The Power Plant

Fawz Kabra: Rock the Casbah

Fri Oct 28 2016

12:00 PM – 2:00 PM

FREE with daily Art Toronto admission
$45 multi-day fair pass (allows access to all three Power Talks and all four days of the fair)

Metro Toronto Convention Centre
North Building, Exhibit Hall A & B
255 Front Street West

Fawz Kabra. Photo by Daniel Terna.

In this Power Talk, New York-based curator and writer Fawz Kabra will address the conditions of contemporary art production in the Middle East and its diasporas. With shared histories of colonialism, the rise and fall of Pan-Arab solidarity and efforts of decolonization and social justice; to recent invasions, civil wars, and neoliberal capitalism running alongside proliferating city expansions, erasures, and revitalizations; what does the artist tell us about the limits of representation, the production of histories, and the transformation of landscapes?

Fawz was recently Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Abu Dhabi Project, New York (2014-2016). She curated The Way Things Can Go for the Armory Show Focus: MENAM Symposium, New York (2015), co-curated the BRIC Biennial: Volume I, Downtown Edition at BRIC Arts and Media, Brooklyn (2014), the ArteEast video program at Arts and Culture in Transformative Times, New York (2013), and was curatorial assistant for WS: Paul McCarthy at the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2013). In the United Arab Emirates Fawz was curator of projects at Art Dubai (2014). She co-curated the special project Brief Histories: Winter/Spring 2011 at a pop-up space in Sharjah and Satellite in Dubai (2011), and was curator of public programs at the Cultural Department, TDIC, Abu Dhabi (2008–2011). Fawz earned a MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York (2013) and BFA at Concordia University, Montreal (2004). Since 2012 she has been an editorial correspondent at Ibraaz, the online journal on contemporary visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East.

Co-presented with: