This talk centres on the sun as a recurring motif across the visual and literary culture of the Palestinian struggle. Rather than studying it merely as an iconographic trope, it considers how it became the means for artists to use realism not simply to represent social reality, but to imagine its transformation.

The talk is in English.
To register please fill in the form here.

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This event is part of the "Inheriting the “Avant-Garde”: Art History and the Horizons of Liberation" program presented by Natasha Gasparian.

Over the next two months, Natasha Gasparian will present a series of discussions emerging from her research into the art and visual culture of the Palestinian struggle and the wider artistic and intellectual currents that developed around it.

Across these discussions, a recurrent question is addressed: How do we write art history without consigning its object to the past?

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Natasha Gasparian is an art historian, critic, and curator whose work focuses on modern and contemporary art in the Arab world. Based between Oxford and Beirut, she is pursuing a DPhil in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. She is the author of Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El Rayess: The Changing of Horses (Anthem Press, 2020), the first in-depth study of the landmark work The 5th of June (The Changing of Horses) and its critical reception. Her criticism has appeared in ASAP Art, Cultural Politics, and ARTMargins. In 2023, she co-curated the exhibition Je suis inculte ! The Salon d’Automne and the National Canon with Ziad Kiblawi at the Sursock Museum in Beirut.

Image: Ismail Shammout The Sea and Us, 1984. Oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm.