Critical Distance DIRECTORY Amin Alsaden

Amin Alsaden is a curator, scholar, and educator whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries. His curatorial practice is committed to advancing social justice through the arts, and to disseminating more inclusive narratives that decenter existing canons and challenge hegemonic epistemological and power structures. His exhibitions invariably raise questions concerning the interrelated domains of geography, colonialism, extraction, organized violence, and displacement.

Alsaden’s research explores the history and theory of modern and contemporary art and architecture globally, with specific expertise in the Arab-Muslim world and its diasporas. He studies constructions and perception of space; historiography, endangered heritage, and archives; language and calligraphic forms; museological and exhibitionary practices; impact of warfare and militarization on the environment; Orientalism and representational tropes; monumentality, commemoration, and the public sphere. Modernism in post-World War II Baghdad, Iraq, is a long-term project.

Alsaden holds graduate degrees from Harvard and Princeton, and has taught at several institutions, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, offering classes on non-Western modernisms, critical discourses, and syntheses across art, architecture, and urbanism, among other topics. He regularly serves as an invited lecturer, critic, and jury member at art, curatorial, and design programs.

Banner Image: “Distilled Lessons: Abstraction in Arab Modernism,” Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, 2023. Photo: Qatar Museums.