LONDON.- The British Museum has been collecting modern and contemporary art from the Middle East since the 1980s. To date, this collection contains works by over 200 established and emerging artists from across the region, many of which featured in the influential exhibition Word into Art in 2006 (which travelled to Dubai in 2008). The Museum has been a pioneer in the acquisition of this material and now, in its fourth decade of collecting, houses the pre-eminent collection of art from this region in the UK. Modern artworks in the British Museum collection are principally works on paper, and are selected to complement the historical collections because they ‘speak of their time’. The collection of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art, therefore, represents social and historical realities of the modern Middle East. The Museum has been fortunate in its