Curating Jerusalem Actual and Possible: Political Lessons from a non-Euclidean City

Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Kirsten Scheid presents, “Curating Jerusalem Actual and Possible: Political Lessons from a non-Euclidean City.”

Treating an exhibition not as a representation but a “system of action,” reveals how it provides participants with a “critical space,” i.e. a semi-physical, sensorially alter-space. In this lecture, Scheid examines an exhibition she co-curated in 2018 in Jerusalem as a process-space where actors could analyze the bundling of their lives into incomplete concepts, such as “Palestinian” or “Israeli Arab,” or artificially exclusive ideologies, such as “binationalist coexistence” or “nationalist resistance.”

Kirsten Scheid is associate professor of anthropology at the American University of Beirut, where she studies imagination technologies, artistic materialities, and social change specifically through cases of modern and contemporary Arab art. Her essays appear in Anthropology Now, ARTMargins, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Museum Anthropology. She has co-curated “The Jerusalem Show” (Jerusalem, 2018) and “The Arab Nude” (Beirut, 2016), and exhibited at the New Museum (2011), and consulted for the Tate Modern (2014) and the MoMA (2016-8). While the Clark/Oakley fellow, Scheid will complete an historically informed ethnography of aesthetic encounters that comprise contemporary Palestine and point to new political imaginings.