Middle Eastern Studies Program Presents
Manifestos, Debates, and Other Discursive Energies of Modern Arab Art
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Center for Curatorial Studies, Room 102
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Sarah Rogers, coeditor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents
This talk discusses the motivations and research and translation processes involved in the production of the forthcoming publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. A compendium of critical art writings by 20th-century Arab intellectuals and artists, the publication brings together and translates into English, for the first time, manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, exhibition guest-book comments, letters, and more. Traversing empires and nation-states, diasporas, and speculative cultural and political federations, these documents bring light to the formation of a global modernism, through debates on originality, public space, spiritualism and art, postcolonial exhibition politics, and Arab nationalism, among many other topics. Sarah Rogers is an independent scholar. In 2008, she earned her PhD from the History, Theory, and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the dissertation “Postwar Art and the Roots of Beirut's Cosmopolitanism.” Her scholarship has been published by Parachute, Art Journal, and Arab Studies Journal. She is co editor of Arab Art Histories: The Khalid Shoman Collection (2014) and coeditor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (forthcoming, Museum of Modern Art). She is a founding member and president elect of the Association of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Turkey, and Iran. Her current manuscript examines modern art in Lebanon within the international context of the cold war.
Workshop
Found in Translation: Archiving Modern Arab Art
Sarah Rogers and Dina Ramadan
Friday, April 6, 2018, Olin LC 118
10:00 am – 11:30 am Session I: Viewing the Exhibition
11:30 am – 1:00 pm Session II: Accounting for the June 1967 War
In these workshops students will be reading and discussing primary documents in translation, in relation to artistic production from the period. Primary documents will include exhibition guest-book entries from the early 1930s, exhibition reviews from the 1950s, and an artistic manifesto written in response to the June 1967 War, as well as artists’ interviews and roundtables. All readings will be in English and will be sent to students in advance.
Students can participate in one or both workshops. Please register by emailing Dina Ramadan [email protected] and state which session you wish to join.
This event is cosponsored by the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Human Rights Project, and the Art History Program.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Center for Curatorial Studies, Room 102