Piotr Uklański: Ottomania (2019) was an exhibition of works from the artist’s series of large-scale paintings inspired by the complex Orientalist heritage of Poland, his country of origin. Uklański’s lushly rendered re-interpretations of a broad range of art-historical portraits find the Warsaw-born, New York-based artist expanding his longstanding engagement with questions of nationalist ideologies, representations of masculinity, and personal identity while redressing contemporary suppression of Eastern Europe’s deep and felicitous connections to the Middle East.

Sifting through centuries of obscure art historical source imagery, Uklański has depicted white European subjects enrobed in the clothing and signifiers of the Orient—turbans, richly patterned fabrics, ornate Eastern jewelry, and other exotic accouterments—to suggest their desire to merge the allure of otherness with their existing identities. Executed in ink, oil stick, and acrylic on deeply colored velvet, burlap, or canvas, the Ottomania paintings recuperate a complex, centuries-old cultural cross-pollination between East and West to contradict both the extreme Islamophobia of today’s Western political culture and the academic community’s categorizations of Orientalism as unilaterally essentialist. Uklański’s canvases celebrate Europe’s undeniable romance with the Islamic cultures of Turkey, Persia, and North Africa while inviting viewers to question their coded content.

In Ottomania, Uklański’s paintings acknowledge the fraught history of colonialism within his Old Master iconography while simultaneously highlighting the reciprocal exchanges that fueled the centuries-long European craze for things Islamic. These paintings recall the Ottoman Empire not as a cultural underdog but as a hegemonic political and cultural superpower, bringing to the surface repressed socio-political content and questions about the scopophilic pleasures of portraiture as a genre.

This exhibition coincided with and complemented Uklański’s participation in the 16th Istanbul Biennale, The Seventh Continent, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. For the Biennale, Uklański presented a significant group of Ottomania paintings inside the permanent collection rooms of the Pera Museum, an institution in Istanbul, focused on Orientalism in the 19th-century art of Europe and Turkey.