Study Session: Sara Raza + Ruba Katrib

How can artists and curators leverage the power of non-conformity in their contemporary practice to influence the world outside their galleries? Curator Sara Raza, curatorial assistant Anna Cahn and MoMA PS1 curator Ruba Katrib facilitate a discussion about challenging power and position as a curatorial and artistic framework.

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

Ruba Katrib is the curator at MoMA PS1 in New York. At MoMA PS1 she has curated exhibitions such as the retrospective of Simone Fattal in 2019 and the solo shows of Edgar Heap of Birds (2019), Karrabing Collective (2019), Fernando Palma Rodríguez, and Julia Phillips (2018). From 2012″“2018 she was curator at SculptureCenter in New York where she curated over 20 solo and group exhibitions including 74 million million million tons (2018) (co-curated with artist Lawrence Abu-Hamdan), The Eccentrics (2015), Puddle, pothole, portal (2014) (co-curated with artist Camille Henrot), Better Homes (2013), and A Disagreeable Object (2012).Katrib was the associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami from 2007″“2012. She was also co-founder of the residency and exhibition space Threewalls in Chicago, and she has held positions at the Renaissance Society and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where she currently serves on the Graduate Committee. She was a research advisor for the 2018 Carnegie Internationaland a member of the Advisory Board for Recess, a nonprofit artist residency and exhibition space in New York. Katrib was one of the curators of SITE Santa Fe’s 2018 biennial, Casa Tomada, along with José Luis Blondet and Candice Hopkins.

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.