Graduate Student Talk Nisa Ari

Take a look at the List’s exhibitions from a new perspective. Join us to discover Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space through this interdisciplinary gallery talk, led by a member of the MIT graduate student community. 

This talk will be led by Nisa Ari, a current PhD candidate the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT. She studies late-19th and 20th century visual practices, with a focus on artwork from the Middle East. Her research explores the relationships between cultural politics and the development of art institutions, specifically in Palestine and in Turkey. Her dissertation is provisionally titled “Cultural Mandates: On Art and Political Parity in Early Twentieth Century Palestine.” Recently, she has written on photography during the British Mandate in Palestine, military painting practices in the late Ottoman Empire, non-profit art institutions in Turkey in the early 2000s, and on the histories and theories of “alternative” art spaces. Nisa received a B.A. with honors in art history from Stanford University and worked in contemporary art centers in New York before starting her doctoral degree. With fellow graduate student Christianna Bonin, she is currently editing the MIT Department of Architecture’s peer-reviewed journal, Thresholds.