al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art
The Arab Art Archive builds upon an initiative led by Salwa Mikdadi in the mid-1980s, under the name of ICWA/Cultural & Visual Art Resource, to archive and study the art of the Arab world. That initiative involved documenting artists’ responses to a range of social, political and environmental issues, notably wars in Lebanon and Iraq, and the field research it entailed resulted in the creation of an artist-database, audio and video interviews, and publications now housed in the Salwa Mikdadi Papers at the NYU Library.
Renewing that earlier archival project within the context of a global research university, the Arab Art Archive seeks not only to consolidate the documentary record in a digital resource available to students and scholars worldwide, but also to use that record to develop new historiographic frameworks that move beyond established paradigms in the discipline of art history. To this end, al Mawrid pairs the construction of a digital archive with a range of endeavors, both scholarly and artistic, to identify new categories of analysis and interpretation that re-frame the history of modern art both regionally and globally.
Drawing upon new understandings of Arab and global social thought, this cluster is composed of three projects: Tracing Migrations, a research project which documents the lives, careers, and contributions of artists in the Gulf/Khaleej region; Teaching Global Social Theory, a pedagogy project that reworks the “centers and peripheries” of social theory; and Plurilogue Talks, a mobile conversational platform based on engaging artists and social scientists working on the region in Arabic and English.