Performative Preservation
with MIT’s Dr. Azra Akšamija

TALK

Performative Preservation
with MIT’s Dr. Azra Akšamija

Date: Tue, May 14, 2019 07:00PM
Price: $20, $18 Friends and $12 students and seniors
Includes same-day Museum admission (redeem at Ticket Desk)

Buy all four Changemakers Talks for $60

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Join us for a talk exploring bold new creative responses to humanitarian crises with artist and scholar Dr. Azra Akšamija from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Dr. Akšamija works at the intersection of art, design, and technology to co-create projects with communities affected by conflict and crisis — projects that preserve the community’s cultural heritage, identities, and memory, and in turn help restore social structures and living culture.

 

Through a look at past projects, Dr. Akšamija will show how the approach, which she calls Performative Preservation, has worked with refugee women in Bosnia (Monument in Waiting); with communities in the Middle East and North Africa (Memory Matrix); and in her recent work with refugees in the Al Azraq Camp in Jordan.

 

This is the third in our Changemakers Talk series, which delves into the critical conversations of our time. This season we present four exceptional women forging new paths in art and activism. Dr. Akšamija is leading the way in a revolutionary new field with innovative approaches that empower communities and advance outdated narratives.


Bio:

 

Azra Akšamija is an artist and architectural historian, Director of the MIT Future Heritage Lab and an Associate Professor in the MIT Art, Culture and Technology Program. Akšamija investigates the politics of identity and cultural memory on the scale of the body (clothing and wearable technologies), on the civic scale (religious architecture and cultural institutions), and within the context of history and globalization. Her work has been published and exhibited worldwide in leading venues such as the Royal Academy of Arts London, Museums of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Belgrade and Ljubljana, and Sculpture Center New York. She is the recipient of the 2013 Aga Khan Award for Architecture for her design of the prayer space in the Islamic Cemetery Altach, Austria.



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