Free and open to the public

Drawing from her recent book Palestine: We Lack for Nothing Here (Palestine rien ne nous manque ici), cultural critic Adila Laidi-Hanieh will discuss the paradoxical vitality of Palestinian culture--literature, visual arts, film, music—its "normalization", and unprecedented access to the international art circuit despite its predominantly political content. Laidi-Hanieh will conceptualize these practices as well as the related paradigms informing them, such as colonialism, post-colonialism and Arab postmodernity.

Adila Laidi-Hanieh is a cultural studies PhD candidate at George Mason University and has taught Palestinian contemporary art and modern Arab intellectual history at Birzeit University. From 1996 to 2005, she ran the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah and curated the 2001 memorial exhibition 100 Shaheed-100 Lives. In 2008, she edited the book Palestine: We Lack for Nothing Here (Palestine: Rien ne nous Manque ici, Cercle d’Art, Paris), a cultural review of contemporary Palestine, which commissioned texts and art work from confirmed and emerging artists, critics, novelists, poets, and visual artists from Palestine and elsewhere.