29 Okt - Clare Davies

Wednesday, 29 October 2014, 5.00 pm - 6.30 pm |
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

From Alexandria to Bandung and Back Again: Transregionalism in Arab Art After 1955


Clare Phyllis Davies
(NYU / Coninx Fellow Forum 2014-15)

Chair:Mohamed Elshahed
(NYU / Art Histories Fellow 2014-15)

Abstract
Clare Davies studies the influence of initiatives aimed at strengthening Afro-Asian and Mediterranean networks of affinity, respectively, on art practice in the Arab world. The Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia took place in April 1955 and the Alexandria Biennale in Egypt was inaugurated in July of the same year. Both events critically informed exhibitions, works of art, and publications identified with a concept “Arab art” (fann ‘arabi) promoted by Arab governments in the 1970s. Davies addresses the ways in which Arab art--a category, which would seem to deliberately exclude a consideration of other regions--engaged transregional frameworks developed in the 1950s and 60s as alternatives to a Eurocentric vision of international artistic modernism. The project builds on her recent research into models of “international” artistic and intellectual exchange developed in Egypt between 1919 and 1939.

Clare Davies is an art historian whose research focuses on the histories of art practice in Egypt and the Arab world, as well as historiographies of non-Western art of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Her recently completed doctoral dissertation explores the ways in which artists, patrons, and art audiences negotiated the parameters of a proposed “modern Egyptian art object” in relation to dominant imaginaries of urban space, colonial- and postcolonial-era cultural politics, the circulation of commodities between European colonial powers and Egypt, and strategic forms of collaborative organization leveraged by and on behalf of artists. Davies majored in Rhetoric with concentrations in LGBTI studies and art practice at the University of California, Berkeley before receiving an MA in modern and post-war European and American art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2008, and a PhD from the same institution in 2014. As a freelance researcher for CULTNAT, she authored of an index of the historic photographic archive of the Egyptian Geographical Society. She writes regularly for contemporary arts publications.