Curators’ Bios

Tarjama/ Translation Curators

LEEZA AHMADY

Born in Afghanistan and raised as a young teenager in the United States, Ahmady is an independent art curator, educator, and a noted specialist in art from Central Asia. Ahmady has been designing unique gallery spaces all over New York, implementing innovative programs that welcome varied art forms. She is also Director of Asian Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) at Asia Society, an annual citywide event showcasing artists at leading museums and galleries across New York City. She has traveled widely in Centvral Asia as part of her ongoing curatorial project promoting the largely unknown artists of the region in various international art forums, including the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Most recently she curated The Taste Of Others, at Apexart in 2005, The Paradox of Polarity: Contemporary Art from Central Asia at Bose Pacia in 2007, Parable of the Garden: New Media Art from Iran & Central Asia at The College of New Jersey Art Gallery, and I Dream of the Stans at Winkleman Gallery, which traveled to MARTE Museo de Arte de El Salvador in 2008. Ahmady performs and teaches a combination of Afghan and Indian dance practices and is a founding member of two non-profit organizations: NURTURArt Non Profit (USA) and School of Hope (USA/ Afghanistan). She is an advisor to arts organizations in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, and the newly established Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan (CCAA). Her writings have been published in Asia Art Archive, Art Asia Pacific and Flash Art Magazine among other publications.

IFTIKHAR DADI

Iftikhar Dadi is Assistant Professor, Department of History of Art at Cornell University. His research interests include modern South Asian & Middle Eastern art and visual cultures, comparative modernities, and postcolonial theory. His book on modernism in South Asian art is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press in 2010. Recent essays include “Shirin Neshat’s Photographs as Postcolonial Allegories,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2008); “Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Shadows: Spectral Visualities in Karachi’s Public Sphere.” In Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia, ed. Martina Rieker and Kamran Ali (Oxford, 2008); and “Rethinking Calligraphic Modernism.” In Discrepant Abstraction, ed. Kobena Mercer (MIT, 2006). He co-curated with Salah Hassan, Unpacking Europe, an international exhibition of nineteen leading contemporary artists at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2001–2002, accompanied by a major critical reader co-edited with Salah Hassan, Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (Netherlands Architectural Institute, 2001). Iftikhar is also an artist who collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi. They have shown their work in numerous international venues, including 24th Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil; Asia-Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Museum, Australia; Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool, UK; Walker Art Center, Minnesota; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Queens Museum of Art, New York City.

REEM FADDA

Reem Fadda is a Ramallah-based curator and art historian. She was Director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA) between 2005-07 and worked as Academic Director to the International Academy of Art–Palestine, which she helped found in 2006, as part of her approach in broadening the perimeters of curatorial experience towards education. She has cocurated and has been involved in many projects on contemporary topics in the Middle East, especially those pertaining to architecture, space and geopolitics. These include Liminal Spaces 2005-08, and Decolonizing Architecture and Ramallah Syndrome that will be showcased in the Venice Biennial, 2009. She is the author of Palestinian Women Artists: The Land = The Body = The Narrative (2007). Fadda received her MA in Curating from Goldsmiths College and is currently awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, where her research focuses on contemporary aesthetic theory and practice of the Middle East.