Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, columnist on Arab affairs, MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, and Founder of Barjeel Art Foundation, took the main stage at STEP2016 to talk about the increasingly important role of technology as a platform to disseminate art from the Arab world and the challenges that come along such as censorship and the lack of intellectual property protection, and what Barjeel Art Foundation has been doing to introduce art from the MENA region to the world. Read more »
Arts & Culture
Mona Hatoum: The First Contemporary Arab Artist?
Attempting to pinpoint a specific date in which modern Arab art gave way to the contemporary is bound to raise more questions than answers. I propose that Arab contemporary art timeframe begins with artists who have come of age in the decade between the early 1980s and the early 1990s due to their general readiness to adopt the latest technologies and concepts in their work. In my opinion the artist that best embodies this definition is Beirut born British-Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. Read more »
“A sliver of history”: Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi and Suheyla Takesh on Barjeel Art Foundation
In this interview, Art Radar speaks with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi and curator Suheyla Takesh to learn the story behind the Barjeel Art Foundation’s most “iconic” masterpiece and one of the organisation’s most recent acquisitions. Read more »
Why the Arab world must embrace placing art online
Unfortunately, many collectors in the Arab world shy away from placing their art collection online. But art institutions and collectors in the Arab world need to make a giant leap into the present day and invest in creating online portals for the region’s art. We can all play a part in countering the negative narrative of extremists in the region by virtually displaying our arts and culture. Read more »
BBC interview with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi on Arab art
Interview with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi on Barjeel Art Foundation’s year-long exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery with BBC’s Yalda Hakim. Read more »
Is Islamic Art Going Mainstream?
At GIES 2015, Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi discusses the global relevance of Islamic art. Read more »