Wednesday June 24, at 8 pm
THE LIVES OF ARTWORKS IN AND AFTER WAR
Round table with Saleh Barakat (curator of the exhibition) & Kirsten Scheid (anthropologist and art historian).
Moderator: Kristine Khouri
Language: English
Saleh Barakat will present his objectives and processes of researching and organizing the exhibition, “The Road to Peace – Painting in Times of War, 1975-1991”.
Kristen Scheid will discuss artist Saloua Raouda Choucair, her experiences, and the changing discourses surrounding “the social life of her oeuvre” during the civil war period.
This roundtable is part of the series of events “On Lebanese Wars”, conceived and organized by Lamia Joreige and Manal Khader for Beirut Art Center.
Saleh Barakat is an art expert based in Beirut specializing in the modern and contemporary art of the Arab world. He co-curated several pan-Arab exhibitions (Ateliers Arabes for the IX Francophonie Summit, Arabian Canvas for the World Bank Summit and Mediterranean Crossroads for the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs). He has written many articles in his specialty for books and journals, and co-authored a book on contemporary Lebanese art commissioned by the Arab League Education, Culture and Sciences Committee (ALECSO). He lectured in major museums and universities including the Barbican Center- London, the Metropolitan Museum- New York, The Bahrain National Museum, the Unesco and EHESS in Paris, Bogazici University- Istanbul, Yale University- New Haven, Princeton University- New Jersey, The Venice Agenda at the 51st Venice Biennale, and Canvas Education and Art Lobby at Art Basel 39. He also co-curated the first national Pavilion of Lebanon at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Projects that he initiated for the preservation and promotion of 20th century art of the Arab world include Agial (1991) and Maqam (2008), two specialized institutions for the beginning of images in the Levant area since 1870. He is a founding member of the Kinda Foudation (2000) and serves on the steering committee of the Arts Center at the American University of Beirut. He was nominated as a Yale World Fellow in 2006.
Kirsten Scheid is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She studies art modernisms, historiography, and contemporary art politics in Lebanon and the Middle East. Her research interests include the history of painting in Lebanon, cross-cultural investments in fine art, and the use of art for negotiating ambiguous social identities such as gender and class. She is the author of several articles on art and civilizing discourses in colonial and post-colonial contexts as well as a monograph, On Civilized Art in Primitive Places: Modern Art and the Formation of Lebanese Society. Scheid received her PhD from Princeton in anthropology. Her newest research explores rites of passage common among upper class Lebanese prepubescents and the cultivation of elite subjectivities.
Kristine Genevive Khouri is a researcher, writer, and photographer based in Beirut. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2007, spent a year as a Fulbright fellow in Amman researching art institutions, and has been working on the project Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World. She is currently working on a research project on Modernity and the Visual Arts in the Arab World.
Link: http://beirutartcenter.org/parallel-events.php?exhibid=37&statusid=2