Creative Processes, Patrimonial Practices seeks to map out, analyse and articulate the meanings of connections betweenart—as a medium (e.g. painting, music, literature, and dance), a form of expression and a discipline—and heritage within public and private cultural institutions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Contributors seek to examine how artists, architects, curators and digital content producers engage with various elements of aesthetic practice to produce, re-produce an challenge cultural representations and narratives. Does art assume a different posture when engaged with heritage, and vice versa? What ‘forms’ of artistic expression are produced in heritage institutions of the MENA region and to what end? What power-knowledge networks emerge from such landscapes? And, how artistic practice is used—by state and non-state actors both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ museums and cultural heritage institutions—to represent and challenge local, regional and international identities? 

Over the past 10 years, museums and heritage in the MENA region has been a booming field of research, leading to the publication of seminal collaborative studies. These volumes have focused their attentions on the more traditional objects of museum studies: collections, audience, visitor studies and professional practice (Erskine-Loftus 2013, 2014; Mejcher-Atassi and Schwartz 2012), the construction and theorisation of heritage (Exell and Rico 2014), the analysis of local, regional and global power dynamics within MENA heritage and museum institutions (Exell and Wakefield 2016; Wakefield 2020), the relationships between national identity and the museum (Erskine-Loftus, Penziner-Hightower and Al-Mulla 2016) and issues of inclusion and pluralism (Rey 2020). There have been a number of historical and anthropological research that consider issues of art production in the MENA in relation to shifting social and political environments (Cooke 2007; Migrani 2018; Winegar 2006) and the entanglement between art, museums and heritage in specific context of engagements (Pieprzak 2010; Rey 2019). However, there have been no texts that examine in the detail the role of creative and cultural processes within the museums and heritage industries in the MENA region. This volume offers original analyses of current artistic and heritage practices within the region, questioning the appropriateness of existing models and methods and providing suggestions for future research and practice.