This series explores Afro-Arab Futurisms in contemporary art and cultural production.
In the past decade artists have responded to ongoing wars and continued corporate/imperial practices in the Middle-East and North Africa with alternative visions of the future. We have seen national conceptions of Palestine as a single high-rise tended to by a woman in a space-suite in the work of Larissa Sansour for instance, and artists working under the heading of “Gulf Futurism” in response to fast growing urban spaces in the Persian/Arab Gulf region. In light of these practices, this research group attempts to contextualize Speculative Arab Futurism in relation to longer traditions of futurist resistance in Afrofuturism.
Convener
Sara Mameni
Events
Held at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
- October 13, 2018 – Ronak Kapadia
Kapadia is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and affiliated faculty in Global Asian Studies and Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of the forthcoming Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke UP, 2019), which examines the visionary, world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the context of ongoing US war and empire in the Greater Middle East.
- November 3, 2018 – Roundtable Discussion: Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing
Featuring Harmony Holiday, Harryette Mullen, Tisa Bryant and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson.
With “art as a form of epistemology” and “disaster as the convention of the present state” as conceptual frameworks, poets Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin’s groundbreaking 2018 anthology, Letters to the Future, gathers and explores the innovations and interventions of contemporary Black women writers as they manifest the future of Black life, aesthetics and concern.
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- November 17, 2018 – Nasrin Himada
Himada is a Palestinian writer, editor and curator based in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal), in Kanien'kehá:ka territory. Their writing on contemporary art has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Critical Signals, The Funambulist, Fuse Magazine, and MICE Magazine among others. They are the co-editors of contemptorary.org.
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