ARP Talks: Alia Nakhli

Resituating artistic practices within a regional historical perspective and within a localized cultural and intellectual history, can create an effective means for better understanding these practices. Regionally, this history remains for the most part as yet unwritten: who today is familiar with the Damascus Festival, or the Biennials of Baghdad, Rabat, or Tripoli? Yet these events date back only to the 1970s, they border on the contemporary. Alia Nakhli has carried out exceptional research on Arab art festivals and biennials in the 1970s and is one of the most qualified historians on the subject.

The Union of Arab Artists, Al-ittihâd al-‘âm lil-fannânîn at-tashkîliyyn al-‘arab, played a leading role in organizing major artistic events, which took the form of biennials, symposia, congresses, and festivals. Hosted by various Arab countries, these events reveal the artistic circulation, and interactions between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean basins that marked the 1970s. These meetings, which have faded from memory and been marginalized in historiography, also interest us for the discourses and narratives produced and presented therein.

Alia Nakhli holds an advanced master’s degree in art history and a degree in film and audiovisual studies from Marc Bloch University, Strasbourg and a Ph.D. in art history from Paris X-Nanterre-la Défense University. She is currently an assistant lecturer in art history at the École Supérieure des Sciences et Technologies du Design, Manouba University, Tunisia.