The British Museum started its collection of modern and contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa in the 1980s, following former director David Wilson's concerns regarding a possible art-historical continuity between the production in previous decades and the current one. This growing interest encouraged a collecting practice mainly focused on artistic experimentations around Arabic letters as a linking thread between works from different times and parts of the region. In 2006 the exhibition Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East displayed some of them. This event triggered the widening of the collection in broader directions and the foundation of the Contemporary and Modern Middle Eastern Art acquisition group (CaMMEA), a committee that since 2009 has supported this enlargement process. The artworks will eventually “enable future generations to look back and see what was being produced during a particular time as well as to record significant moments in the history of the Middle East”, as Dounia Nadar puts it. A decade later, this book comes to celebrate a growing collection that will soon be exhibited at the British Museum.

As Venetia Porter explains in Reflections, the collection consists of works on paper and photographs by established and emerging artists from, based in, or otherwise connected to countries that include Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, or Syria. The works operate as a polyphonic response to both shared and particular concerns relating to the region's sociopolitical, historical, cultural, or religious context tackled from personal experience. As such, and in line with the historicist focus of the British Museum, Charles Tripp and Venetia Porter highlight the alternative historical narrative the pieces provide, evidencing the power of art to revisit the past, comment on the present and imagine other possible futures.

The core of the carefully edited publication is a selective catalogue of artworks classified in seven major topics: 1) Figure and figuration; 2) Abstraction, geometry and script; 3) The past is present; 4) Faith; 5) A female gaze; 6) Political struggle, revolution and war; 7) Where is Home? This catalogue is preceded by a timeline and a map that offer chronological, historical, and geographical context, and two introductory essays that delineate the main theoretical controversies and subjects one will find in the following pages. The book closes with a bibliographical record that compiles a number of relevant publications on the field.

The pieces’ arrangement in topics discloses the challenges the authors must have faced in structuring such a large and miscellaneous collection, as well as their efforts to avoid more problematic groupings. With this solution, they succeed in bringing together some of the main thematic trends in MENA's current artistic panorama, even though the elected subject matter could be seen as perpetuating, to a certain extent, misleading stereotypes and expectations often associated with the region. The only exception to this set-up is the sixth section, in which pieces and artists are grouped according to their ties to a specific country, falling into a nationalistic approach that is fantastically overcome in the other parts.

This thematic arrangement contrasts with the attention paid to individual artists and artworks in a way that underscores their artistic, discursive and creative relevance regardless of any systematization. To that end, the catalogue is composed of high-quality images of the pieces accompanied by a brief biographical reference, quotes, and a comment on the project. This arrangement invites the reader to transcend preconceived though necessary frameworks in order to identify other connecting threads that traverse the acquisitions and make a coherent collection out of them. Furthermore, it favours the understanding of the artworks in relation not only to regional, national or local contexts, but also to particular stories that ultimately converge with broader narratives and weave valuable and unexpected networks. In this regard, a section devoted to succinctly delineating possible connections with other pieces in the museum would have been greatly appreciated, a multilayered and transversal dialogue that might be expected to be sparked in the upcoming exhibition.

The introductory essays by Venetia Porter and Charles Tripp tackle the choices behind the book and the main controversies and challenges that surround the field. Among them are the problem of naming (here solved through a geographical label that nevertheless echoes a colonial heritage), the risks of homogenizing a greatly diverse production through the regional approach or the political focus of many works in a time when this seems to be a global trend. Unmentioned remains, however, the designation of the collection as “contemporary” in the subtitle of the publication with no further explanation of what the authors meant by it, especially when encompassing some works often thought of as modern. This question is, however, tackled in the online Courtauld book event and insightful conversation between Venetia Porter, Charles Tripp, and Sussan Babaie available on YouTube.

It is particularly interesting how Porter's overview of the field's conundrums is interspersed with art-historical references that delineate a pertinent genealogy to contemporary panorama. This outline is greatly complemented by Tripp's text “Art and power”, more focused on past centuries’ sociopolitical drifts. By framing their introduction following an art-historical and sociopolitical continuity, Porter and Tripp offer a public unfamiliar with the subject a useful tool to navigate the book, the prospect exhibition, the collection and, more broadly, a complex field. At the same time, they succeed in underlining the dimension of the decisions, open questions and obstacles encountered in the enterprise. On the other hand, specialized scholars may miss a detour from panoramic compilations, a deeper critical engagement, and more creative methodological responses articulated from and through the artworks. Yet for them, Reflections can be the venturous corroboration of a progressive settling of a long-disregarded artistic panorama within global art histories, institutions and networks. In this vein, Porter insists on the book and the collection being resources and starting points, and as such, they are precious projects to establish connections between the British Museum, academia and society, and to think of them not as separate entities, but as converging communities.