RTS is excited to host Real Talks with resident artists Dena Al-Adeeb & Kathy Zarur Wednesday, February 21st from 6-8pm PST in person and via Zoom.
125 10th St. Oakland Ca
Meeting ID: 838 0562 0710
Passcode: 435956
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/keJn4hASUQ
Dena Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi born feminist scholar-activist, artist-cultural worker, educator, and mother. Her transdisciplinary research is at the intersection of U.S. imperial war geographies, militarism, and extractive capitalist economies in West Asia with an emphasis on visual, material, and petro-culture of the Arab/Muslim worlds. Dena’s creative practice explores gendered histories and lived experiences of war, refugee narratives and collective memory, affect and embodied survival practices through a decolonial framework. Her artwork takes on varied practices including live art, video art, installation, digital art, photography, text, and activism. She creates performative, relational works, dedicated to participatory art, socially engaged projects, collaborative engagement and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work appears in a diversity of publications and shown internationally in spaces ranging from national museums to abandoned buildings. She is a recipient of numerus awards including a Mellon Artist and Practitioner fellowship at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration as well as the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has undertaken many academic research positions throughout her career including her role as Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg. She has taught at New York University, Pratt Institute, San Francisco State University, and Expression College for Digital Arts. Dena holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Culture and Representation, from New York University, M.A. in Sociology-Anthropology from the American University in Cairo, and a B.A. in International Relations from San Francisco State University. Dena curates DIWAN: SWANA Futurisms and is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and HEKLER Collective. After completing her residency at Real Time & Space, she will be a resident artist with CULTURE HUB; Dresher Ensemble; and ARAB.AMP.
Kathy Zarur is an educator and culture worker in San Francisco. Through courses, exhibitions, and conferences, she seeks to highlight artists and histories that have historically been sidelined. Preferring metaphor over representation, her approach to exhibition making centers around place to explore topics including belonging, identity, and the landscape. Previously at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, she was an assistant curator and producer of live art. More recently as an independent curator, she has created exhibitions for the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco Arts Commission, Minnesota Street Project, and SOMArts. She has organized conferences with San Francisco State University at the de Young and Asian Art Museum. Her writings and editorial work appear in Art in America, Broadsheet, and a Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts publication with Sternberg Press. She is Associate Professor of Art History at Skyline College, Fellow of Modern and Contemporary South West Asian and North African art at Smarthistory.org, and a board member of Arab.AMP. Kathy has a PhD in Art History and a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan.