Exhibition Tour with Curator Nada Shabout: All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group

Join us for an exhibition tour led by Dr. Nada Shabout, curator of All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group.

Active in Iraq of the mid-20th Century, the Baghdad Modern Art Group was established in 1951 by two of Iraq’s most influential artists, Jewad Selim (1919–1961) and Shakir Hassan Al Said (1925–2004), and grew to engage many of Iraq’s leading artists, architects, poets, and more. They sought to develop a new art form, one that negotiated a time of globally inflected modernism from Baghdad, an Abbasid city (est. 762 CE) that traces its lineage to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia.

Curator Nada Shabout, PhD, is a scholar of modern and contemporary Arab art, founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey, as well as founding director of the Modern Art Iraq Archive, and on the faculty of NYU Abu Dhabi, where she is also Senior Investigator at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art.

All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group will be on view in the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery through June 7.