Daoud Family Lectureship: “Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950”

Dr. Kirsten Scheid, an associate professor at the American University of Beirut and author of Fantasmic Objects, offers the first English-language monograph of modern art in Lebanon and the first study of Lebanon through art on Thursday, April 11 at 7 p.m. in Towsley Lecture Hall. 

An historical ethnography of “art acts” which played a significant role in founding the nation during French occupation (1920-1950), Fantasmic Objects foregrounds the decolonizing and self-civilizing efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political and pious being.  It thus recontextualizes the art of Lebanon’s recent “postwar period” by closely reading artworks and careers, such as those of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, through the lens of Islamic theories of fantasm that informed twentieth-century civic experimentation.

Sponsored by The Daoud Family Lectureship in Middle Eastern Studies.  Free.  Open to the public.

Posted on Thursday, April 04, 2024 by Linda Clawson (LClawson@albion.edu)