Thinking with Stuart Hall: critical dialogues on art and culture

Curated by Layal Ftouni

Language: English

Thinking with Stuart Hall: critical dialogues on art and culture is an event of roundtable Discussions paying special tribute to the late cultural theorist and sociologist Professor Stuart Hall. As a co-founder of the Birmingham center for contemporary cultural studies and the journal new left review, Stuart Hall’s intellectual trajectory has been a driving force for artistic, cultural, and intellectual production in Britain and beyond.

The event brings together artists, curators, art critics, and academics, from the region and internationally to think with, through, and beyond Stuart hall’s ideas and oeuvre of writings on art, identity and culture. Topics for discussions include: the relationship between aesthetics and politics (anti-racist, anti-colonial, identitarian) in black British and transnational art practices; cultural studies’ belated encounter with gender and sexuality; and de-centering cultural studies: theoretical and philosophical explorations outside and beyond the continent.
Thinking with Stuart Hall is an attempt at cultural translation as an intellectual, political, and aesthetic endeavor that performs and establishes nodes of connectivities and spaces of disjuncture between British cultural studies and the emerging field of Arab cultural studies. It attends to the urgent debate around the place of identity in both black and Arab cultural politics.

The participants: Sonia Boyce, artist, and professor of black art and design, at the University of the arts, London; David Morley, professor of media and communications, goldsmiths university, London; Roshini Kempadoo, artist and reader in digital media, university of east London, Keith Piper, artist and associate professor at Middlesex University, London, Tarik Sabry, reader in media theory at the University of Westminster, Helga Tawil-Souri, associate professor of media, culture, and communication, new york university, and Layal Ftouni, a senior teaching fellow at soas, university of London, Dina Matar, senior lecturer in Arab media and political communications at soas.