NYU Abu Dhabi Lecture Series in New York City
The series is co-sponsored by Bidoun.
Curated by Clare Davies
Too often artists play a role in interpreting nation-building and humanitarian initiatives while endowing them with intellectual currency. What drives this cycle of revelation and obfuscation that so often frames contemporary art practice identified with the Middle East? What kind of fallout occurs when separate agendas overlap?
This series provides what may be a long overdue chance to investigate an art world’s romance with validation, self-examination, and image-making, and to explore those strategies directed at ending the affair.
Clare Davies is an Erwin Panofsky Fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
An Enduring Romance: Contemporary Art and Human Rights
September 29, 2009 | 6:30 PM
The transfer of value between the fields of art and human rights has a long and complex history in the Middle East and abroad, informing critical engagement on both sides. Why are invocations of trauma, prejudice, and marginality in the art world so resonant today? Arts and human rights discourses often intersect where agendas are invested with moral certitude.
Location: Jeffrey S. Gould Welcome Center, NYU, 50 West 4th Street
Ayreen Anastas Artist, New York
Tirdad Zolghadr Curator and Writer, Berlin
Boris Groys Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU
The Plight of the Arab Intellectual
December 16, 2009 | 6:30 PM
An encounter between philosopher Sadik Jalal Al-Azm, famous for his controversial and censured works on religion, politics and culture in the Middle East, and Bilal Khbeiz, an independent poet, essayist and journalist in exile, brings both men's personal experiences to bear on a discussion of the Arab intellectual as political, cultural and social construct.
Location: 19 Washington Square North
Sadik Jalal Al Azm Professor Emeritus of Modern European Philosophy, University of Damascus; Harry C. Payne Visiting Professor of Liberal Arts in Philosophy and Religion, Williams College
Bilal Khbeiz Writer, L.A.
FOXP2
January 27, 2010 at 6:30 PM
FOXP2 is a dérive in the spatial and mental fields usually ascribed to a lecture. Constantly shifting back and forth between the authorial voices of a politician, a naturalist, and an art historian, the lecturer drifts between the passionate and the irrational, stopping at various stations of historical, artistic, socio-political, and personal significance.
Location: 19 Washington Square North
Bassam El Baroni Curator, Co-Director of the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum and Manifesta 2010
featuring
Kenny Muhammad beatboxer known as the "human orchestra"
Dense Objects and Sentient Viewings: Contemporary Artistic Production and the Middle East
Will be rescheduled
Historian Omnia El Shakry outlines recent trends in contemporary artistic production in and about the Middle East, while critically exploring the prevalence of binary understandings of the region as trapped between local ethno-nationalisms and global neo-liberalisms, or between politics and aesthetics.
Location: 19 Washington Square North
Omnia El Shakry Associate Professor of History, University of California Davis
The Shape of the Argument
March 10, 2010 | 6:30 PM
After insistent vague realizations (signs of consciousness or merely the platitude of self-serving delusion?) the artist investigates: the normalizing institution and its stifling horizons; the relationship between value and aesthetics; willful misreadings by 101 critics; the charged moments of transactions and loss; and last but not least the artist's secret anger–the drama and its pleasure.
Location: 19 Washington Square North
Hassan Khan Artist, Writer, and Musician, Cairo
Fortune-teller: Reflections on the Future of Arts, Education and Economy in the Middle East
April 7, 2010, 6:30 PM
What does the future hold? Speculations on the political, economic and social future of the Middle East are common in many spheres. Political economists Kiren Aziz Chaudhry and Saskia Sassen join Mishaal Al Gergawi, curator and critic, for an informed discussion, building on each other's perspectives to propose potential directions for regional developments with implications for arts and education internationally.
Location: 19 Washington Square North
Mishaal Al Gergawi Critic
Kiren Aziz Chaudhry Associate Professor of Political Science, University of
California, Berkeley
Saskia Sassen Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
