Abstraction Unframed: Fourth Annual Conference of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Turkey and Iran (AMCA) | AMCA | Association for Modern + Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran + Turkey

Open to the Public

Date: May 22, 2016 – May 24, 2016
Time: 09:00am – 05:00pm
Location: NYUAD Campus, Conference Center View map

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Agenda

Our art historical account of modernism has long been rooted in an idea of dissatisfaction with representation, in a twentieth-century impatience with perceived distance from ‘real’ material, emotion, or knowledge. While Western scholarship privileges one network of European artists with the invention of abstraction in 1910, this dissatisfaction with representation permeated other disciplines as well. Modern architects ceased concerning themselves with historical styles as a métier, instead designing machines for living, and for knowing. By mid century, the methods of postwar sociology and planning shifted in the direction of producing data sets which, offering ways to manipulate experience apart from the singularity of good taste or the frame of the individual, became material to the art object (and its deconstruction) as well. At stake in these multiple abstractions was the dream of true being, as might exist outside the specificity of language or culture.

There is no monopoly on this dream. Nomenclature to describe the transcendence of the singularity of appearances in fact proliferates in translation – the Arabic word tajreed, the Persian entaze’e or the Turkish word soyutlama, and other names – to denote formal states beyond natural likeness such as a lasting structure or eternal concept. And yet, still tethered to the very word abstraction—as it is used in the narrow disciplinary frame of artistic modernism—is a concept of representation that has been formed within the particular historical context of the European tradition of illusionistic painting. Abstraction acquired its sense in reference to a lack, a pulling away from visual representation, an absence of the figure. If this is our disciplinary inheritance, what can be made of work with traditions that never placed emphasis on the icon, or never submitted to the representational limits of the painterly frame? How can we attend to the multiplicity of other artistic problems, or modes of creation, found in modernism writ large? To the many strands of Eastern mysticism and vitalist philosophy that provided an impetus to abstraction, on all shores? What history can we write for the artists who made their own mobility a ground for new abstractions, moving from discipline to discipline, and circulating around various cities and countries?

The fourth AMCA conference seeks to open the concept of abstraction up to inquiry across multiple disciplinary formulations, so as to probe both the frame of modern abstraction and its promise to unframe. Papers might engage a range of subjects, including and not limited to (1) critical accounts of the concept of abstraction; (2) case studies of artistic practice; (3) critical analyses of interactions between artists and architects, or art and calculation; (4) reinterpretations of global conditions for abstract art in the twentieth century. As a whole, the conference is intended to highlight transformations of abstraction in the non-West, including the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey, and the history of aniconic ornament in their spiritual landscapes. Equally it aims to take other impetuses into account: the abstract calculations of colonialism, economics, and planning that produced the modern condition, as well as ethical issues surrounding the abdication of the figure or the non-figure (such as sincerity of practice or lack thereof).

The conference will take place at two institutions: NYU-Abu Dhabi and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah. By convening the conference in conjunction with a collection of art assembled outside national boundaries, and within a new institution of higher learning located between the Middle East and Asia, in which Europe is de-centered, we anticipate that our discussions in the United Arab Emirates will enable us to un-frame abstraction as an artistic process, goal, and critique. To that end, the conference will conclude with a day of “unconference”, when the questions raised in the conference may be applied to the collection of art in the Barjeel Art Foundation. This collection includes work by Etel Adnan, Mohammed Melehi, Mona Saudi, Hugette Caland, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Omar El Nagdi, and others may be viewed at  https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/u/0/collection/barjeel-art-foundation.

All proposals to be submitted by Oct 31^st 2015
to: info@amcainternational.org. Responses will be emailed on December 1^st, 2015.

Conference participation of presenters will be fully subsidized by the generous sponsorship of Barjeel Art Foundation and NYUAD

Organizers:

Saleem Al-Bahloly (EUME Fellow 2014-2016, Forum Transregionale Studien)
Jessica Gerschultz (University of Kansas)
Anneka Lenssen (UC Berkeley)
Salwa Mikdadi (NYUAD)
Nada Shabout (University of North Texas)

In Collaboration with

 AGENDA

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Sunday, May 22: Day 1
9:00 – 9:30 AM		Registration
		Institute Conference Center
		Meeting Room Foyer
9:30 – 9:45 AM		Welcome Remarks & Introduction
		Robert J.C. Young, Dean of Arts & Humanities,NYUAD
		Salwa Mikdadi, NYUAD
		Nada Shabout, AMCA
		Sultan Al Qassemi, BAF
9:45 – 11:00 AM		Panel I: Painting: Questions of the Liminal Space
		Beyond Figuration: Exploring the space between the abstract and the figurative in Marwan’s painting
		Charlotte Bank, University of Geneva
		Sam Francis’s Polycentric Abstraction
		Elizabeth Buhe, NYU
		Discussant:
		Anneka Lenssen, UC Berkeley
		Q&A
11:00 – 11:30 AM		Break & Refreshments
		Atrium
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM		Panel II: Violence of Abstraction
		Clandestine Aesthetics: Abstracted Photography in Wartime Algeria
		Tina Barouti, Boston University
		Part Flesh, Part Data: Permutations of Black Square
		Sandra Skurvida, FIT-SUNY
		Discussant:
		Saleem Al-Bahloly, Forum Transregionale Studien
		Q&A
2:00 – 3:30 PM		PANEL III: Anonymous Modalities
		Understanding abstraction in artistic expressions in contemporary media of the Arabian Gulf
		Maha Al-Saati, University of Dammam, Saudi Arabia
		Speculation and Spectacle: Oil and Modernization in Kuwait
		Michael Kubo, MIT
		Discussant:
		Jessica Gerschultz, University of Kansas
		Q&A
3:20 – 4:00 PM		Break & Refreshments
		Atrium
4:00 – 5:00 PM		Curatorial Tour: Diana al Hadid Exhibition
		Maya Allison,  NYUAD Chief Curator & Director
5:00 – 6:30 PM		Break & Refreshments
		Atrium
6:30 – 8:00 PM		PUBLIC PROGRAM
		NYUAD Conference Center (A6)
		Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee—in Less than 1/24 of a Second
		Jalal Toufic,  Director of the School of Visual Arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA)
		Immediately followed by a public reception
Monday, May 23 | Day 2
9:00 – 9:30 AM		Registration
		Institute Conference Center
		Lecture Hall Foyer
9:30 – 11:00 AM		PANEL IV: Painting: Choosing Abstraction
		Fahrelnissa Zeid Unbound: Inner Necessity and the Articulation of Abstraction with Representation
		Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Independent Scholar
		Abstraction in Saudi Art:  one solution, various situations
		Eiman Elgibreen, The Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabi
		Discussant:
		Nada Shabout, University of North Texas
		Q&A
Tuesday, May 24: DAY 3
		Hosted by Barjeel Art Foundation Al Qasba Theater, Sharjah
9:30:00 AM		Welcome
		Sultan Al Qassemi, BAF
		Nada Shabout, AMCA
10:00  –  11:30 AM		PANEL V: National Narration: Abstraction in Place
		Architecture-Art-Architecture: Constructing Baghdad’s Modernism
		Amin Alsaden, Harvard University
		Abstraction, ‘Iranian Modernism,’ and the Question of Global-Local Art
		Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam, Art University in Tehran
		Abstraction: Modernization Challenged, Representation Dismantled
		Ilhan Ozan, Research and Programs at SALT, Istanbul
		Discussant:
		Salwa Mikdadi, NYUAD
		Q & A
11:30 – 11:50 AM		Break & Refreshments
		Al Qasabah Theater, Sharjah
11:50 – 1:00 PM		PANEL VI: Abstraction in Performance
		Dialogical Abstraction in Halim El-Dabh’s Expression of Zaar (1944)
		Delinda Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
		Generative abstraction in the media artworks of Mounir Fatmi and Arthur Jafa
		Laura Marks, Simon Fraser University
		Discussant:
		Anneka Lenssen, UC Berkeley
		Q & A
6:30-7:45 PM		Unconference: Abstraction Unframed
		Sharjah Art Museum

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