Silvia Naef and Art Reoriented curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath lead a panel discussion about non-western art histories and modernism in the Arab world. They will reflect on artists and intellectuals who travelled and created work in dialogue with global modernism.

FREE 

Silvia Naef is a full professor at the Arabic Studies Section of the University of Geneva since 2006, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 1993 with a thesis on modern art in the Arab world (published 1996; Arabic translation 2008). Her research focusses on modern art, visual representations and images in the Arab and Islamic world; she is also interested in gender issues. She has recently published (ed., with E. Helbig), Visual Modernity in the Arab World, Turkey and Iran: Reintroducing the ‘Missing Modern’, Special Section, Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques, 70,4 (2016). She has been the principal investigator of the four-years research project (2013-2017) Other Modernities: Patrimony and Practices of Visual Expression Outside the West, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, in collaboration with I. Maffi (University of Lausanne) and W. Shaw (Free University Berlin).

Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath are independent curators and academics, and the co-founders of Art Reoriented, a multidisciplinary curatorial platform based in Munich and New York. Over the past decade they have jointly curated numerous in museums and institutions worldwide including the critically acclaimed exhibition Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938-1948) which showed at Tate Liverpool in 2017,Ways of Seeing presented at Arter – Space for Art in Istanbul. In 2017). They also curated I Spy With My Little Eye: A new generation of Beirut Artists at The Mosaic Rooms in London and Casa Arabe, Madrid and Cordoba (2015). Their academic monograph Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (I.B. Taurus, 2016) recently won the prestigious academic 2017 Modernist Studies Association book prize.