Conferences and Colloquia
Akkasah regularly hosts conferences and colloquia. These gatherings of international scholars, archivists and practitioners are intended to encourage and develop new scholarly research. They focus in particular on topics either directly related to photography in the Middle East and North Africa, or to photography in its cross-cultural and transnational aspects. Some of the scholarly events have been organized in collaboration with other institutions and Akkasah welcomes collaborative projects.
Photo Archives VII: The Majority World Conference
Conference Villa La Pietra, New York University Florence
24-25 October 2019
The archive has become an object of sustained historical and theoretical investigation in recent years. The anthropological turn in photographic criticism has opened up new directions for the analysis and understanding of photo archives that compliment and dialogue with more traditional Art Historical approaches focused on photographs as images; it has helped direct this growing interest towards the materiality of the photograph as object, and its social and institutional lives that unfold very often within the archival ecosystem. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of scholars, artists and curators are addressing the neglected histories and practices of photography beyond the borders of Europe and North America. This conference aims to build upon these developments and reorientations, and to attend to issues of critical importance for photo archives from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Oceania—from the part of the world that Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Ahlam has so aptly referred to as the “majority world.” The conference will be the seventh in the series “Photo Archives,” a series that helped over a number of years to establish an international network of photo archive scholars and archive professionals, and to stimulate a dialogue between academics and archivists. We invite in particular papers that engage with the historical, social, institutional and theoretical aspects of photo archives in conceptually and critically innovative ways, and that move beyond primarily descriptive accounts of the evolution or contents of particular archives, or a restricted preoccupation with archiving technologies and procedures. Both focused case studies and papers of broader theoretical and cultural scope are encouraged as are diversity of critical approaches and disciplinary range. We hope the conference will provide a meeting place for a truly international community for individuals and institutions committed not only to a better understanding of photo archives, but to exploring their epistemological potentials and to developing international dialogues and strategies that can ensure sustainable and creative futures for these archives.
Photographic Archives in the UAE
Colloquium NYUAD Saadiyat Campus, Conference Center, Abu Dhabi, UAE
October 21, 2015
This colloquium aims to develop conversations and collaborations among various public archives, institutional archives, and private collections devoted to photography or containing substantial photographic holdings. Presentations on the archives are followed by a round-table discussion that explores ways in which UAE institutions and individuals might work together to develop greater interest in, and understanding of, the role of photography in the history and culture of the UAE.
Photography and Human Rights
Colloquium 19 Washington Square North – NYU Abu Dhabi, New York
April 4, 2016
Human rights photography has pursued an ethics and a practice for photography that distinguishes it from much of social documentary photography and photojournalism. It has focused not only on wars, political upheavals and environmental catastrophes but also increasingly on issues of health, gender, work and education in their local dimensions. This colloquium and workshop will explore the history, theory and practice of human rights photography by bringing together a distinguished group of international scholars and practicing photographers.
The Family of Man in the 21st Century: Reassessing an Epochal Exhibition
Conference Clervaux Castle, Clervaux, Luxembourg
June 19 – 20, 2015
The conference sought to reassess and discuss the exhibition’s appeal and message, launched against the backdrop of the Cold War threat of atomic annihilation. It also indicated new ways in which the exhibition, as an artistic response to a historical moment of crisis, can remain relevant in the context of 21st-century challenges. The conference offered reconsiderations of the achievement of “The Family of Man” and tried to reassess the potentially radical role of the exhibition in intercultural communication in the historical contexts of both the mid twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
View from the Inside: Contemporary Arab Artists in Conversation
Colloquium NYUAD Saadiyat Campus, Conference Center, Abu Dhabi, UAE
April 15, 2015
This colloquium is organized in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi Festival and FotoFest International within the framework of the exhibition “View from the Inside: Contemporary Arab Photography, Video and Mixed Media Art” (The Gallery, Emirates Palace, March 21-April 20, 2015). The colloquium brings together Arab artists and photographers included in the show to present their work. The panel discussions are followed by the opportunity for the audience to engage in conversation directly with the artists: Hazem Harb, Tammam Azzam, Camille Zakharia, Manal AlDowayan, Khalil Abdul Wahid, Ahmed Jadallah.
Photography’s Shifting Terrain: Emerging Histories & New Practices
Conference NYUAD Saadiyat Campus
March 8-10, 2015
Our understanding of the histories and practices of photography is changing as more and more critical attention is being paid to photographic cultures from outside of Europe and North America, and to new forms and functions emergent in a variety of contemporary social and political contexts. Focusing in particular on the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, this conference brings together scholars, photographers, curators, and archivists from around the world in order to undertake new explorations of photography’s past and present.
