Thinking outside the art fair: Rising narratives on gender, site-specificity and postcoloniality in the MENA region

Thinking outside the art fair: Rising narratives on gender, site-specificity and postcoloniality in the MENA region

Independent art critic and curator Nadine Khalil will be in conversation with Dyala Nusseibeh, Abu Dhabi Art (ADA) Director about new curatorial models and artist narratives and artist Hoda Tawakol about her work with the body in relation to the natural world and postcolonial critique.

These are the bios below and pictures attached:

Nadine Khalil is an independent art critic, editor and curator. Her curatorial practice looks at the intersections between performativity and technology. She is currently researching the body as an expanded site of performance, labour and technological embodiment. She is the former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine, Canvas (2017-2020) and Beirut-based urban culture magazines A mag and Bespoke (2010-2016). After a decade-long stint in art publishing, she advises art institutions and non-profits on editorial strategy, content development and publications. She was lead editor of the book, The Arts Center: Building a Performing Arts Community on Saadiyat Island, 2023, published by New York University Abu Dhabi. Her writing can be found in Art Agenda, Art Forum, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Review Asia, Artsy, Broadcast, Brooklyn Rail, Financial Times, Frieze, Ocula and the Women’s Review of Books. She has also authored a series of artist monographs (Paroles d'Artistes) on Lebanese artists Samir Sayegh, Hanibal Srouji and the late filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, and curated video art for European film festivals such as MidEast Cut and the Arab Independent Film Festival.

Dyala Nusseibeh is the Director of Abu Dhabi Art. A Cambridge University graduate, Nusseibeh also completed a Master’s in Contemporary Art from Glasgow University. She began her career at the Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi. As part of the senior management at the Saatchi Gallery, London, she was responsible for the education programme, facilitating art education and championing young talent. Nusseibeh was the Founding Director of the art fair ArtInternational Istanbul from 2012 to 2016, cultivating her expertise in building concepts that reflect regional relevance whilst embracing an international outlook. Over the course of four years, she established it as a leading platform for art collectors to access high-quality art from diverse markets such as Helsinki, Hong Kong, Jeddah, London and San Francisco and grew the fair significantly year-on-year. Nusseibeh joined the Abu Dhabi Art team as Director in 2016 and has, since joining, created key new programmes for the fair that include Beyond: Emerging Artists, the Art + Tech Artist Residency, the Pavilion Prize, Artist Commissions in Heritage Sites and a number of year round exhibitions and events that have further embedded the fair in the dynamic art eco-system of the emirate. The fair has announced its biggest edition to date this year, taking place from 22-26 November in Abu Dhabi.

Hoda Tawakol’s practice is built on the twin pillars of wit and criticality. Her colourful, engaging textile works—collages, sculptures, installations—ripple with vitality while tackling compelling issues of gender and bodily control. At once captivating and disarming, the works spring from a range of media, yet focus largely on the female body, its distortions and transformations across a woman’s life. In a universe of transformation: the body forever hovers between physical and ethereal, reality and abstraction, presence and absence. While her artistic strategy is focused on topics touching on certain cultural practices, patriarchal social structures and the ancient relationship between body and nature; her material mastery is vast. A diversity of unpredictable hand-dyeing techniques—batik, spotting, painting, tie-dye—vivify her textile work. Her sculptures, whether assertively figurative or cryptically morphed, enlist a variety of materials - the braided mesh of the veil, bulbous nylons filled with rice, portraits with blankets and felt - with which she consistently experiments. In 2023, for her first solo institutional exhibition at the Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany, the artist created an installation of large-format textile sculptures transforming the premises into a palm grove – figuratively too as a place of fruitful utopias and of resistance, between sensuality and brutality.

Hoda Tawakol’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries in Germany, including Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, Museum für Neue Kunst in Freiburg, and at the Dortmunder Kunstverein. Internationally, she has shown, among others, at Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Germany and Lebanon, at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, at the Villa Romana in Florence, and at 10th Velada Santa Lucía in Venezuela.

Her work appears in the following collections: The Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation (SHF), Abu Dhabi; The Progressive Art Collection, USA; Huma Kabakci Collection, Turkey, UK; Sammlung Haus N, Germany; Weserburg Collection, Germany, among others.