Saleem Al-Bahloly
(UC Berkeley / EUME Fellow 2014-15)

Chair:Refqa Abu-Remaileh (EUME Fellow 2014-15 of the AvH)

Abstract
As a EUME Fellow, he is working on revising and expanding his dissertation into a book manuscript. In particular, he is looking at a body of drawings, paintings and prints made by the artist Dia Azzawi on the war in Kurdistan in 1974-75 and on the destruction of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon in 1970, 1976 and 1982. He is considering this body of work in relation to other representations of those events, notably that of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency  (UNRWA) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. By looking at the practice of art in relation to the humanitarian discourse of care and the juridical discourse of rights, he is exploring the ways in which the formal possibilities of the artwork offered a different way of thinking about and responding to the condition of statelessness.

Saleem Al-Bahloly has just completed a PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.  He has an A.B., also in Anthropology, from the University of Chicago.  With a focus on the Middle East, his research concerns the other histories of modern art outside the context of its  formation in Europe between the fifteenth and nineteeth centuries. He is in particular interested in  the relation between those other histories and the histories of political violence. His dissertation, “The Freedom of Despair:  Art and Violence in the Middle East, 1941-1979,” examined the establishment of a practice of modern art in Baghdad, in the context of both the public sphere, that had emerged with the new Iraqi state, and a wider cultural revival across the former Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. It traced the development of a particular form of critique in this practice of art as that public sphere was collapsing in the sixties and seventies, a critique that responded to a new kind of violence that was appearing not only in Iraq but across the Arab world.