RAP Grantees (2020)

The AFAC-ACSS research grant is a funding opportunity that aims to support research on all art practices across disciplinary boundaries and methodological approaches on key themes of concern to, and in, the Arab region.

This program is funded by AFAC and the ACSS (funds to the ACSS are provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Grants are available to individual researchers (up to USD 15,000), teams of researchers or collectives (up to USD 25,000), and institutions (up to USD 35,000).

Grants are for the duration of 18 months for individuals, teams and collectives (starting February 2021 and ending July 2022) and for up to 24 months for institutions (starting February 2021 and ending February 2023).

A multi-disciplinary Selection Committee convened in a two-day virtual jury meeting on December 8 and 9, 2020 to deliberate and evaluate the research proposals in order to select the winning projects. Commenting on this cycle and the applications pool, the jurors issued the following statement:

The jury members read applications that engaged with virtually all art forms and all fields of the humanities and social sciences. The projects came from all parts of the Arab region, with special concentration in Egypt and Morocco. It was instructive to receive applications from candidates of different generations and get a sense of where research in the region is headed. We were very pleased by the specificity of many projects, which presented a sound and precise framework.

We noticed an overwhelming interest in archiving and processes of documentation, in relation to handicrafts, musical traditions and other modes of cultural expression. Clearly, this points to a sense of impending loss felt by many artists and scholars when it comes to certain forms of art or social practices considered as “traditional”. While such impulses are understandable and welcome, we wish to highlight the importance of complicating documentation to go beyond archiving for archives’ sake and viewing it exclusively from the point of view of a lack that needs to be filled. Often, these approaches overlook the crucial step of analyzing how that sense of lack was produced in the first place. Hence, they end up perpetuating it. We encourage all current and future applicants to approach archiving with a critical eye.

Many projects involve fieldwork and close interactions with communities. From an ethical point of view, it seems crucial to stress the importance of listening to these communities and engaging with them as a fundamental component of the research, from beginning to end, in order to avoid two frequent pitfalls: 1/ treating community members as mere informants and producing knowledge that never returns to the community; 2/ producing knowledge according to pre-established categories instead of letting the field guide the theorization/taxonomy.

Overall, we were impressed by the quality and the variety of the projects, and by the readiness of many researchers to think with art and to learn through art, to approach art as a way of understanding the world rather than as a mere object of study. This appears most clearly in the passion and enthusiasm of some of the projects presented by applicants who do not shy away from proposing new methodologies that will, in time, hopefully redefine what we understand by “research on the arts”.

The eleven research projects selected by the RAP jurors hail from Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and cover an array of topics ranging from documentation and archiving, to mapping, in addition to feminist re-writing of history of cinema, and interdisciplinary research among others. 

Research on the Arts Program: Grantees of the Third Cycle (2020)

• “The Missing Centuries: Qur’an Manuscripts from the Central and Eastern Islamic Lands c. 950-1250 CE” by Alya Karame (Lebanon)
• “Zaghareed” by Sally Mohammed Ahmed Shalabi (Jordan)
• “Documenting the History of the Contemporary Palestinian Theatre Movement 1967-Present: The Cases of Adel Tartir, Balalin Group and Sandouq El-Ajab Theatre” by Alaa Tartir (Palestine)
• “Phoenix of Mesopotamia: Revitalising the Boatbuilding Heritage of Southern Iraq as a Living Art Form” by Jaafar Jotheri (Iraq)
• “Nafas: An Egyptian Literary Cookbook” by Randa Aboubakr (Egypt)
• “Arabic Cover Design Archive” by Mahmoud Elhossieny Mohamed Said Ahmed (Egypt)
• “The Theatrical Learning Season” by Damascus Theater Lab (Syria)
• “The Absent Map: Rural Jerusalem in an Alternative Narrative” by RIWAQ – Centre for Architectural Conservation (Palestine)
• “Cartography of Darkness” by The Society of False Witnesses (Lebanon)
• “Femme… Arabe… Et Cinéaste” by Touda Bouanani (Morocco)
• “Arabic/Latin Bilingual Book Structures” by Yara Khoury Nammour (Lebanon)

Selection Committee:

• Alia Moussallam, EUME fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, Germany

Alia Mossallam is interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. She is currently a EUME fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, writing a book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it. As a visiting Scholar at the Lautarchiv, she has also started a new project tracing the experiences of Egyptian and North African workers on the various fronts of World War I through the songs and memoires that recount their struggles. Some of her writings can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Jadaliyya, Ma’azif, Bidayat and Mada Masr. She has tried her hand at playwriting with David Grieg, Hassan El-Geretly, Laila Soliman and written her first short-story “Rawi” with 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh”, as well as having taught at the American University in Cairo, CILAS, and the Freie Universität in Berlin.

• Aseel Sawalha, associate professor of Anthropology at Fordham University, USA

Aseel Sawalhais an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Co-Director of Women Gender and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University. Her research interests include: Urban anthropology, arts, gender, critical social theory, war and violence, globalization. In 2010, Dr. Sawalha published her book titled “Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City with University of Texas Press, Austin. Currently, she is completing a book about the emerging art scene Amman and the way it is shaped by the changes by regional and international geopolitics, refugees flow, and women’s agency.  

• Kirsten Scheid, associate professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Kirsten Scheid is an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at American University of Beirut. She earned her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University and her BA in Art History from Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests are the Anthropology of Art, Aesthetics, Art Historiography and Theory, Modernization and Cosmopolitanism, Affect, and Elites. She has conducted field and archival research since 1992 in Lebanon and Palestine. In 2009, Kirsten was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, with its research program, “Europe in the Middle East, the Middle East in Europe.” Her research has been supported by the Palestinian American Research Center, the Barakat Trust, and the Issam Fares Institute. Kirsten has also contributed extensively to the art community, curating, exhibiting, writing in art journals and popular media, and founding both a cultural resource center and an Arabic children’s books line.

• Omar Berrada, writer and curator currently teaching at The Cooper Union, USA

A writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. Previously, he organized public programs at Centre Pompidou and hosted shows on French national radio. His work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He has curated exhibitions in Rabat, Marrakech, Rotterdam, Berlin, Dubai, and New York. Omar is the author of Clonal Hum, a book of poems on “invasive species” (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Album – Cinémathèque de Tanger, a multilingual volume about film in Tangier and Tangier on film (2012), The Africans, a book on migration and racial politics in Morocco (2016), and Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous history of Moroccan cinema, La Septième Porte (2020). His writing was published in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, and The University of California Book of North African Literature. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.

• Tarek El Ariss, professor and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College, USA

Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. His work examines notions of modernity, nation, community, and technology  in Arabic literature, culture, media, and art. His books include Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (2013), The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (2018), and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (2019).