Mohamed Elshahed: Rebellious Things l The SNF Rendez-Vous de l'Institut

People, places, and things, objects, can be seen as rebellious within the confines of rigid institutional structures and narrow definitions of exclusion, symptoms of an unfree world. This talk is anchored around objects collected for an experimental project at the British Museum that expose the limits of museums, authoritarian definitions of heritage, and the ambiguous state of today’s coloniality. These themes permeate other projects by Mohamed Elshahed over the past decade, from installations to acts of rebellious writing, forming a practice that is subtly nonconformist, nomadic and constantly questioning the liminal space between official narratives and personal memories. In this talk Mohamed Elshahed will showcase several accidentally rebellious projects and objects.

Mohamed Elshahed is a writer, curator, and critic of architecture. He is the author of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, 2020) and was the curator of Cairo Modern at New York’s Center for Architecture (October 2021–March 2022). He earned a Masters from MIT’s Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and a PhD from NYU’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies. He is the curator of the British Museum’s Modern Egypt Project and of Modernist Indignation, Egypt’s winning pavilion at the 2018 London Design Biennale. In 2019 Apollo Magazine named him among the 40 influential thinkers and artists in the Middle East. In 2011 he founded Cairobserver, a fluid project with six printed magazines distributed for free to stimulate public debates around issues of architecture, heritage, and urbanism. Mohamed is based in Mexico City.

Learn more about Mohamed: https://ideasimagination.columbia.edu...