Zamaniyyat—from zaman, the Arabic word for time, always plural—approaches modernism as a set of overlapping durations rather than a single historical arc. The section brings together solo and group presentations from the 1950s to the 1990s to examine how modernist practices took shape. It foregrounds the cultural infrastructures and historical breaks that structured their making and reception. Modernism is read through the time-bound structures that shaped how artists learned, worked, and exhibited, from the pedagogies of art schools and studios to the routes of travel and exile that redirected artistic trajectories, as well as the fractures of war, decolonisation, and institutional change. Across diverse media, Zamaniyyat follows how forms are learned, translated, displaced, and reconfigured as they move across geographies and generations, unfolding through multiple timelines that challenge a linear reading of modernism.
