Ghalya Saadawi

Ghalya Saadawi is adjunct lecturer at the American University of Beirut where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art theory, and on art in Lebanon after 1990. She recently completed a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London in sociology titled Rethinking the Witness: Art after the Lebanese Wars. Her dissertation was suspicious of potting artist practices under the rubrics of ‘post-war’ or ‘contemporary art’, preferring to underscore particular aesthetic tactics, theoretical considerations and historical entanglements that she argued informed a rethinking of representation and ideology at the declared end of the civil wars / Cold War. Some of her essays and reviews have appeared in Bidoun, Frieze, Third Text, Jadaliyya among other publications and artist monographs. In 2012-13 she wrote and performed the walking tour in Beirut, After the Future Heritage Redux (2080). Saadawi is currently artistic director of Ashkal Alwan’s art study program, the Home Workspace Program, and co-editor with Mirene Arsanios and Iman Mersal of Makhzin, a nascent, bi-lingual literary magazine founded by Arsanios. She lives in Beirut.