"THE POLITICS OF ART: DISSENT AND CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN LEBANON, PALESTINE, AND JORDAN"
Hanan Toukan, Bard College Berlin
Part of the Silsila Fall 2023 Program
Over the last three decades, a new generation of conceptual artists has come to the fore in the Arab Middle East. As wars, peace treaties, sanctions, and large-scale economic developments have reshaped the region, this cohort of cultural producers has also found themselves at the center of intergenerational debates on the role of art in society. Central to these cultural debates is a steady stream of support from North American and European funding organizations—resources that only increased with the start of the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s.
The Politics of Art offers an unprecedented look into the entanglement of art and international politics in Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman to understand the aesthetics of material production within liberal economies. In her book talk, Toukan will outline the political and social functions of transnationally connected and internationally funded arts organizations and initiatives. The book reveals how the production of art within global frameworks can contribute to hegemonic structures even as it is critiquing them—or how it can be counterhegemonic even when it first appears not to be. In this talk, Toukan will propose not only a new way of reading contemporary art practices as they situate themselves globally, but also a new way of reading the domestic politics of the region from the vantage point of art.
Hanan Toukan is Associate Professor of Politics and Middle East Studies at Bard College Berlin. Her work broadly is concerned with the political and social roles art and cultural institutions play in our social and political worlds. In particular her research and writing focus on the function(s) of art in global politics; museums and exhibitionary practices; migration of artists and the movement of art objects; the politics of knowledge production in and about memory, displacement, history(ies), and race and racialization. She was previously visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and History of Art at Brown University and Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at Bamberg University. Her book The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan was published with Stanford University Press in 2021. Besides her academic work Toukan is also a writer and critic whose work has appeared in various catalogues, art publications and journals.
This event will take place as a live webinar at 12:30pm EDT (New York time). To register as an online attendee, please use the following link:
https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yTidkR3TQpGzMjeZmEABWg
Only registered attendees will be able to access this event via zoom.