Virtual Lecture: Curating Modern Abstraction from the Arab World

In this talk, Suheyla Takesh addresses the process and challenges of curating modern art from North Africa and West Asia. She discusses the curatorial strategies, pitfalls, and questions that arise while studying modernism in the non-West and developments that conceptually preside outside established art-historical frameworks. Using examples from the exhibition, she offers an expanded view of global modernism in the arts, and discusses multiple and manifold histories of global abstraction.

Speaker: Suheyla Takesh is a curator and writer. At the Barjeel Art Foundation, she works on research and curatorial development of exhibitions, and oversees the production of publications. An exhibition she curated at the Aga Khan Museum in 2015, titled Home Ground, was named Toronto’s top art show of the year by NOW Toronto. Her writing has appeared in peer reviewed journals including Thresholds and the Rutgers Art Review. Suheyla holds a master’s degree (SMArchS) from MIT’s department of History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art, where she was a student in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic architecture. She is the co-curator of Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s (2020) at the Grey Art Gallery in New York, which is set to travel to several venues in the US.

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Image: Mohamed Melehi (Morocco), Composition, 1970, acrylic on wood, 47 1/4 x 39 3/8 in, Collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE