Institute of Art in the Arab World Inaugural Event
Gezairy Building 403 Lecture Hall
The Institute of Art in the Arab World is delighted to invite you to its Inaugural Event.
Program
6:00 – 6:05 PM: Welcoming speech, Dean Elie Haddad, SARD
6:05 – 6:10 PM: Introduction of IAAW- Dr. Yasmine Taan, Director
6:10 – 6:30 PM: Artist Talk: Rayyane Tabet on Geometry, Geology and Geopolitics
6:30 – 6:50 PM: Book Launch: Dr. Kirsten Scheid’s Fantasmic Objects, Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950
6:50 – 7:00 PM: Open floor to Q & A
Rayyane Tabet
Geometry, Geology and Geopolitics
Through an in depth look at three works - Steel Rings, The Dead Sea in Three Parts and Arabesque - Rayyane Tabet will discuss strategies of research, production, display and the entangled relationship between abstraction and political imaginary.
Biography
Rayyane Tabet is a Lebanese artist who studied architecture at The Cooper Union in New York and fine arts at The University of California, San Diego. Drawing from experience and self-directed research, Tabet’s work explores stories that offer an alternative understanding of major socio-political events through individual narratives.
Kirsten Scheid
Art Acts, Local Art Histories, and Taswir: Studying Lebanon through Modern Art, and Modern Art through Lebanon
What can we find by studying Lebanon through its modern art. I offer an historical ethnography of “art acts” which played a significant role in co-founding the nation during French occupation (1920-1950), by foregrounding the decolonizing and self-civilizing efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political and pious being.
Biography
Kirsten Scheid is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History. She researches Imagination; Islamic and Arabic Theories of Visuality; and Modern and Contemporary Art between cultural junctures, especially in the Middle East and North Africa.