Language: English
Address: Residenzplatz 10, 5020 Salzburg
If
we are to avoid and confront the geographical and identitarian paradoxes at the
heart of global, transnational contemporary art, we need to return to time. And
If we are to be frequently solicited to talk about our locality within the
field of contemporary art, we will need a better set of theoretical tools with
which to do so in order to cut through total disinclination, instrumentalized
display, and ahistorical understanding. This talk is about the category art in
Beirut and how it has coalesced into a transnational category and cabinet of
curiosity, drawing capital from both its locality and its trans-nationality –
without turning the mirror upon either – and the infrastructures and meanings
that make this possible. As it moves within globalization, towards this
totality, the talk considers art in/from/out of Beirut as symptom, not as
artifact – and as something to be thought historically, temporally. It will
critically discuss the conditions by which we can understand the
global under capitalism
in art through the local (or the locally transnational). In short, the talk covers
art in Beirut without needless overviews, while paying close attention to transnational,
neoliberal art discourse and practice today.
Ghalya
Saadawi lives
in Beirut. She lectures at the American University of Beirut, the University
of St. Joseph and the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, in modern and contemporary
art theory, and on art in Lebanon after 1990. Between 2015-2017, she was
Resident Professor of the Home Workspace Program (Ashkal Alwan). Saadawi recently
earned her PhD from Goldsmiths University of London in sociology titled Rethinking the Witness: Art after the Lebanese
Wars. She is co-editor, with Mirene Arsanios and Iman Mersal,of Makhzin,
and is affiliated with Bicar.
