Events

Renowned art critic and writer Samir Gharib will discuss art criticism and his writing on Egyptian modernism, particularly his approach to covering exhibitions in Egypt, focusing on two key exhibitions. Join us for an engaging discussion moderated by critic and poet Sameh Kaawach. This talk is presented in collaboration with the Cultural Foundation.

Born on February 21, 1954, in Manfalout, Assiut Governorate, Samir Gharib studied there before obtaining a Bachelor's degree in Media from Cairo University in 1975. He worked as a journalist for Al-Akhbar newspaper from 1975 to 1987, then moved to Paris, where he worked for Al-Mustaqbal weekly magazine. After earning a diploma from the International Institute for Journalism in Paris in 1985 and another in Budapest in 1987, he served as a press and artistic advisor to the Minister of Culture between 1987 and 1999 and was the first director of the Cultural Development Fund. He chaired the National Library and Archives from 1999 to 2002 and was the first Egyptian to head the Arab Federation for Documents. He founded the Egyptian Association for Art Critics and was appointed President of the Egyptian Academy of Arts in Rome from 2002 to 2004. Gharib has published 18 books on art and culture, starting with "Surrealism in Egypt.”

On the occasion of International Archives Week, al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art invites you to attend our Open House on Monday, June 10, to learn about archives' integral role in preserving cultural heritage and memory in the Arab world. 

The Open House will consist of a tour and a hands-on session at NYU Abu Dhabi Library hosted by al Mawrid’s researchers and archivists designed to guide attendees through the development and ethos of a research archive. The tour will be run twice at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., with one hands-on session at 12 p.m. 

Those interested in attending the hands-on instructional session, Preserving Your Family Memories, will be introduced to the preservation of family archives and will have the opportunity to apply their newly acquired skills with the supervision of al Mawrid’s archivist and conservator. Participants in the hands-on session are encouraged to bring samples from their family archive collections.

Looming sculptures of spun wool coils. Braided shearlings dyed with ochre. Fabric wrapping bullet-ridden trees and slaughterhouse pipes. What sensations, memories, and narratives do wool and fiber evoke? How do textiles enact and restore bonds between living beings and their environments? Join artists Rabbia Sukkarieh and Adrian Pepe as they speak about their work with woolen matter and textile-rich performances. Moderated by Jessica Gerschultz, Senior Humanities Research Fellow for the Study of the Arab World. In collaboration with al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art.

Featuring over 60 color images, this book explores the photographic self-representations of the urban middle classes in Turkey in the 1920s and the 1930s. Examining the relationship between photography and gender, body, space as well as materiality and language, its six chapters explore how the production and circulation of vernacular photographs contributed to the making of the modern Turkish citizen in the formative years of the Turkish Republic, when nation-building, secularization and modernization reforms took centre stage. Based on an extensive photographic archive, the book shows that individuals actively reproduced, circulated and negotiated the ideal citizen-image imposed by the Kemalist regime, reflecting not only state-imposed directives but also their class aspirations and other, wider social and cultural developments of the period, from Western fashion trends and movies to the increasing availability of modern consumer items. Making the Modern Turkish Citizen offers a valuable portrait of how the newly minted Turkish middle classes presented their different selves in and outside the studio setting, revealing the shifting political and social landscape of the time. 

Özge Baykan Calafato is Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research interests lie at the intersection of photography, archives, memory, and cultural identity.

Titled, The Generative Archive: Research, Methods, and Practices, the aims of the symposium emerge from a combination of practical and conceptual challenges involved in archival work – and particularly archival work around Arab art histories in a global context – in the twenty-first century. Specifically, participants in the symposium will explore a set of interrelated queries about archive uses for pedagogy and communal memory as well as research. What needs might archives be able to fulfill for families, communities, and other users of archives outside the narrow confines of academia? What does a collaborative archive look like? What do digital environments enable, and what do they foreclose?

Join a conversation featuring Abdullah Al Saadi, the appointed artist for the National Pavilion UAE at the 60th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale Venezia with the UAE Pavilion curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh. The event is moderated by NYUAD Professor and Director of Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, Salwa Mikdadi. The speakers will examine Abdullah’s diverse practice and offer insights into his upcoming solo exhibition, ‘Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia.’

Considered a key figure in the development of contemporary art in the UAE, Al Saadi’s prolific practice ranges from painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and photography, to collecting and cataloging found objects, and the creation of new alphabets. His work is informed by the UAE’s landscape and his family history, often exploring relationships between individuals and their natural and social environment. 

Selections from the archive of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art highlight the role of four artists in the development of higher education in the arts at universities in Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Amman, and Irbid.

While writing the history of early Arab art institutions and their relationship with Arab art pioneers, there emerges a reliance on a limited number of credible and well-known sources. With the repeated transfer of information culled from these sources, such material could potentially become immutable facts. The replication of material from these same sources demands constant review, revision, and correction, leaving many important events unreported. How do we identify the challenge of repeated resources, and what does such a phenomenon pose? Can we interpret its causes or monitor its consequences? Supported by images, film clips, and documentary materials, this talk presents historical and research-based examples that highlight the necessity to review past publications by Arab and non-Arab authors. The talk offers examples of documentary, field, and comparative studies that enrich and refine the reference of modern Arab art history.

About the speaker

Dr Yasser Mongy (b. 1972) is an Egyptian academic, critic, and art historian, and Assistant Professor in the Graphic Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo. Since 2019, he has been seconded to teach art history and criticism in the Art Education Department at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. In 2014, he worked as a research and documentation consultant at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha (Mathaf). He authored eighteen publications, mainly in art history, and contributed to the creation of the first glossary of art terminology published by the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo. Dr. Mongy is the recipient of two consecutive Sharjah Awards for Critical Visual Research, and has earned several awards in graphics, painting, and drawing. Furthermore, he has played significant roles in organizing and adjudicating numerous Arab art events. His articles on art, literature, documentation, heritage studies, and museology were published in Arab newspapers, magazines, and online platforms. 

What do curators do? "Curators Talk" is a new series of talks by invited curators to discuss their distinct approaches to exhibition-making, research, critical thinking, artistic collaboration, and beyond.

The talk will focus on the Barjeel Art Collection in Sharjah as a case study to investigate the various phases of the collection's evolution, the factors that influenced its transformation, and the role of private art collections in the UAE’s wider cultural ecosystems. Barjeel’s chief curator Suheyla Takesh will take the audience behind the scenes of running the Barjeel Art Foundation, revealing its evolving acquisition strategies over the past decade and discussing the less visible work of preserving an art collection. Discussion will raise questions around the ethics and responsibilities of a collecting institution and its potential influence on the region’s art historical narratives by uncovering forgotten art and by the circulation of its collection and its accompanying publications.

About the speaker

Suheyla Takesh is the Curator at Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah where she works on research, exhibitions, and oversees its publications.  Suheyla holds a master’s degree from MIT’s Department of  History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art . She is the co-curator of Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, and the co-editor of its accompanying volume of essays. Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Rutgers Art Review, Thresholds, and Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World.  During her Fellowship at al Mawrid, Suheyla will use al Mawrid’s archives to expand her research on East-East cultural relations in the mid to late twentieth century Arab art.  Her other research interests include critical interrogations around collection building and the use of geometry in the work of modernist Arab artists. 

This roundtable featuring Aliyah Alawadhi, Maya Allison, and Salwa Mikdadi moderated by Saba Karim Khan explores past and present opportunities and challenges of promoting gender equity, diversity, and inclusion within the realms of museums, art history, and fine arts. It discusses the influence of gender, intersectional dynamics, and the persistent structural obstacles within these fields, including gendered professional networks and women’s (under)-representation in leadership roles. The speakers draw on their professional and personal experiences, bridging both academic research and careers in the UAE, the broader Middle East, Asia, and US. 

This event is part of the Gender Brown Bag series at NYUAD. 

What is a subject? A subject is what a song or painting is about; it makes things happen in a sentence and in the world. Yet, to be the subject of a book or a ruler or to law or social conventions limits the choice of verbs that can animate action. Through reflecting on Ossman’s experiences of serial migration and her project that combines practices from the social sciences and the arts, this conversation opens up new possibilities for thinking about knowledge production both within and outside of the academy.

The event will take the form of a Plurilogue, a term that evokes the notion of dialogue that goes beyond two sides. Plurilogue is akin to a roundtable discussion in which the invited speaker shares research followed by interventions by attendees. All participants are expected to situate their own work in relation to their location in their institutions, geographies, and trajectories as well as to the speaker’s presentation. The event will be followed by a light dinner. 

Plurilogue is organized by Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought, an interdisciplinary and dynamic space that bridges the arts and social sciences in Al Mawrid: Arab Center for the Study of Art at New York University Abu Dhabi. Through research, archives, pedagogy, and exchange platforms that activate the Global Network of NYU while simultaneously building connection to the thinkers, artists, and alumni in the region, Haraka is a space for movement and flow but also for a more nuanced reading of the politics of translation and knowledge production. Haraka Lab is currently hosted at Alserkal Arts Foundation as part of its guest residency in 2023.

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.

Lara Baladi is an Egyptian-Lebanese artist, archivist and educator recognized internationally for her multidisciplinary works. Her artistic practice spans from photography, video, sculpture to architecture, multimedia installations, textile and scent. Informed by critical investigations into historical archives and the study of popular visual culture, Baladi’s work questions the theoretical divide between myth, memory, sociopolitical narratives and the cycles inherent to History.

Baladi received fellowships from the Japan Foundation (2003) and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab (2014). She was an artist-in-residence at MIT (Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence, 2015), MacDowell (New Hampshire, 2015), Art Omi (Ghent, New York, 2014) and VASL, (Karachi, Pakistan, 2010), amongst others.

Within her artistic practice, she is active in socially engaged projects. For more than twenty years, she has been on the board of directors of the Arab Image Foundation in Lebanon and the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Egypt. Ongoing since 2011, her media initiative Vox Populi: Tahrir Archives, includes a series of media initiatives (Tahrir Cinema), artworks, publications and an opensource timeline and portal into web-based archives of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and other global social movements.

Baladi’s work has been published, exhibited and featured internationally—the Centre Pompidou, (Paris, France, 2004), Transmediale, (Berlin, Germany, 2016), the Gwangju Biennial, (South Korea, 2018) to the Hasselblad Foundation, (Gothenburg, Sweden, 2021).

Since 2016, Lara Baladi has been a lecturer in MIT's Program Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT).

About the Speakers

Lubna Hammad studied Architecture at Damascus University, and worked at the General Company for Engineering Studies Consulting in Damascus before moving to Amman, Jordan in 1985. In 2009, she founded the “Family Estate of Mahmoud Hammad,” and started working on archiving the complete oeuvre of her father, the late Syrian artist Mahmoud Hammad, as well as documenting historical data and the different stages of the Syrian art movement. Her mother is the Lebanese artist Derrieh Fakhoury.

Hala Schoukair received an MA in Cinematographic Studies from the Sorbonne University, Paris, in 1981, then returned to Beirut in 1983, where she worked in film production.. Schoukair moved to the United States in 1987 and participated in a number of solo/group art exhibitions. She is the founding president of the Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation.

About the Moderator

Ala Younis is an artist, with curatorial, film and publishing projects. She is co-founder of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta, co-Head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, member of the Academy of Arts of the World (Cologne), and co-Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2022. She is a Research Scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Conference Schedule

Thursday, November 3, 2022

10-4pm: Graduate Student Workshop (open to participating graduate students only)

Participants:
Pujan Karambeigi, Columbia University, NY
Natasha Gasparian, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
Özge Karagöz, Northwestern University, Chicago
Leena Sonbuol, University of North Texas
Derya Acuner, IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca
Elham Shahsavar Zadeh, York University, Toronto
Ahmed Abdelazim, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Flavia Malusardi, Cà Foscari University of Venice, Italy

6pm: Launch Ceremony and Celebration: Salwa Mikdadi Research Travel Grant

Friday, November 4, 2022

10-12 pm: Being Seen: 1980s Exhibition Cultures
-Defne Kırmızı, Boston University, “Conceptualism Localized: Öncü Türk Sanatından Bir Kesit Exhibition Series in the 1980s Istanbul”
-Joan Grandjean, University of Geneva, “How Two Arab Art Students Started an Artistic Revolution in London”
-Rachel Winter, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and University of California, Santa Barbara, “Alterity, Alternative Spaces, and Representation in 1980s London”

12-1:30 pm: How the UAE Became the Artistic Crossroads of the Arab World
Organized by al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, NYU Abu Dhabi
-Ala Younis, al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, NYU Abu Dhabi, “Majid Magazine: how a publishing project in the 1980s shaped the visual culture  of the Arab world”
-Dina Taha, al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, NYU Abu Dhabi, “Methods of Self-Mediation in Hassan Sharif’s Practice”
-Sophie Kazan, University of Falmouth, Cornwall, UK and University of Leicester, UK, “Artist Pioneers: Exploring the impact of Art by Emirati artists during the 1980s”

3:45-5:30 pm: Mediated Experience / Media Art
-Anna Levett, Oberlin College, “Ibn ‘Arabi in Sausalito: Etel Adnan in the 1980s”
-Hossein Tavazonizadeh, University of Groningen, “Iranian Interiors in the Narrative Cinema of the 1980s: The Construction of the Memory of Pre-1979 Architecture”
-Anneka Lenssen, University of California, Berkeley, “On Hearing / Not Hearing Houria Niati’s No To Torture”
-Dalia Ibraheem, Rutgers University, “Sha’bi Music in Egypt and the Genres Without History”

6 pm: Keynote Lecture
Sama’an Ashrawi: “The life and times of a Palestinian punk-rocker-turned-hip-hopper in New York City”

Saturday, November 5, 2022

10-12:30 pm: The Decade that Changed Iran: Perspectives from the Visual Arts, Film, Prose, and Poetry in the 1980s
-Blake Atwood, American University of Beirut, “Watching Movies at Home in Iran: Videocassettes and Movie Culture in the 1980s Iran.”
-Pamela Karimi, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, “Sites Unseen: State Censorship and the Rise of Alternative Art Forms in Post-Revolutionary Iran.”
-Orkideh Behrouzan, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), “The Psycho-politics of Coming of Age in 1980s Iran: Perspectives from Pop Culture”
-Amir Moosavi, Rutgers University, “Elegies for Destruction and Moments of Silence: Early Aberrations in Sacred Defense Literature.”
-Fatemeh Shams, University of Pennsylvania, “Writing Outside Borders: Trauma and Alienation in 1980s Exile Persian Poetry”

2-3 pm: National Culture? New Pressures on Afro-Arab Arts
-Chahrazad Zahi, Boston University, “Mohammed Kacimi, 1983-2003: Traversées (Crossings)”
-Cynthia Becker, Boston University, “Seven Walls Revisited (1989): Denis Martinez’s Algeria”

3:15-5:15 pm: Lebanon’s Art World at Home and Abroad in the 1980s: Artistic production and reception in times of war
Organized by LAWHA at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB)
-Monique Bellan, Orient-Institut Beirut, “Continuity and Beginnings? Reading Lebanon’s 1980s art exhibitions through the press”
-Çiğdem İvren, University of Bamberg, “Off the Mainstream: War motifs and the medium of printmaking”
-Jessica Gerschultz, University of Kansas, “When the Wood is Fragrant, the Bond is Stronger”: Tapestry and Lebanon (late 1970s-1980s)”
-Nadia von Maltzahn, Orient-Institut Beirut, “Fadi Barrage: ‘To think things out in painting’”

Structured around the work of the late Iraqi-American photographer, Yasser Alwan (1964-2022), scholars and practitioners from the arts, humanities and social sciences will come together to address questions of photography, representation, archives, and history making. While the focus will primarily, though not exclusively, be on Egypt and the Middle East, the issues raised will have relevance well beyond those borders.

This hybrid webinar will be of interest to artists, historians, curators, photographers, and archivists, as well as those concerned with social movements. Speakers include scholars and practitioners of documentary photography, art history and visual culture and media studies, social scientists and social activists.

This colloquium is made possible by the generous support of Donald C. Samuel Fund for Politics and Economics, the Mellon Foundation Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education (CFMDE), the various disciplines in the Social Sciences at Sarah Lawrence College, and an anonymous donor. It has been co-organized by Sarah Lawrence College and al-Mawrid, the Arab Center for Art at New York University Abu Dhabi. No less important has been the on-going support and encouragement of the Yasser Alwan family and friends.

Continental breakfast and a buffet lunch will be provided.

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. 

About the Panel | عن الندوة

In recent years, Professor Dagher has devoted himself to studying the image in its philosophical and historical contexts, focusing on the challenges with its formal and social reception. In this panel, he will shed light on his preoccupation with the reception of the image within society and public discourse.

في السنوات الاخيرة، كرس البروفيسور داغر نفسه الى دراسة الصورة بين فلسفتها وتاريخها، متوقفا عند كونها مسألة إشكالية في تلقيها الفقهي والاجتماعي. في هذه الندوة، سيلقي الضوء على انشغاله، متوقفا عند إشكاليات تلقي الصور في المجتمع والخطاب العام

About the Speaker | عن المتحدث

Charbel Dagher is an art historian, poet, novelist, translator, and educator. He has published over seventy books in Arabic, English, and French including several on Islamic Art and modern Arab Art.

Dagher holds two doctorate degrees in modern Arabic literature; and in the philosophy and history of art, respectively. He is currently a Professor at the University of Balamand in Lebanon.

شربل داغر مؤرخ فني، شاعر، روائي، مترجم، ومعلم. نشر أكثر من سبعين كتابًا بالعربية والإنجليزية والفرنسية منها العديد عن الفن الإسلامي والفن العربي الحديث. داغر حاصل على شهادتَي دكتوراه: في الآداب العربية الحديثة، وفي فلسفة الفن وتاريخه. يعمل حاليًا أستاذًا في جامعة البلمند في لبنان

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:

Please visit the website of Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought for more details. 

About the workshop instructor

Ghazi Faisal Al-Mulaifi is an applied-ethnomusicologist who received his PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University in 2016. In addition to working as an assistant professor of music, Al-Mulaifi is also a Venice Biennale artist, composer, Khaleeji-jazz musician, and ensemble leader. His research interests include Kuwaiti pearl diving music, the music of the Indian Ocean civilizations trade routes, global-jazz, and heritage production. His current musical efforts include performing with his ensemble Boom.Diwan where he and traditional Kuwaiti pearl diving musicians merge Kuwaiti bahri (sea) rhythms with global jazz traditions for the purpose of creating a new Kuwaiti music and engaging in a global musical dialog.

About Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought

An interdisciplinary and dynamic space that bridges the arts and social sciences in al Mawrid: Arab Center for the Study of Art. Through research, archives, pedagogy, and exchange platforms that activate the Global Network of NYU while simultaneously building connection to the thinkers, artists, and alumni in the region, Haraka is a space for movement and flow but also for a more nuanced reading of the politics of translation and knowledge production.

Hanaa Malallah (1958-) is an artist, researcher and educator, based in London. Born in Iraq, she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, and later earned an MA and PhD from the University of Baghdad. In her graduate work, she developed a semiotic approach to art, receiving a doctorate in 2005 for a thesis that uses forms of logic elaborated by modern philosophy to examine the art of ancient Mesopotamia. Malallah left Iraq at the end of 2006 for an artist residency at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris; that was followed by fellowships at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Chelsea College of Art in London. She has lectured at the University of Baghdad and the Royal University for Women in Bahrain.

Since the early 1990s, Malallah has tried to think through destruction as an essential part of the human condition, by treating the material she works with as found objects that she mutilates or disfigures according to what she came to conceptualize in 2007 as a ‘ruins technique’. This reflection on destruction has drawn on Malallah’s research on semiotics, and on the material culture of ancient Mesopotamia, but more recently it has shifted its focus from objects to landscapes, and it has explored the ‘virtual’ aspects of destruction: the temporality of decay, the survival of material, and the paradoxical appearance of invisibility within the visible. Her research on the virtual has led more recently to examine the relationship between spiritualism and technology.

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. 

9:00 am Breakfast in A6

9:30-10:00 am Welcomes, introduction to al Mawrid, and contextualization of conference questions, Anneka Lenssen

10:00-11:30 am Session One
Przemyslaw Strozek and Sara Lagnaoui, “Exchangeable Abstraction in the 1960s: Modern Art from the Arab World and Poland (Casablanca - Warsaw - Baghdad)”

11:30-1:00 pm Session Two
Anthony Gardner, “Curating Solidarity”
Masha Kirasirova, “Art Therapy After the 1967 War: Soviet artist Aleksei Shmarionv’s 1968 exhibit in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad”

1:00 - 2:30 pm LUNCH - Torch Club

2:30-4:00 pm Session Three
Suheyla Takesh, “Soviet Scholarship of Modern Arab Art: A Look at the Writing
of A. Bogdanov and B. Veimarn”
Anahi Alviso-Morino, “The Case of Yemeni Artists in the Soviet Union”

Coffee Break

4:15-5:15 pm Session Four
Ala Younis, “High Dam (Red Rose)”

5:15 pm Brief final remarks, Anneka Lenssen

6:00 pm Bus - Depart for The Lighthouse on Yas Bay

6:30-7:30 pm 5-minute PowerPoint ‘lightning presentations’ with snacks in the Library space of The Lighthouse

For the second day and final session of the workshop, NYUAD visiting professors, fellows and guests visited The Africa Institute in Sharjah.

Thanks to Dr. Anneka Lenssen for being the lead facilitator of this visit and Salwa Mikdadi from al Mawrid for being a co-convener of this workshop.

Image below courtesy of The Africa Institute. Read More.

What relationship to laborious productivity—personal or national—do we expect an Arab artist to claim? In the postcolonial context of Arab countries in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, an aesthetic of roughly elaborated self-expression often reigned supreme. Guided by theories of decolonization and modern psychology, many artists performed a supposedly authentic relationship between self and production by means of apparently effortless automatic sketches and intuitive compositions. By contrast, artists who opted to create highly elaborated forms with experimental materials often seemed to slip outside official projects of subject formation in the period. Anneka Lenssen will share her new research tracking a figure she proposes to designate a “tinkerer,” meaning an artist who works in a labor-intensive experimental manner. Appearing in many ways opposed to national developmentalist sensibilities, the ambivalent figure of the tinkerer 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. Why, and with what impact on methods and historiography? As part of a moderated discussion of narratives around laborious production in art, we will consider the work of artists Celine Chalem, Nadia Saikali, Saloua Raouda Choucair, and Najat Makki. All these women trained and exhibited in international settings and multiple languages; our conversation will pay particularly close attention to descriptions and attitudes appearing in Arabic-language materials.

Anneka Lenssen is an Associate Professor of Global Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-editor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018) and author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020), which won the Syrian Studies Association Best Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is currently an art editor for the journal Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory (Duke University Press). Here at NYU Abu Dhabi, she is a Senior Fellow (Spring 22) in the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World and a proud member of the Advisory Board to al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art.

Hanaa Malallah (1958-) is an artist, researcher and educator, based in London. Born in Iraq, she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, and later earned an MA and PhD from the University of Baghdad. In her graduate work, she developed a semiotic approach to art, receiving a doctorate in 2005 for a thesis that uses forms of logic elaborated by modern philosophy to examine the art of ancient Mesopotamia. Malallah left Iraq at the end of 2006 for an artist residency at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris; that was followed by fellowships at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Chelsea College of Art in London. She has lectured at the University of Baghdad and the Royal University for Women in Bahrain.

Since the early 1990s, Malallah has tried to think through destruction as an essential part of the human condition, by treating the material she works with as found objects that she mutilates or disfigures according to what she came to conceptualize in 2007 as a ‘ruins technique’. This reflection on destruction has drawn on Malallah’s research on semiotics, and on the material culture of ancient Mesopotamia, but more recently it has shifted its focus from objects to landscapes, and it has explored the ‘virtual’ aspects of destruction: the temporality of decay, the survival of material, and the paradoxical appearance of invisibility within the visible. Her research on the virtual has led more recently to examine the relationship between spiritualism and technology.

As part of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, Haraka Lab’s exhibition Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement features the work of artist Vikram Divecha titled Veedu (“house” in Malayalam), an inquiry into the structures that some migrants design and build in anticipation of their eventual return to India. The film documents the experience of a Keralite migrant family residing in Sharjah as members negotiate the ideals of an aspirational future home in Kerala. Divecha’s work, part of an ongoing project, unravels how negotiations over the house’s AutoCAD design are shaped by the complex intersections of gender, class, caste, ethnicity, and migration.

Back to the Drawing Board is a program designed to engage Vikram Divecha in a public conversation with Surabhi Sharma (Film), George Jose (Anthropology), Gayatri Gopinath (Gender Studies) and Deepak Unnikrishnan (Literature). The conversation takes the form of an ‘open critique’ in which reflections and questions are shared with the artist as he reconsiders this work 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. By centring process in this interdisciplinary exchange, Sharbaka: Entanglement/Attunement aims to be a place in which artistic work gets reinvented and reconfigured rather than simply shown and disseminated. 

Beirut-born, Mumbai-bred, Vikram Divecha is an artist based in Dubai. His practice raises questions about time, value, and authorship by engaging people across urban and social spheres, and working with available material and space. Divecha terms this approach as ‘found processes’, which often sees him intervene within public and social systems. From wholesale exporters to municipal gardeners, architectural consultants to railway traffic managers, Divecha’s participants inform and shape his projects in various ways, at times for sustained durations. These attempts translate into public art, site-specific interventions, workshops, installations, moving images, paintings, surfaces, drawings, photographs, performances and text.

Surabhi Sharma has been an independent filmmaker making feature-length documentaries and short films since 2000. Her documentaries, fiction, and video installations engage with cities in transition using the lens of labor, music, and migration. Her works have been screened at International Film Festivals like Dubai International Film Festival, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, and MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, amongst others. She has also created video installations that have been exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London; nGbK, Berlin, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture and the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016). Her films have been recognized and awarded at the 8^th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Brisbane 2016; Eco-Cinema, Greece 2003 (The Ramsar-Medwet Award), Film South Asia, Kathmandu 2001; Karachi Film Festival 2002; and The Festival of Three Continents, Buenos Aires 2002. Surabhi is currently teaching and the Program Head, Film and NewMedia at New York University Abu Dhabi.

George Jose is Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology in New York University Abu Dhabi. He was Dean of the Jyoti Dalal School of Liberal Arts, NMIMS University, Mumbai; Program Director for Asia Society India; Program Executive with India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bengaluru; and was Research Fellow at Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. He has directed programs in the field of arts and culture for international and regional organizations, and has taught in architecture, design, and management institutes. George maintains a strong interest in art practice across disciplines, and serves collaborative projects in an advisory capacity.

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.

Ambra D'Antone (Research Associate Bilderfahrzeuge, Max Weber Stiftung) will explore the relationship between word and image in al-Moudarres’s work, presenting examples of his distinctive approach to questions of meaning, form and intelligibility.

Issam Kourbaj (Former artist-in-residence, bye-fellow, and lector in art, Christ’s College, Cambridge University) will draw on his experience as a student of al-Moudarres at the College of Fine Arts, Damascus, as well as has own extensive experience teaching artists in the UK, UAE, and elsewhere, to discuss the artist’s different attitudes toward creative being, everyday life, and aesthetic judgment.

Anneka Lenssen (Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley / Senior Humanities Fellow, NYU Abu Dhabi) will lead the group through an analysis of al-Moudarres’s selection and use of particular media (paint, sand, ash, other) with a particular focus on the element of chance in his oil painting practice.

Email nyuad.almawrid@nyu.edu for more details.

This is one of two events organized to mark the publication of Fateh-Adonis: Sense and Intuition, the English translation of the famous dialogues between poet Adonis and painter Fateh al-Moudarres first hosted by gallerist Mouna Atassi in Damascus in 1998.

Watch the video of the event here:

This conversation with Adonis, the greatest living poet of the Arab world, focuses on questions regarding the intersection of visual art and poetry in theory and practice. This gathering is timed to coincide with the publication of a new English-language translation of a remarkable series of dialogues between Adonis and Syrian artist Fateh al-Moudarres (trans. Rula Baalbaki) hosted by Mouna Atassi in Damascus in 1998. There will be a screening of rare archival video footage from that dialogue, followed by commentary from Mouna Atassi and the Research Scholar and Artist Ala Younis, and an extended discussion with Adonis about the keywords of sense and intuition in literature, art, and his own life and work.

In-Person:

Please present a standard Al Hosn app green pass 

Zoom Link, click here

Simultaneous English Interpretation will be provided.

تستضيف هذه الأمسية المميزة التي تقام برعاية مشتركة من المورد "المركز العربي لدراسة الفن" ومؤسسة "أتاسي" و معهد جامعة نيويورك أبوظبي، أيقونة الشعر المعاصر أدونيس في حوار حي ومباشر حول جوانب التقاطع بين الفن التشكيلي والشعر من المنظورين النظري والعملي. يأتي هذا اللقاء بالتزامن مع صدور النسخة الإنجليزية للحوار بين أدونيس والفنان التشكيلي السوري الراحل فاتح المدرس (ترجمة رولا بعلبكي)، والذي أدارت جلسته السيدة منى أتاسي في دمشق عام 1998. وستعرض في الأمسية لقطات فيديو أرشيفية نادرة من حوارات أخرى بين الفنان والشاعر، تليها تعليقات من منى أتاسي والفنانة والباحثة ألاء يونس، بالإضافة لشرح مفصل مع أدونيس حول الكلمات المفتاحية لكتاب "فاتح – أدونيس: الحس والحدس" في الأدب والشعر وفي حياته ومختلف أعماله، ليجيب بعدها في الختام على أسئلة الحضور.

للحضور الشخصي | الرجاء إبراز تصريح المرور الأخضر عبر تطبيق الحصن

للزوم | سيتم إرسال الرابط يوم المحاضرة

Speakers
أدونيس Adonis, Poet
Mouna Atassi, Founder of Atassi Foundation

In conversation with
Ala Younis, Artist; Research Scholar, Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art

In collaboration with NYUAD Institute and the Atassi Foundation for Arts and Culture.

A scene plays out across the liberation imaginaries of 1960s art worlds. Teachers and students smash the plaster casts of the “models” granted to them by colonial occupiers and break the frames of academic oil painting. In Algiers, this destructive work came as a terrible collaboration with the occupying French military, which in the final years of the Algerian War for independence took back French art and bombed the museum. Henceforth, the FLN took responsibility for (re)filling the building with revolutionary displays. In Damascus, the effort took a conceptual guise as teachers returned from study in Italy and Eastern Europe and, under the sponsorship of a newly powerful Ba’th Party, announced plans to write an all-new experimental curriculum based on Bauhaus-style sensory exercises. In this talk, Anneka Lenssen introduces aspects of her research on how, exactly, artist-pedagogues set about repairing mind-body relationships following dramatic breaks with academic convention. Once makers claim to abandon the curricular standards of a bygone colonial era, what is made? With what materials, forming what sensibilities? And for what audience? Using examples from Syria and Algeria, with reference to other pedagogical initiatives from ex-colonial settings, Lenssen examines the place of the art school—-a site of both praxis and proclamation—-in several different collective efforts to realize a future free society by accommodating a fuller spectrum of creative practices and sensory perceptions. Which subjects and abilities were allotted space to survive, which were not, and how might we understand the stakes of such thwarted projects today?

Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Book Prize, and co-editor with Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (MoMA, 2018). On her home campus she is an art editor for Critical Times and a member of the advisory board to UC Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents "Natq," a live audiovisual essay on the politics and possibilities of reincarnation. Through listening closely to “xenoglossy” (the impossible speech of reincarnated subjects), this performance explores a collectivity of lives who use reincarnation to negotiate their condition at the threshold of the law—people for whom injustices and violence have escaped the historical record due to colonial subjugation, corruption, rural lawlessness, and legal amnesty. In the piece, reincarnation is not a question of belief but a medium for justice.