Study Session: Sara Raza + Rami Abou-Khalil

What is the role of place when it comes to producing and curating an exhibition? When does the setting for art become part of the art itself? Curator Sara Raza, Curatorial Assistant Anna Cahn, and architect Rami Abou-Khalil discuss rethinking issues of space and place as they relate to site-specific and site-responsive art and curation.

About The Exhibition

Contemplate the power of non-conformity and your own potential for action at Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance. Using the Rubin’s circular architecture to create an immersive, site-specific display, the exhibition examines social, cultural, and political events through local and global lenses, offering unique perspectives from 10 contemporary artists living and working in the United States and around the world—all of whom are grouped together for the first time.

Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance is supported by Rasika and Girish Reddy, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, anonymous, Basha Frost Rubin and Scott Grinsell, Akhoury Foundation, Preethi Krishna and Ram Sundaram, and Sonny and Gita Mehta.

About the Speakers

Rami Abou-Khalil is a Lebanese and Canadian architect currently based in New York, where he is an associate for the architecture, engineering, and urbanism firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Rami is fundamentally interested in architecture’s ability to propel cultural discourse and reveal the stories of the societies that inhabit it.

He is a founding member and leads the New York chapter of Afikra, a salon on Arab arts, culture, and history with chapters in Washington DC, Montreal, London, Beirut, Manama, Amman, and Dubai.

Sara Raza is a writer and curator specializing in contemporary global arts. In 2016, she won the ArtTable New Leadership Award for Women. Recently she was the Guggenheim UBS MAP curator for the Middle East and North Africa, and she curated But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2016), which travelled to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan (2018). Raza has curated exhibitions and projects for international biennials, festivals and museums, including Mathaf, Doha, Qatar; MacKenzie Art Gallery, Canada; Tashkent Biennale, Uzbekistan; Rhizoma (Generation in Waiting), Saudi Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); and Baku Public Art Festival, Azerbaijan (2015). In addition, she has organized a number of exhibitions for Maraya, Sharjah, UAE. Formerly, she was the head of education at YARAT, Azerbaijan; founding curator of Alaan Art Space, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and curator of public programmes at Tate Modern, London. Raza is the West and Central Asia editor for ArtAsiaPacific.

Anna Cahn is a curatorial assistant at the Rubin Museum of Art. She joined the museum in May 2016, contributing to exhibitions such as Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance, A Lost Future: Shezad Dawood, The Otolith Group, and Matti Braun. She was also one of the lead organizers for the Rubin’s performance art series, Refiguring the Future. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, and the Rubin Museum’s Spiral Magazine. Previously she held positions at the City College of New York as an adjunct lecturer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a curatorial intern, and at Stanford University as a summer research fellow. She received her BA from Clark University and an MA in art history with a concentration in museum studies from the City College of New York.