Engaging with Eugen Bracht’s 1882 painting In the Araba Desert invites reflection on the mechanisms of Orientalism in art. While Bracht captured an impressive natural landscape, his work also reflects a distinctly Western imagination of the “Orient.”
The Bedouins are reduced to decorative elements for the Western viewer’s gaze. Historical sites are used as a Western-constructed backdrop to project a Eurocentric perception of “otherness” and “exoticism.”

At the same time, it is said that Bracht pursued a genuine interest in learning more about Bedouins and historical locations — something conveyed through his sketches, studies, and notes.
A contemporary and critical view of such works requires us to question and expand these perspectives. How might a depiction of this desert scene look from the viewpoint of the people who actually live there?
What stories would they have told then, and what stories would they tell today?
What role do our own perceptions and cultural conditioning play when we look at this painting now?

Knowing the painting’s staging and its reproduction of a specific “image of the Orient,” we must ask ourselves:
Where do we idealize “the Other” as a place of longing, and how can we develop a more nuanced understanding of history, culture, and mechanisms of colonization?

The re*vision was written by the student group in the seminar “Intersectional Cultural Work” (taught by Nur Bakkar, Winter Semester 2024/25) – in cooperation between the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (supervised by Isabel Dotzauer) and the Master’s program in Cultural Mediation at the University of Education Karlsruhe.*

For the video, Luisa Schoenemann collaborated with Aber Al Hsen Alarabli.
Arabic text and voice: Aber Al Hsen Alarabli
German text and voice, video material, and editing: Luisa Schoenemann

Aber Al Hsen Alarabli was born in 2007 in Raqqa, Syria. She spent most of her childhood in Lebanon, where most of her family still lives today. At the age of eight, she came to Karlsruhe, which she now calls home. Arabic is her mother tongue. Sometimes she misses her family in Lebanon and life there — although there is less, it feels lively and uncomplicated in its own way. At the same time, her life is here, in Karlsruhe.

Translated with ChatGPT.