In this talk, artist and architect Abeer Seikaly sheds light on her journey of research and experimentation to challenge the currently dominant structural forms in modern architecture. Her work aims to synthesize traditional building practices with contemporary design processes. Through ethnographic research and a forward-looking approach to placemaking, her instinctive experimentation with local and natural materials and resources generates new cultural forms and material experiences that reinforce the environmental rootedness of indigenous knowledge and practices.
Abeer discusses the cultural significance of repurposing and reappropriating as a necessary precursor to advancing new, more sustainable modes of architectural production and design. The artist will showcase several of her projects and the different phases of their development over the years, including Matters of Time (2019) and Thabit: Building For Future Generations (2022) - currently on display as part of the exhibition Re-rooting.
The talk is in English.
Abeer Seikaly is a Jordanian-Palestinian interdisciplinary artist, architect, designer, and cultural producer. Her practice is deeply rooted in acts of memory: journaling, documenting, archiving, and collecting. She views her practice as a social technology for cultural empowerment. Her recent works center on indigenous Bedouin knowledge and practices to recover the intimacy of handmaking—lost in today’s production. She has been regularly travelling to Jordan’s Badia (desert), where she engages in Bedouin women’s craftsmanship of tent making and textile weaving.
Abeer won the Lexus Design Award, for her ongoing work, Weaving a Home. She is the co-founder of Amman Design Week. She established ālmamar, a cultural experience and residency program in Amman, Jordan. Yale University awarded Abeer an endowed professorship. She was appointed as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture.
Her works have been exhibited at many institutions: Science Museum, London (2022); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2022); The Miyake Issey Foundation, Tokyo (2021); Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2020); Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016). Her works are in private and public collections: Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan, Amman; and Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.