahrelnissa Zeid as an artist ignored because of her gender and international origin who was “saved” by the Deutsche Bank International Arts Partnership. I demonstrate that both institutions manipulate the art histories and exhibition promotion they produce by relying on a rhetoric of neoliberal feminism and performative progressivism to achieve their political and financial goals.I also expose the extent of corporate and state intervention in the cultural field and explain the deleterious results for the independence and critical potential of bank-sanctioned arts initiatives. By identifying the causes of historiographic and promotional manipulation in the Tate Modern/Deutsche Bank retrospective, I re-examine Zeid’s history to provide evidence contrary to the reductive institutional history which Tate and Deutsche Bank produced.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Faculty of Fine Arts > Art History |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
| Authors: | Burrows, Isabelle |
| Institution: | Concordia University |
| Degree Name: | M.A. |
| Program: | Art History |
| Date: | 20 March 2025 |
| Thesis Supervisor(s): | Pezolet, Nicola |
| Keywords: | Fahrelnissa Zeid, Deutsche Bank, Tate Modern, modernism, neoliberalism, corporate sponsorship, funding, museums, feminist historiography |
| ID Code: | 995170 |
| Deposited By: | Isabelle Burrows |
| Deposited On: | 17 Jun 2025 16:42 |
| Last Modified: | 17 Jun 2025 16:42 |
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