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Research
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Lungs Project
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Khaymaz’s research interests include social histories of art; abstraction and text; transnational and diasporic modernisms; global contemporary art; Amazigh art; art of the Sahara; postcolonial studies; feminist studies; Indigenous methodologies and sovereignty movements; and Black anticolonial thought and praxis. They are the 2023 recipient of the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, awarded by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) for their paper titled “To Twist a Historical Knot: Projects of Pan-Arabism, Hurufiyya, and Amazighism.” In 2022, they were awarded the Mark Tessler Graduate Student Prize Award by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) for the paper titled “Phantom Images, Residual Violences: An Unlooking and Untelling of Marc Garanger’s Femmes algériennes 1960.”
Their doctoral research has been supported by a number of UK and US organizations, including Tate Modern, Delfina Foundation, Brooks Foundation, Center for Curatorial Leadership/Mellon Foundation, and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, as well as earning several University of Texas distinctions, such as the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Program scholarship, Provost’s Fellowship, and the Department of Art History Graduate Excellence Award. Their writing appears in the Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Settler Colonial Studies, and various exhibition catalogs, among others.
Khaymaz’s most recent curatorial works include The Shape of Words collection exhibition at Tate Modern (2024–2026), Algeria archive display in Hamid Zénati: Two Steps at a Time, curated by Salma Tuqan at Nottingham Contemporary (2024), and Roots and Horizons, programmed for the 3rd Biennial Black Midwest Symposium, in Dayton, Ohio (2024). Khaymaz is a founding member of the curatorial collective and independent press, Lungs Project, which has been operating since 2016 between the UK and the USA, promoting a cross-disciplinary dialogue among early-career artists and writers, and co-editor and publisher of New Landscapes Anthology, a 2019 collection of emerging poetry by QTBIPOC poets.
DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2025.2535137
pp.1-33
This paper explores the potential offered by deploying a settler colonial critique in Algeria. Issues around sovereignty constitute its central topic, as I consider the following questions: What did sovereignty mean for Algerian Arab and Kabyle communities subsequent to independence? How has colonial urban design historically shaped – and continued to shape – power relations? Under the theoretical umbrella of Frantz Fanon’s lieu en ébullition (boiling place), this paper analyses the mechanisms by which Algiers had become bifurcated by the 1950s and how urban architecture served not only as a tool that reified antagonistic colonial power relations, but also as a site where demands of sovereignty took tangible form. I consider the notion of permanency, both that of colonialism and urban architecture, to elucidate the role of the built environment in instituting an antithetical order of coloniser versus colonised. Following the scholarship on the built environment of colonial Algeria that has grown in recent decades, this work demonstrates that the seeds of alterity sown by the French architectural and urban practices persisted beyond independence, embedding spatial hierarchies that continue to shape lopsided power relations well into the twenty-first century.
DOI: 10.1177/00219347231166883
Language [is] a foreign anguish,” once declared Afro-Caribbean diasporic poet NourbeSe Philip. Philip’s sentiment holds true predominantly for those who write within Anglophone spheres yet cannot relay their anguish to their mothers in English. This article argues that the English language, as a diasporic tongue, is a limited and limiting entity that precludes the rich spectrum of expression of diasporic consciousness. A number of poets from the Black Diaspora have sought to transgress the boundaries of their language and, in turn, produced strategies for liberation. In this article, I analyze and compare the work of NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, June Jordan, and Claire Harris to demonstrate how the desire for liberation from coloniality has produced linguistically deconstructive impulses in these poets. Their resulting oeuvre is characterized by a distinctive refusal that tends toward fragmentation, incompleteness, and a sense of strangeness.
02. Teaching
Survey of Ancient through Medieval Art
Department of Art and Art History
TTH 5-6:30 am
We will do something similar in this course. We will examine diverse cultures around the world across a vast timeline, moving roughly chronologically, but always listening for what lessons they hold for us today. These periods in art, from prehistoric times to what is erroneously known as the Dark Ages, that is, the Medieval era, often connect directly to modern questions or anxieties about tradition and how modernity positioned itself at times against and at others in tandem with these traditions. The cyclical recurrence of the ancient in modern times challenges our linear perception of advancement and progress. It aids us in reorienting the histories of art as recursive and asynchronous, where influences flow in and out across space (through global exchanges, as we will learn) and time (with the resurgence of the ancestral past in today’s art).
Anyone who has walked through the Impressionist galleries at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris or attempted to get a closer look at Manet’s iconic painting Olympia (1863) has likely struggled to push their way through the throngs of visitors, many pausing to take multiple selfies in front of famous artworks from Western art history. Similarly, one would consider themselves lucky to get within ten feet of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. This course is about looking and learning to look. The question “How do I look?” has several working parts, from your outward appearance and self-presentation to how you make sense of what you see and your relationship with the very act of looking. These considerations now seem a necessity for navigating our social and cultural identity positions in our image-saturated times. In this course, we will learn the art of analyzing and decoding images and connecting them to broader social and cultural phenomena.
Additionally, this course propounds that looking is more than just seeing; it is a discipline of sorts, one that necessitates a considerable engagement with representations, symbols, icons, and images. Whether in the setting of protest movements, propaganda, art practices, or regular media consumption, we will learn how the politics of looking have influenced historical and present-day practices of image-making. We will examine the valency between images, power, and politics and the ways in which visual culture shapes our world while being shaped by it in return. We will explore influential theories from the past century and a half, not least from Semiotics to Institutional Critique, Modernism, Postmodernism, and Simulation. Through discussions and case studies, we will unpack the polyvalent character of visual representation and its impact on our understanding of the world.
Additionally, this course propounds that looking is more than just seeing; it is a discipline of sorts, one that necessitates a considerable engagement with representations, symbols, icons, and images. Whether in the setting of protest movements, propaganda, art practices, or regular media consumption, we will learn how the politics of looking have influenced historical and present-day practices of image-making. We will examine the valency between images, power, and politics and the ways in which visual culture shapes our world while being shaped by it in return. We will explore influential theories from the past century and a half, not least from Semiotics to Institutional Critique, Modernism, Postmodernism, and Simulation. Through discussions and case studies, we will unpack the polyvalent character of visual representation and its impact on our understanding of the world.
Syllabus available upon request.
Survey of Renaissance through Modern Art: A Feminist History
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Art and Art History
Department of Art and Art History
Fall 2025
TTH 8-9:30 am
TTH 8-9:30 am
Art history is far from a discipline without gender bias. In 1950, when E. H. Gombrich’s “bible” for introductory art history, The Story of Art, was published, it did not include any women artists (Hessel, 2023). In fact, the sixteenth edition, released in 1995, had only one. More than half a century has passed since the publication of Linda Nochlin’s landmark essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in which Nochlin questioned the prevailing narrative. In 2011, the Guerrilla Girls, a group of anonymous artists based in the United States, issued a poster that indicated a significant gender gap at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Only 4% of the artists shown in the Modern Art sections were women, while 76% of the works featured female nudes. According to a 2019 study brought to light by The Guardian, which examined the collections of the eighteen most prominent U.S. art museums, there still remains a notable disparity: 87% of the artworks are credited to male artists and 85% to white artists. This startling inequality reflects not a dearth of “great” women artists but their systematic erasure from the documents of art history.
This course moves beyond simply “discovering” overlooked women artists and addresses the fundamental questions raised by feminist art historians like Nochlin and Griselda Pollock. Rather than merely inserting women into the existing canon dating back to Giorgio Vasari’s monographic model, we will critically examine works by women artists from the Medieval period onward while questioning the value systems that determine artistic importance. We will discuss the ways in which women artists’ works have been cast as marginal, often because of societal norms that looked unkindly upon their gender. By surveying a wide range of artistic practices, styles, and approaches and developing analytical skills through feminist theoretical frameworks, students will discover that a history of art centered on women’s contributions constitutes a body of knowledge that is as unabridged and intellectually rigorous as the tacitly male-centric art history as we know it today.
Syllabus available upon request.
This course moves beyond simply “discovering” overlooked women artists and addresses the fundamental questions raised by feminist art historians like Nochlin and Griselda Pollock. Rather than merely inserting women into the existing canon dating back to Giorgio Vasari’s monographic model, we will critically examine works by women artists from the Medieval period onward while questioning the value systems that determine artistic importance. We will discuss the ways in which women artists’ works have been cast as marginal, often because of societal norms that looked unkindly upon their gender. By surveying a wide range of artistic practices, styles, and approaches and developing analytical skills through feminist theoretical frameworks, students will discover that a history of art centered on women’s contributions constitutes a body of knowledge that is as unabridged and intellectually rigorous as the tacitly male-centric art history as we know it today.
Syllabus available upon request.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, virtual, February 18
Course: Africa and West Asia: Decolonization and Art
Instructor: Tina Barouti
2025
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, virtual, February 20
Course: Africa and West Asia: Decolonization and Art
Instructor: Tina Barouti
2024
Boston University, virtual, July 17
Course: Arts of Africa and Its Diaspora
Instructor: Colleen Foran
Publishing as Curatorial Practice
Dartington School of Arts, Devon, UK, virtual, May 15
Course: Arts and Place (MA)
Instructor: Jo Joelson
The History and Politics of the Sahel-Sahara
The University of Texas at Austin, TX, in person, March 27
Course: Survey of Ancient Through Medieval Art
Instructor: Douglas Cushing
Visual Expressions of Indigeneity in the Work of Aouchem
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, virtual, February 21
Course: Africa and West Asia: Decolonization and Art
Instructor: Tina Barouti
2023
The University of Texas at Austin, TX, in person, September 15
Course: Survey of Ancient Through Medieval Art
Instructor: Athanasio Papalexandrou
A Not So Small Press: Introduction to Indie Publishing
Dartington School of Arts, Devon, UK, virtual, May 31
Course: Arts and Place (MA)
Instructor: Jo Joelson
Imagining Anew: Collaborations and Necessities
Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, virtual, May 3
The Contemporary Arts Research Council
Orientalism and Its Discontents: Why the Orientalist Debate Matters Today
The University of Texas at Austin, TX, in person, March 21
Course: Survey of Renaissance Through Modern Art
Instructor: Douglas Cushing
2022
Dartington School of Arts, Devon, UK, virtual (Zoom), May 25
Course: Arts and Place (MA)
Instructor: Jo Joelson
2021
57th NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Annual Convention, Pittsburgh, PA, virtual, March 5–8 (Forthcoming)
Panel “Regeneration in Morocco: Memory, Identity, & Innovation” (Part 2)
Organized by Salsabil Fakkar (Université Internationale de Casablanca)
Beyond Colonial Cadrage: Safaa Mazirh and Productive Illegibility
114th CAA (College Art Association) Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, in person, February 18–21 (Forthcoming)
Panel “Photographic Subjectivities: Seeing, Being Seen, Refusing the Frame”
Organized by Jennifer González and Miguel Fernandez (University of California Santa Cruz)
2026
59th Annual MESA (Middle East Studies Association) Meeting, Washington, DC, in-person, November 22–25 (Forthcoming)
Panel “Occidentalism Reconsidered: The West through the Eyes of its Other”
Organized by Varol Kahveci (Columbia University)
Boiling Places: Mapping Algiers’ Urban and Political Landscapes
11th Biennial UHA (Urban History Association) Conference, Los Angeles, CA, in person, October 10 (Forthcoming)
Panel “Urban Life and (Post)Colonial Memory in the French Empire”
Organized by Esther Isaac (University of Chicago)
Tuareg Therapeutics: Artistic Visions Beyond Loss and the Spiritual Suturing of the Desert
BRISMES (The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) Annual Conference, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK, in person, July 3
Panel “War, Colonial Violence, and Ecocide”
‘Symbols in Symbiosis’: Situating Tamazgha in Hamid Kachmar’s Abstract Expression
AMCA (The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey) Symposium, “Aesthetics of Solidarity by Arab American and Arab/SWANA Diaspora Artists in the US, 1948–Present,” Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, virtual, April 12
Panel “Identity as Strategy in Contemporary Art”
Half-Seen Figures, Double Gestures: Locating Tin Hinan Across Choukri Mesli’s Monotypes
AIMS (The American Institute for Maghrib Studies) Graduate Student Dissertation Workshop, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, in person, February 27
Ethics of Discovery: Chronicling the Neolithic Art of Tassili n’Ajjer in the Twentieth Century
UT Austin Antiquities Action 6th Annual Symposium, “Cultural Heritage in Conflict Zones: Protecting Antiquities During War,” The University of Texas at Austin, TX, in person, February 22
Panel “Heritage as Imperium: Authoritarian Uses of the Past”
Zardazgheneb: Motion, Chaos, and Pathos in the Furigraphy of Hawad
113th CAA (College Art Association) Annual Conference, New York, NY, in person, February 14
Panel “Cross-Cultural Conversations in Visuality and Textuality”
Is Colonialism Invariably Toxic? A Short Story of the Desertification of the Sahara
NAIS (Native American and Indigenous Studies) Brown Bag Workshop Series, The University of Texas at Austin, TX, in person, January 30
Memory Made Modern: Reimagining Ancient Amazigh Visuality
The Brooks Foundation Symposium, “Building an International Knowledge Network,” Tate Modern, London, UK, in person, January 22
Panel “Internationalism and Transnationalism”
Organized by Jess Sully (Tate Modern)
2025
Tate Modern, London, UK, in person, December 9
The Brooks Foundation Fellowship Seminar
Organized by Jess Sully (Tate Modern)
Chasing Horizons or Discovering New Old Things
Lecture performance in the exhibition Spirits Searching for Forms to Settle in
Delfina Foundation, London, UK, in person, November 27
Ethics of Discovery: Chronicling the Neolithic Art of Tassili n’Ajjer in the Twentieth Century
58th Annual MESA (Middle East Studies Association) Meeting, virtual, November 13
Panel “Material Culture in the Middle East”
Indigenous Presentness: Translocal Politics of Amazigh Art and Resistance
Tate Modern, London, UK, in person, September 23
The Brooks Foundation Fellowship Seminar
Organized by Jess Sully (Tate Modern)
‘Give Us Fire, We’ll Tattoo the Dawn on You’: Exile and Freedom in Ishumar Music
2nd MENACA (Middle Eastern, North African, and Central Asian Dances and Music) Symposium, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, virtual, October 4
Panel “Envisioning Decolonialism”
Diasporic Imaginations in Algerian Art: From Aouchem to Zénati
Public lecture, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK, in person, July 24
Sign, Symbol, Letter: Tracing Abstraction in Arab and Amazigh Aesthetic Modernism(s)
BRISMES (The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) Annual Conference, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK, in person, July 2
Panel “Religion, Materiality, and Aesthetics”
Half-Seen Queen: Tin Hinan’s Imprint in Choukri Mesli’s Monotypes
Eleanor Greenhill Symposium, University of Texas at Austin, TX, in person, March 30
Organized by the Graduate Student Art History Association
Sardonic Smile of the Void: Hawad’s Sahara in the Crosshairs of an Extractive Enterprise
55th NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Annual Convention, Boston, MA, in person, March 8
Panel “‘The surplus would have to die:’ Surplus and Abundance, Alienation and Relationality”
Organized by Kailey McDonald (University of Buffalo)
2024
57th Annual MESA (Middle East Studies Association) Meeting, Montréal, Québec, Canada, in person, November 2
Panel “Visual and Aural Histories of [De]colonization in North Africa”
Organized by Lacy Murphy (Washington University)
Performing Place-based Knowledge: The Case of Aouchem
Maghrib in Past & Present, Le Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT), April 27
Phantom Images, Residual Violences: An Unlooking and Untelling of Marc Garanger’s Femmes algériennes 1960
21st Annual Sequels Symposium, The University of Texas at Austin, TX, in person, March 31
Panel “Witnesses and Actors: Archives in Production”
Organized by the Ethnic and Third World Collective
‘Verbs Are a Tragedy’: Poetics of Refusal from the Black Diaspora
54th NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Convention, Niagara Falls, NY, in person, March 24
Roundtable “Literature of Resistance”
Organized by Amanda González Izquierdo (Florida International University)
On Permanency: Colonial Urbanism in Algiers or Fanon’s lieu en ebullition
39th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium, The Florida State University, Department of Art History, Tallahassee, FL, in person, March 4
Indelible Resistances and the Mark-Making of Aouchem
111th CAA (College Art Association) Annual Conference, New York City, NY, virtual, February 15
Panel “Abstraction in and around the Middle East and North Africa in the Context of Decolonization”
Organized by Leili Adibfar and Kaveh Rafie (University of Illinois)
2023
Eleanor Greenhill Symposium, University of Texas at Austin, TX, virtual, April 2
Organized by the Graduate Student Art History Association
Phantom Images, Residual Violences: An Experiment in Method
110th CAA (College Art Association) Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, virtual, March 5
Panel “Reparative Collectivities, Communities and Ecologies: Toward a Reparative Art History”
Organized by Alexander Strecker & Jasmine Magana (Duke University)
2022
Public lecture, Side Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, virtual, August 7
2020
Panel discussion, facilitated by New Art Social, Quilliam Brothers, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, April 7
Women Working in Sculpture: Towards a New Lexicon
P anel discussion, the Institute of Transplantation, Freeman Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, February 5
2018
A rtist conversation with Julie Louise Bemment, PH. Space, The Newbridge Project, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, November 21
2016
Co-curated with Nabila Abdel Nabi
and Bilal Akkouche
Collections Exhibition
October 7, 2024 – ongoing
The connections and exchanges formed by artists as they moved across the globe resulted in a variety of visual expressions, often shaped by their unique trajectories or memories of their distant homes. While some artists pursued these approaches independently, others were part of schools and groups. These included: the Casablanca Art School, CoBrA (acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), the Khartoum School, Bauhaus, as well as artistic currents such as Lettrism, Surrealism and Saqqakhana.
Following the devastation of the two world wars, artists across different cities were already experimenting with modes of abstraction, and the figure had all but disappeared from painting. Artists from newly independent countries sought new artistic vocabularies rooted in their local visual heritages. Working within a continuum of forms across history, many experimented with letters and script as the basis for new, anticolonial, abstract languages. These forms often converged to suggest figures, landscapes and cityscapes at the intersection of abstraction and representation.
At the same time, European artists turned to Asia and North Africa for new artistic ideas. These ranged from the interlocking geometric shapes in Kufic script to the fluid brush marks in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. This display demonstrates some of these transformative encounters, that pushed artists to reconceive ideas of depth, surface and materiality.
Guest Curator: Algeria Archive Display Exhibition curated by Salma Tuqan
May 25, 2024 – September 8, 2024
This era saw a generation of painters, most of whom were formally trained in fine art academies in France, called upon to establish a national school of painting. Their goal was to develop a pictorial language that reflected their cultural heritage and the revolutionary ideals of the new state by producing works that were uniquely Algerian and readily identifiable as such. Known colloquially as ‘independence painters’, these artists were politically savvy; many were informed by anticolonial nationalist discourses.
Through print media outlets, notably Révolution Africaine and El Moudjahid, and nationalised art institutions such as Union Nationale des Arts Plastiques (UNAP, or National Union of Plastic Artists), they came together and engaged in prolific but sometimes incendiary and slanderous debates on establishing Algeria’s new art. Artists diverged significantly in their approaches, leading to a diverse range of themes and styles. Influenced by Soviet art, some embraced social realism and others expressionism, while an overwhelming number turned to abstraction.
This form of abstraction, however, did not signify a break from tradition, as commonly recognised in European art, but rather a reinvention of it with a modern twist. Abstract painters drew from a rich array of sources, including, not least, Arabic calligraphy, architectural shapes, carpet designs, local materials, and geometric symbols. The members of the avant-garde artist collective Aouchem, Choukri Mesli (b.1931, Algeria; d.2017, France) and Denis Martinez (b. 1941, Algeria), set themselves apart from the artistic expression of their time by proposing a return to the Sahara and the millennial visual forms of the indigenous territories known as Tamazgha.
The post-independence era was an energetic yet tumultuous one, with no ultimate method for image-making or consensus on defining Algerian art. For the artists of the abstract genre, this particular expression offered not a definitive answer but one of several possibilities.
Co-curated with Angela Burdon
October 18 - 19, 2024
Organized for the Third Biennial Black Midwest Symposium, Roots and Horizons brings together the work of artists who received the inaugural Artist Fellowships from the Black Midwest Initiative in Summer 2023. The selection presented here rethinks the idea of the Black Midwest from a variety of expansive perspectives.
The themes range from the history of Midwestern cities and their Black communities to collecting oral histories and building accessible archives. Some artists consider individual identities and what it means to operate on an intersectional level as a Black Midwesterner. And while certain works focus on the resilience of Black communities throughout history, others dwell on the present moment and address current issues. Together, they reimagine potential futures—new horizons—for the Black Midwest, rooted in dialogue with their past, communities, and one another.
Co-curated with Angela Burdon
October 9, 2018
Part 1: Waiting Room
This section presents nine videos by Korean-American artist Laura Hyunjhee Kim. Kim’s humorous works utilize DIY, amateur internet aesthetics and consumer electronics, drawing inspiration from viral memes, lo-fi pop music, narrative found-footage film, and kitschy low-budget commercials. Her videos explore emerging trends in consumer-grade technology to capture the underlying dreams and desires that influence human and non-human existence. All selected works feature unique soundtracks blending Korean pop with waiting room music, introducing Kim’s playful visual and auditory style.
Run Time: 18’28”
Part 2: Masculine Vulnerability
Emerging filmmaker Kariim Case presents Take Me to The Water. The film explores Black masculinity and the construction of self. Inspired by pioneering Black artists like Marlon Riggs and Carrie Mae Weems, the film examines three life stages—childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—investigating who and what formed the man Case is today while challenging stereotypes society attributes to Black men. The work unpacks masculine vulnerability, scrutinizing social norms governing how men experience and express emotions. Stemming from homesickness and desire to connect with home (both physical and ancestral), the film finds ways to express contradictions and vulnerabilities without fear of stereotyping, directly challenging audiences. Case will introduce his work and take questions afterward.
Run Time: 17’21”
Part 3: Deterritoralized Voices
This section features Inside / Outside - What is Love? by Turkish filmmaker Müge Yıldız. Set in Tarlabasi, a historically marginalized, Kurdish-heavy Istanbul neighborhood with high rates of violence and conflict, the film captures an area undergoing forced gentrification due to Turkish government urban renewal laws that have displaced many residents. Yıldız walks into local shops, casually chatting with owners about love, while the film features only passersby outside, capturing the neighborhood’s daily rhythm accompanied by displaced monologues. Without any manipulation, Yıldız observes these spaces in their own time; every moment of the film has its own destiny.
The film creates a cacophony of voices rising from Istanbul, characterized by objectivity that shows rather than interprets, presenting collages, snippets, and vignettes. Yıldız's use of voice creates an auditory urban landscape while conveying collective messages isolated from individual speakers. The work raises awareness of forceful urban developments in Istanbul under Erdogan's totalitarian regime and to give a voice to those often kept in the margins at a safe distance from the ideology.
Run Time: 22’30”
April 21, 2018 – June 30, 2018
The exhibition examines power dynamics that drive wedges between individuals and communities within the U.K., revealing dominant narratives that influence public and personal relations. It exposes cultural judgment systems that shape and maintain social stratification, dividing society by economic class, regional identity, and status—creating “imaginary” chasms that often seem insurmountable.
In the exhibition, you will find paintings and photographs by Jill Tate reflecting on worlds that are alien to us and structures that keep us in isolation. Meanwhile, Fang Qi’s animations create poetic landscapes as an homage to the North Sea and capture people's fading memories of village life in North County Durham. Finally, Ella Ray Barnes presents narrated illustrations exploring the Miners’ Strike of the Thatcher era and the socio-economic consequences of mine closures.
April 21, 2018 – June 30, 2018
The exhibition is primarily concerned with the production of knowledge and adopts a curatorial model informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” theory. The show explores the dialogical relationship between artworks and ideas, composed of multiple paths of investigation into how we create meaning. The Latin origin of the word dialogue, dialogus (dia: through, logos: words/meaning), suggests a natural flow of meaning that permeates through everything, ready to be extracted.
Dialogus presents works by eleven North East artists whose mediums span video, short film, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, and illustration. Artists include: Amy Roberts, Callum Costello, Emma Bennett, Joe Jefford, Lauren Drummond, Liam McCabe, Mark Chapman, Molly Bythell, Matthew Wilkinson, Steven Lowery, and Zara Worth.
The preview features poetry readings by Newcastle-based poets Caroline Hardaker, David Spittle, and Matt Miller.
Solo exhibition
Istanbul, Turkey
December 29, 2017 – January 28, 2018
The exhibition contains quasi-archaeological artefacts belonging to a healer and the high priestess of goddess Ishtar named Sitare. This fictional woman supposedly lived during the Bronze Age on the mound of Ash Hill, a trade outpost of the Assyrian city Karum Kanesh located in today’s Kayseri, central Turkey. The tale of Sitare is borne from the pseudo artefacts and personal belongings created by the artist. While the underpinning facts weaving the story alongside the techniques used in re-imagining “ancient” objects are based on modern archaeological knowledge, the script and symbols used in the exhibition are created in fiction.
The Post-Processual Theory in modern archaeology informs the exhibition’s line of enquiry, which proposes to unearth the human agency. Hence, Khaymaz’s primary aim is to connect with Sitare’s individuality, which is undeniably unique to her era. Understanding the nature of knowledge as subjective, and rather than seeing archaeology as a method of scientific data collection and objective generalisation, the artist embraces the political and social situations as well as the free human agency in shaping societies.
Expanding the idea of a re-imagined past, the works in the exhibition draw on the daily life, rituals, and traditions of people who lived in the dawn of settled societies. In preparation for the exhibition, Khaymaz taught themselves to write in cuneiform, a script that initially emerged from Sumer around 3500 B.C., as well as earlier forms of written language, pictograms. While pictograms were used widely by the masses regarding daily matters throughout Mesopotamia, the cuneiform was reserved only for the privileged. In creating a dialogue on clay tablets utilising both systems, Khaymaz points out the discrepancy between the production of knowledge and its distribution in relation to sociopolitical connotations of language.
The artist developed this exhibition in collaboration with philologist and poet Mete Ozel, who will be performing on the preview night to enact the story of Sitare. The exhibition runs from 29 December 2017 to 28 January 2018, with a private view on 28 December. Tasarim Bakkali is a non-profit organisation and an independent art space with an international artist residency programme based in Istanbul, Turkey. Inspired by the “accessible art and accessible design for all” motto, Tasarim Bakkali aims to create a diverse and open platform together with artists and designers who share the same philosophy. For more info, visit: www.tasarimbakkali.cc
Solo exhibition
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
January 12 – March 11, 2017
Our value systems and identities are created at the intersection of humans and things, and that in this regard my practice is related to the notion of ‘thingness’. ‘Things’ encompass space, language, image, and object. Society, as a whole, acts as a disseminating device, helping solidify the reality we create through this interplay and root it in everyday acts. My practice is precisely about exploring the temporal–fleeting–space between the production and solidification of knowledge, and wants to ask “what happens if we throw a spanner in the works?” To that end, I work with cast-out objects which are no longer functioning purposefully, while at the same time, aim to discuss the notion of art-making as a repetitive quotidian practice.
The series of works Idea Generating Machines define art-making as a tactical apparatus; they are created to unpack the sculptural and philosophical possibilities of discarded objects. The repeated gesture of applying plaster and pigment is intended to rid the objects of their practical connotations, to reduce them to their ‘thingness’ in order to redefine and reinterpret them, to form an illusion of mere physical material without a history or a beginning. They are then assemblaged within a state of non-hierarchical totality, overriding the objects’ inherent characters and bestowing upon a rather arbitrary value. Idea Generating Machines revel in this disruptive, transitory phase whereby signs and signifiers of ‘things’ are thrown in disarray.
By the same token, the everyday is a hodgepodge of different experiences and perspectives, a clumsy assemblage of activities, rituals, notions and conceptions: its continuous cycloidal rhythm binds together seemingly non-synchronous existences within its gravitational pull. At the same time, the everyday is an ideological playground where invisible tools of control are in continuous operation. Our daily lives are precariously re-produced and re-performed through every single subjective viewpoint. The performative aspect of the everyday condition allows powerful manifestations of ideology–both historical and modern–to be silently enacted within collective urban spaces in which we experience life through simple daily rituals. Within my creative process, I intend to reveal the covertly oppressive characteristics of the everyday and the linguistic signification which renders such oppression invisible. Throughout this endeavour, I aim to raise a question about hegemonic imaginaries undergirding every aspect of our culture, shaping our critical knowledge of even the most mundane of things.
Photo © Colin Davison
Gesso, plaster, gold enamel paint, household objects