This thesis considers the "regional" or "geographical" exhibition as a curatorial paradigm that has been central to the mediation of contemporary and modern artistic production from the Arab world and the Middle East and their diasporas. After 2000 infrastructures for art grew exponentially at a regional level, and the institutionalisation of art as a form of cultural capital evolved further under the sign of globalisation. Concurrent with these developments has been urgent critical engagement (by artists, curators and critics) with the historical circumstances and political discourses coalescing in and beyond the Middle East, partly impelled by new paradigms of curatorial practice. Through three case studies, incorporating six examples in Europe, the Middle East and the United States, the thesis examines a group of exhibitions that take the geocultural constructs of the Arab world, the Islamic world, or the Middle East as their curatorial leitmotifs. Consonant with the curatorial field from which they are drawn, the exhibitions discussed have been both mechanisms for making art visible as representation of geography and identity, and frameworks for attempting to contest the conflation of particular practices with instrumentalised notions of place. Among the issues the thesis engages are the interpretation of places and people through the lens of terror and conflict; the excavation of overlooked histories of modern art in the Arab region; and, perhaps most importantly, the tension between attempts to represent place in critical and specific terms and the reification of generic notions of regional identity and space.