JOIN the event here on ZOOM – 25 April, 7pm BST (London)
Meeting ID: 872 9924 5436
Passcode: 994089
LIVESTREAM with captions on Facebook

In this online panel discussion moderated by Paula Barreiro López, Amin Alsaden, Yazid Anani, Naeem Mohaiemen and Eszter Szakács, will speak from their research and work on solidarity. Learn about the challenges of cultural solidarity work within the confines of state-sponsored exhibitions in the Cold War as well as contemporary interrogations of solidarity through writing, art and curating.

About the speakers

Amin Alsaden is an independent curator, writer, and educator whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries. His scholarship explores the history and theory of modern and contemporary art and architecture globally, with specific expertise in the Arab-Muslim world and its diasporas. Alsaden’s research is often an inquiry into anti-colonial discourses and creative resistance cultures, those developed in the non-West as well as those pioneered by Indigenous and racialized communities in the West. He has been studying the modernism that emerged in post-World War II Baghdad, and how the city became a locus of unprecedented encounters that transformed art and architecture well beyond Iraq, while engendering a unique local movement. He has taught at several institutions, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and regularly serves as an invited lecturer and critic at art, curatorial, and design programs.

Yazid Anani born 1975, Ramallah, is the Director of the Public Programme at the A. M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah. He was a professor at the Department of Architecture and the Master Program in Urban Planning and Landscape – Birzeit University, Palestine 2007 – 2016. He curated and co-curated several projects including: Outside the Archive, Subcontracted nations, Zalet Lisan, The Facility, Weed Control and the 2nd- 6th editions of Cities Exhibition, and most recently Mapping (Un)Solidarities. Anani has lectured and published internationally on architecture, art and urban transformations, colonial spaces and power relations, public art and public spaces and art education.

Paula Barreiro López is Full Professor of the Universite Toulouse Jean Jaurès and Head Researcher of the international platform Decentralised Modernities/MoDe(s). Her research focuses on cultural and artistic networks between Europe and the Americas during the Cold War as well as on the diverse movements of solidarity across the Atlantic and their developments within an increasingly globalised world. Last year she coordinated the special issue “Partisan Genealogies: Radical Visual (and Policial) Practices” for Artl@s Bulletin. Her last books are Compagnons de lutte (MSH, 2023), Atlantico Frio (Brumaria, 2019), Avant-garde Art and Criticism in Francoist Spain (Liverpool University Press, 2017), Modernidad y vanguardia: rutas de intercambio entre Espana y Latinoamerica (Museo Reina Sofia, 2015, edited with Fabiola Martinez).

Naeem Mohaiemen explores forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings) in the Muslim world after 1945, spanning milestones, collisions, and disaster. Several contemporary conversations about the Non Aligned Movement and Third Worldism pivoted around the premiere of his film, Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), at documenta 14. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University, New York.

Eszter Szakács is a curator and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Amsterdam. She is on the curatorial team of the grassroots initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest, with which they were lumbung members at documenta fifteen. Eszter was part of the East Europe Biennial Alliance team that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial, 2021.

Mohaiemen and Szakács are editors of the anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended (Tranzit, 2023), to which Amin Alsaden contributed an essay on Pan-Arab Art.

Image: Installation View of Two Meetings and a Funeral (Mohaiemen, 88’, 3 channel, 2017), curated by Eszter Szakács at Vasas Federation of Metalworkers’ Union, Budapest, tranzit.hu. Photograph by Zsuzsanna Simon.