Middle Eastern Studies Program Presents

Learning Politics with Art: Lessons from Curation under Occupation

Studying imagination shifts attention to the emergent and yet-possible. In 2018, I cocurated an exhibition that invited Jerusalem audiences to reimagine the city’s “possible” existence by building on ludic spatial-temporal moves that have distilled in contemporary Palestinian art. This paper explores the lessons artistic imaginings of a possible Jerusalem, one not confined to space-time coordinates we use to understand realpolitik, offer the exhibition’s participants and audiences.  

Associate professor of anthropology at the American University of Beirut, Kirsten Scheid studies imagination technologies, artistic materialities, and social change specifically through cases of modern and contemporary Arab art. Her essays appear in Anthropology Now, ARTMargins, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Museum Anthropology and can be accessed at https://aub-lb.academia.edu/KirstenScheid. She has cocurated The Jerusalem Show (Jerusalem, 2018) and The Arab Nude (Beirut, 2016), exhibited at the New Museum (2011), and consulted for the Tate Modern (2014) and MoMA (2016–18). The 2019–20 Clark/Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, Scheid is currently completing an historically informed ethnography of aesthetic encounters that comprise contemporary Palestine and point to new political imaginings. 

This event is cosponsored by the Africana Studies Program, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the Art History and Visual Culture Program, and the Human Rights Project. 
 

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For more information, call 845-758-7506, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 202

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