Ghalya Saadawi

How has art changed in recent history into a transnational category and a cabinet of curiosities in Beirut? The Beirut based sociologist and author Ghalya Saadawi suggests to return to time, in order to confront the geographical and identitarian paradoxes at the heart of global, transnational contemporary art.

(Ziad Abillama, Pourquoi n'arretes-tu pas de mourir?, 2005, video-still, courtesy Ziad Abillama)

And if we are to be frequently solicited to talk about our locality, we may as well need a better set of theoretical tools with which to do so, in order to bypass total disinclination, instrumentalisation, ahistorical understanding or pastiche.

The lecture considers art in/from/out of Beirut as symptomatic thermostat, not as artefact; as something to be thought through history and infrastructure, not spatially. It will address the conditions by which we can understand globalisation in art through the local (or the locally transnational), while thinking about future making/thinking in ways that do not oversimplify and succumb to a given, total category of the global under capitalism. The talk thus covers art in Beirut without needless overviews, while paying close attention to transnational and neoliberal art discourse and practice.

The lecture will take place on Thursday 3. August at 7 p.m. at Galerie 5020, Salzburg.