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Abdellah Karroum, the director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, in conversation with Jessica Winegar, Professor of Anthropology and Middle East & North African Studies at Northwestern

This is the third and final in a series of events with Abdellah Karroum that MENA is pleased to present in partnership with the Block Museum of Art and the Department of Art History, with the support of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. The first two events:

Visual Vanguard: Abdellah Karroum - Generation 00: Artists As Citizens
Thursday, February 23, 6:00 PM, Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston

Generation 00: Cultural Practices before the Middle East Uprisings - Colloquium with Abdellah Karroum
Saturday, February 25, 10AM – 3PM, Alumni Center, 1800 Sheridan Road, Evanston

The first two events are open to the general public. The third is designed for Northwestern students and faculty.

Abdellah Karroum is the director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, which explores and celebrates art by Arab artists and offers an Arab perspective on international modern and contemporary art. He is also the founder and artistic director of L’appartement 22, an experimental collaborative space for exhibitions and artists’ residencies in Rabat, Morocco.

Born in Morocco, Abdellah Karroum has more than 20 years of experience in the art sector organizing and curating numerous international exhibitions and programs for various institutions in different countries. Most recently, he was Associate Curator of the 2012 Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Curator of the 2012 Benin Biennial. In 2012, he was appointed Artistic Director of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco’s International Prize for Contemporary Art.

Between 1993 and 1996, he served as the Assistant Curator at the CAPC Museum of Contemporary art in Bordeaux, France. He has been Associate Curator for various international art biennials, including Dakar 2006, Gwangju 2008, and Associate Director of the Marrakech Biennial in 2007 as well as the Artistic Director ot the Marrakech Biennial in 2009. He also launched R22 radio in 2007, an experimental online radio and a platform for hosting projects.

In 2000, Karroum initiated Le Bout du Monde art expeditions with artists and researchers in several continents. He was also the creator of Curatorial Delegation, a methodology for collective artistic projects. He founded the research laboratory Art, Technologie et Ecologie at ESAV (Film School in Marrakech) and other art places in Morocco and remains its director.

Jessica Winegar is Professor of Anthropology and a core faculty member of the MENA Program at Northwestern. She is the author of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt, an ethnographic study of the intense debates over cultural authenticity and artistic value that occur in a postcolonial society undergoing market liberalization. It examines how cultural elites reckon with the legacies of colonialism, socialism, and modernism in order to produce meaningful, yet competing, versions of national and elite visual culture in a context where “culture” itself is becoming increasingly globalized and commodified.