Research Interests
Contemporary art
My research in contemporary art focuses on artists who intervene in hegemonic discourses, social injustices and political movements. I am also interested in global art market politics. Most of my experience is with artists working in and from the Middle East, although I have recently focused on artists and artistic movements elsewhere.
Publications:
Total Replication: Contemporary art and heritage in the Arabian Gulf countries
Books manuscript in progress
When Workers Toil Unseen, Artists Intervene: On the In/ visibility of Labor in the Arabian Gulf States. Visual Anthropology 32 (3-4): 265–86. doi: 10.1080/08949468.2019.1637672.4
Local, Regional, Global: An Investigation of Art Dubai’s Transnational Strategies. Arabian Humanities (7). doi: 10.4000/cy.3250
Cultural heritage
My research focuses on two aspects: how states deploy heritage narratives for nation-building purposes and how artists react to exclusive heritage narratives.
Publications:
Land Art as a Means to Negotiate Natural and Cultural Heritage in the United Arab Emirates,
Český lid, the anthropological journal of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 104 (2): 213–30, 2017.doi: 10.21104/CL.2017.2.03.
When Art and Heritage Collide: Artistic Responses to National Narratives in the UAE, LSE Middle East Centre Blog, 13th December 2018
Futurism
My newest research project focuses on Gulf Futurism as an artistic and literary movement in the Arabian/Persian Gulf and compares it to other futuristic movements, including Afrofuturism and Sinofuturism.
Conference Papers:
Gulf Futurism and the (un-)hopeful chronopolitics of art
European Association of Social Anthropologists
July 2022
Past-Present-Future: Time-based artistic practices from the Gulf
Middle East Studies Association
October 2020
The nation takes place in the future: artistic responses to cultural heritage in the Arab Gulf
Horizon 2020 Global Traces Conference: Art Practice, Ethnography, Contested Heritage, University of Oslo, February 2019
