International Curator Talk – Mariam Elnozahy

Join us in conversation with Mariam Elnozahy, who is here with us as part of the FSAS International Curator Residency programme!

15 July, 5pm – 6pm.

“During this talk, I will present three key projects from the past ten years of my practice, each examining how state-scale historical narratives are metabolized and revised on an individual level. In my practice, I often take a historiographical approach to building thematic frameworks and prioritize collective, collaborative work with artists at various stages of conceptualization and production. This collective process generates the discursive conditions for unsettling, then recasting, dominant narratives. The three selected projects I’ve chosen to discuss take different forms: a writing workshop in Cairo, a group exhibition between Uppsala and Oslo, and an architectural restaging in Stockholm. Separated by geography and time, they are linked by a persistent question: how do artists respond when political horizons collapse?”

The talk is free and no booking is required. 

Bio:

Mariam Elnozahy is a curator, researcher, and writer. She currently serves as the Artistic Director of Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden where her program “Sacred Spaces” invites artists to address questions of religion and society. Previously, she ran exhibitions and programs at the Townhouse Gallery for Contemporary Art in Cairo (2016-2020). She has also curated exhibitions in Copenhagen, Oslo, Uppsala, Amsterdam, Jeddah, Basel, and London, exploring histories of globalization, development, and resource extraction. Her project titled “Whose Open Society? Understanding Neoliberalism and the Economics of Artistic Production in the Middle East and former Eastern bloc” was presented at the Kunsthalle Wien, the Warsaw Biennale, and the Matter of Art Biennale in Prague. Her writing has been published in Frieze Magazine, The Markaz Review, Hyperallergic, and MadaMasr. She was in residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, NL from 2022-2023 investigating the archive of Royal Dutch Shell to understand the relationship between arts and extractive industries in the twentieth century. She holds a masters degree from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT.