Events

  • Title: Cultural Talk; Half a Century of Art Criticism - Samir Gharib

    Date: October 10, 2024

    Time: 6:30-8pm GST

    Location: Cultural Foundation, First Floor

    Type: In-person, open to the public. The event will be held in Arabic.

    The event was recorded and will be available online with English subtitles shortly.

    Register here.


  • Title: al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art Open House

    Date: June 10, 2024

    Time: 10am-3:30pm GST

    Location: NYUAD, Campus Center (C2) – Library

    Type: In-person, open to the public

    Register here.


  • Title: Felt, Wrapped, Entangled; A Conversation with Artists Rabbia Sukkarieh and Adrian Pepe

    Speakers: Rabbia Sukkarieh and Adrian Pepe

    Moderated by: Jessica Gerschultz, Senior Humanities Research Fellow

    Date: April 25, 2024

    Time: 6:30pm GST

    Location: NYUAD, Campus Center (C2) – W002 West Forum

    Type: Open to the NYUAD community and by invitation.

    In collaboration with al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art and Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World.

    Register here.


  • Title: Making the Modern Turkish Citizen; Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era

    Date: April 23, 2024

    Time: 6:30-8pm GST

    Location: NYUAD, Campus Center (C2) - Center for Writing

    Type: Book launch open to the NYUAD community and by invitation.

    Purchase the book here.


  • Title: The Generative Archive; Research, Methods, and Practices

    Date: April 19-20, 2024

    Location: NYUAD, Campus Center (C2) – E002 East Forum

    Type: In-person and on Zoom. Open to the public.

    For more information and to register, click here.


  • Title: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia; glimpses of Abdullah Al Saadi’s solo exhibition at the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia

    Speaker(s): Abdullah Al Saadi and Tarek Abou El Fetouh.

    Moderator: Salwa Mikdadi

    Date: February 15, 2024

    Time: 6:30-8pm GST

    Location: NYUAD, Humanities Building, Room A6-001

    Type: Conversation in Arabic with English translation. Open to the public.

    Register here.


  • Title: On exhibit: Art Education in Arab Cities (1938-2003)

    Date: Tuesday, November 21 until Thursday, December 21, 2023

    Time: All day

    Location: NYUAD Arts and Humanities Building A6 Lobby

    Type: Exhibit


  • Title: Early Arab Art Institutions and the Challenges of Documentation and Historiography 

    Speaker: Dr. Yasser Mongy

    Moderator: Salwa Mikdadi and Ala Younis

    Date: November 14, 2023

    Time: 12:30-2:00pm GST (lunch served)

    Location: al Mawrid Center, C2-350

    Type: Lecture by invitation, in person - Arabic language


  • Title: Curators Talk - Offstage: On the Less Visible Facets of Collecting Art

    In collaboration with the NYUAD Art Gallery

    Speaker: Suheyla Takesh, al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art Fellow

    Moderators: Salwa Mikdadi and Duygu Demir

    Date: November 2, 2023

    Time: 6:30pm GST

    Type: Open to the public. Hybrid (in person and via Zoom)

    Location: Reading Room, NYUAD Art Gallery 

    Register here

    Installation view of Barjeel Art Foundation’s exhibition Parallel Histories, currently on view at the Sharjah Art Museum. Photo by Amir Hazim. Image courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

  • Title: Gender and Leadership Roundtable - Gender and Leadership in Museums, Art History and Fine Arts: Current Trends and Perspectives

    NYUAD Faculty of Arts and Humanities In collaboration with the Office of Inclusion and Equity

    Speaker: Salwa Mikdadi, Maya Allison, and Aliyah Alawadhi

    Moderator: Saba Karim Khan

    Date: October 31, 2023

    Time: 12:00-1:30pm GST

    Location: A6-005

    Type: Open to the NYUAD community and by Invitation

    Register here


Book Launch: Story of Water and Fire (2 events)

In the presence of the book's author, May Muzaffar. 
In conversation with Ala Younis

Book Launch
May 24, 2023 at 7pm, 421, Abu Dhabi (in English)

Book Signing
May 25, 2023 at 6pm, Abu Dhabi International Book Fair

Story of Water and Fire is a captivating account of the life of two prominent figures in the Iraqi art scene, poet and art critic May Muzaffar and artist Rafa Nasiri. Through vivid descriptions and rarely seen photographs, this book offers a glimpse into the social and artistic milieu of Baghdad from the 1960s to the 1990s, as well as the couple’s travels during this period and their years of exile in Amman and Manama.

Co-published by al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art and Hatje Cantz.

May Muzaffar, b.1940, Baghdad, is a poet, short story writer, art critic, and translator. Having graduated with a degree in English literature from Baghdad University in 1961, she has published seven collections of poetry and five collections of short stories in Baghdad, Beirut, and Amman. She has authored books on art and artists, and has also edited several books on Rafa Nasiri’s art.

Ala Younis is an artist and a Research Scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at New York University Abu Dhabi.


  • Title: Scattered Subjects

    Speakers: May Al-Dabbagh (Haraka Lab director) and Susan Ossman (anthropologist and artist)

    Date: April 27, 2023

    Time: 6:30 - 8:00 PM GST

    Type: Open to the public

    Location: Alserkal Arts Foundation ­(Warehouse 51) Common Room 

    Register here


  • Title: Vox Populi: Tahrir Archives

    Speaker: Lara Baladi

    Date: February 20, 2023

    Time: 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM GST

    Type: Internal to NYUAD Faculty

    Location: A6-004

    al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art invites you to a talk by al Mawrid's Resident Fellow Lara Baladi. Baladi will present her long-term research Vox Populi: Tahrir Archives (2011 – ongoing) focusing on "the Anatomy of Revolution," a lexicon of language and iconography of protests and revolts. Lara Baladi is a multi-disciplinary artist, archivist and Lecturer at MIT's Art, Culture, and Technology Program.


  • Title: Saloua Raouda Choucair & Mahmoud Hammad - Preserving a Legacy: Custodians of Arab Art

    Date: November 18, 2022

    Time: 6:00 PM GST

    Type: Open to the public

    Location: Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Manarat Al Saadiyat

    Speakers: Lubna Hammad and Hala Schoukair

    al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art presents a panel on the preservation of the archives of two prolific Arab artists Saloua Rouda Choucair and Mahmoud Hammad. As custodians of their parent's collections, the speakers Hala Shoukair and Lubna Hammad will present their experiences in establishing a foundation and an archive for the artists to sustain their legacy and to maintain a record of their parent's artistic practice. al Mawrid is currently digitizing Hammad's archive to make it accessible for researchers and others. 

    This panel is moderated by al Mawrid Research Scholar and artist Ala Younis.


  • 1980s: Representational Pressures, Departures, and Beginnings

    Date: November 03 - 05, 2022

    Type: Hybrid

    Location: University of North Texas

    The organizational sponsors of the conference are al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, NYU Abu Dhabi; Office of the President and Department of Art History, University of North Texas; ; Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA).

    Register Here


  • A Poetics of Presence: Photography, Documentation, and History Colloquium

    A day-long hyrbid webinar inspired by Yasser Alwan

    Date: November 04, 2022

    Time: 09:00 AM - 5:00 PM EST

    Type: Hybrid

    Location: Sarah Lawrence College, Barbara Walters Campus Center BWCC Rooms A and B

    This colloquium is co-organized by al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art and Sarah Lawrence College.

    Register Here


  • The Culture of the Image: Challenges and Prospects | حول ثقافة الصورة: إشكاليات وآفاق

    Date: October 14, 2022

    Time: 6:00 PM GST

    Type: In Person, No registration required

    Location: Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation - First Floor Hall and VIP room. 

    This event is sponsored by al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYUAD in collaboration with Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation and will be held in Arabic. 


  • Dates: December 6, 2021 - August 5, 2022

    This inaugural exhibition of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at New York University Abu Dhabi was commissioned by New York University’s 19 Washington Square North in New York.

    Organized by Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought
    Curator: May Al-Dabbagh, Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy

    For an overview of Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement, the inaugural exhibition of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, organized by Haraka Lab for 19 WSN in New York, see this brief video:


  • Date: June 7, 2022

    Time: 6:30-8:00 pm GST

    Internal to NYUAD Community

    Speaker: Ghazi Al-Mulaifi

    A workshop about the rhythms of Gulf waters held in collaboration with the NYUAD Arts Center. This  public event is the final one in a year long program for Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement, the inaugural exhibition of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of art organized by Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought.

    This workshop invites participants to perform the exhibition by learning how to make music through “sharbaka” clapping, embodying ideas of attunement and entanglement. Led by Ghazi Al-Mulaifi, Applied Ethnomusicologist at NYUAD, this workshop is a campus-wide experiment in the corporeal transmission of knowledge. 


  • Title: Nadwa Seminar with Hanaa Malallah: Reading Documents from the Artist's Archive

    Date: May 30, 2022

    Time: 10:00 am - 1:00 pm GST

    Type: In Person

    Location: NYUAD Campus, Room A6-175

    For the closing seminar or Nadwa, Dr. Hanaa will guide a close reading of two documents from her papers. The first document is an unpublished study by Shakir Hassan Al Sa'id (1925-2004), entitled, "The Legend of the Spirit-Bird: the Story of the Silent Language of the Nightingale" (1996). The second is an essay Malallah wrote on the occasion of an exhibition held at the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman in 1997 entitled "Environment and Ecology in Iraqi Art".

    Nadwa Seminar with Hanaa Malallah: Reading Documents from the Artist's Archive

  • Title: Go East, Young Artists: Creative Practice across the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Bloc, 1950s-1980s

    Date: May 18, 2022

    Time: 09:30 am -7:30 pm GST

    Type: In Person

    Location: NYUAD Campus, Room A6-010

    This workshop is dedicated to examining Cold War-era constellations of “Eastern” and “non-Western” locations–among them the USSR, Eastern Bloc states, the ex-colonial countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and various cultural platforms devoted to socialist culture–as a site of experimental creative practices. Although art historians have begun to uncover the details of Arab artists’ experiences in European art academies (Rome, Paris, and so on), the experiences of the young artists who looked or moved East remain little studied or understood. 

    Questions to engage include: How to document and interpret the trans-regional mobilities across and between these several “Easts” of the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties? What images, objects, persons, friendships or speculations may be said to have emerged from the decades’ institutional frameworks for East-East exchange? Might we read these entities as tuning forks within that vaster transformations that later delivered the global contemporary art world of the twenty-first century? And what fell out of the system? Which artists forged other friendships, claimed other kinds of art objects, or envisioned other norms, and how?

    Co-sponsored by al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art and the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World. 


  • Date: May 11, 2022

    Time: 12:00-1:00 pm GST

    Online Event - Internal to NYUAD Community

    In this event, Anneka Lenssen shares her new research tracking a figure she proposes to designate a “tinkerer,” an artist who works in a labor-intensive experimental manner, and is most commonly associated in the Arab art archive with women artists, aristocratic artists, and/or design entrepreneurs who apply art to non-artistic ends. Taking the work of artists Celine Chalem, Nadia Saikali, Saloua Raouda Choucair, and Najat Makki as examples, the conversation will pay particularly close attention to descriptions and attitudes appearing in Arabic-language materials.

    Detail of Celine Chalem, Only You, white marble, late 1960s. From exhibition catalogue to Celine Chalem: G.M.T. Art: tables you can eat on, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, Sept. 19 - October 7, 1967

  • Date: May 10, 2022

    Time: 12:00-2:00 pm GST

    Hybrid Event - Internal to NYUAD Faculty

    Speaker: Hanaa Malallah

    Hanaa Malallah is an Iraqi artist and researcher based in the UK. Since her first exhibition, in 1991, two months after the Gulf War, the practice of Hanaa Malallah has dealt with the subject of ruins, whether the archaeological ruins of ancient Mesopotamia or the modern ruins produced by war. In this talk, Malallah develops a new hypothesis about the difference between these two kinds of ruins by distinguishing the regenerative energy of ruins produced by time from the lethal energy of rubble produced by war.

    Register here.

    Floor installation of biohazard sign dusts at second floor of a very toxic exploded building in Baghdad in 2016. The work was executed by special pigment (powder substance), 2016, Baghdad.

  • Date: March 31, 2022

    Time: 5:00-6:00 pm GST

    Online Event -  Internal to NYUAD Community

    Speakers: Vikram Divecha, Syrabhi Sharma, and George Jose

    The conversation takes the form of an ‘open critique’ in which reflections and questions are shared by Surabhi Sharma and George Jose with Sharbaka exhibition artist Vikram Divecha, as he reconsiders his exhibition work titled Veedu and how he would like to develop it further. Through this exchange, the artist goes back to the drawing board, both literally - as one would when designing a house - and metaphorically for this project.


  • Webinar

    Date: March 24, 2022

    Time: 12‐2 PM GST

    Register to attend this “master class” on the art and ethos of Fateh al-Moudarres (1920-1999)—one of Syria’s most beloved modernist painters, and a deeply complex thinker and educator with a far-reaching yet little understood legacy. Led by artist Issam Kourbaj and art historians Anneka Lenssen and Ambra D’Antone, the class will provide a series of lessons in ways to read the different guises of al-Moudarres. We will incorporate close readings of works, writing, recollections of his teaching, and concepts derived from the artist’s ongoing discussions with Adonis and other cultural figures.

    Register Now

    Fateh al-Moudarres, The Lady of the Night, 1983, oil on canvas, 75x55cm. Scanned slide from Atassi Foundation archive

  • Sense and Intuition: A Conversation with Adonis الحس والحدس: حوار مع الشاعر الكبير أدونيس 

    Date: March 23, 2022 (in person)

    Time: 6‐8pm GST

    This conversation with Adonis, one of the great living poets of the Arab world, focuses on questions regarding the intersection of visual art and poetry in theory and practice. 

    The event will be in Arabic with simultaneous translation and is open to the public (limited capacity). 

    Register Now

    Adonis, Mouna Atassi, and Fateh al-Moudarres at the artist’s studio (c. mid-1990s.). Image courtesy of Atassi Foundation for Art and Culture

    Watch the video of the event here:


  • Talk

    Date: February 07, 2022
    Time: 5:00 - 6:00 PM GST 

    Speaker: Anneka Lenssen - Senior Humanities Research Fellow, NYUAD

    This event is open to the NYU community and by invitation.

     

    Detail of studio workspace in the College of Fine Arts, Damascus, c. 1964. From photograph in the collection of the estate of Mahmoud Hammad.

  • Talk

    Date: November 23, 2021
    Time: 7 - 8:30 pm

    Artist: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, al Mawrid’s Resident Fellow (November 2021), Artist, Audio Investigator & 2019 Turner Prize Joint-Winner

    Event in collaboration with the NYUAD Institute.