Andrée Sfeir-Semler, Gallerist, Beirut and Hamburg
Rayyane Tabet, Artist, Beirut / San Francisco
Alexandre Kazerouni, Associate professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris
Antonia Carver, Director of Art Jameel, Dubai
Moderator: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Art critic, Geneva
Since the 1990s, contemporary art in the Arab world has experienced remarkable growth and transformation. With artists from the region increasingly well represented in international exhibitions, the dynamics within the art scene shifted significantly. Museums and art foundations began to collect, biennials were launched, and contemporary art galleries, fairs, residencies, and schools have emerged in many countries. Meanwhile, the governments of the Gulf states initiated cultural megaprojects.
This panel draws on the recently published anthology The Rise of Arab Art to trace the development of artistic practices and institutions across an incredibly diverse and dynamic part of the world. Gathering Andrée Sfeir-Semler, owner of Sfeir-Semler Gallery and the editor of The Rise of Arab Art, artist Rayyane Tabet, author Alexandre Kazerouni, and director of Art Jameel Antonia Carver, the conversation is moderated by critic and scholar Kaelen Wilson-Goldie.
Andrée Sfeir-Semler is a Lebanese-German art historian, exhibition maker, and the owner of the eponymous gallery. She studied fine arts at the American University of Beirut, as well as history and history of art at Bielefeld University with Jürgen Kocka and at the Sorbonne with Pierre Bourdieu. She earned her PhD in 1985 with the thesis ‘Die Maler am Pariser Salon: 1791–1880’. She opened her first gallery in 1985 in Kiel, in northern Germany. She moved to Hamburg in 1998, where the German branch of Sfeir-Semler is still based, and in 2005 she opened the first white cube exhibition space in the Arab world: Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut. The gallery’s program focuses on contemporary art from the Arab world.
Drawing from experience and self-directed research, Rayyane Tabet (b. 1983, Ashqout) explores stories that offer an alternative understanding of major sociopolitical events through individual narratives. Informed by his training in architecture and sculpture, his work investigates paradoxes in the built environment and its history by way of installations, interventions, and performances that reconstitute the perception of physical and temporal distance.
Alexandre Kazerouni is Associate Professor of Political Science at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Since the 2000s, his research and publications have focused in particular on the states of the Persian Gulf region and their cultural policies. He is notably the author of the book Le Miroir des cheikhs: Musée et politique dans les principautés du golfe Persique, published in 2017 by Presses universitaires de France.
Antonia Carver is the director of Art Jameel. The Jameel Arts Centre, known as Dubai’s hub for contemporary art and ideas, is an independent institution dedicated to exhibition-making, commissions, learning, and research. Opened in 2018, the center is founded and supported by Art Jameel, one of the most significant non-governmental, public arts organizations in the Middle East, and grounded in a dynamic understanding of the arts as fundamental to life and accessible to all.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer and critic based in Geneva. She is the author of Etel Adnan (2018) and Beautiful, Gruesome, and True: Artists at Work in the Face of War (2022). Wilson-Goldie has written for Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Mousse, Bookforum, Afterall, Parkett, 4Columns, e-flux, ARTMargins, The Village Voice, and The New York Times, among other publications. She was a practitioner-in-residence at New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2022.
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