Anneka Lenssen

Anneka Lenssen
Presented with The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the HTC Forum
Part of the MIT Spring 2025 Architecture Lecture Series. 
 

This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and streamed online.

Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. Registration required to attend in-person. Register here or watch the webcast on Youtube.

Who was the cameraperson for Rabbia Sukkarieh's surviving 26 seconds of video documentation of her performance on the green line in Beirut in 1988, involving convincing snipers along the edge of Khorsh Beirut to hold their fire while the artist wrapped the bullet-riddled trees in green fabrics? No one can recall. The pressures of a civil war and forced economic migration have scattered the moment into other formats of perception. In this talk, I offer an account of my attempt to research Sukkarieh's performance work in 1988, a time of siege that presages our current ever expanding wars, through the recovery of a few seconds of footage aired on national television--a site of "untimely collaboration" with the thoughts and visions of others. I explore in particular Sukkarieh's interest in the fugitivity of resistance actions that are spun out to other viewers. “Third World problems sleep between my eyelids,” Sukkarieh wrote in 1988, invoking the discontinuous story-telling of Scheherazade (a feminist hero as well as an Orientalist cliche) as a tactic of survival and a repository of shared experiences of dispossession. In a world constituted by too much documentation of violence, how can artists bear witness? And, under what conditions can an art historian participate in this task?
HTC Forum is made possible with the generosity of Thomas Beischer (PhD 2004)

Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of the 2020 monograph Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press), and co-editor of the 2018 anthology Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This talk is drawn from a recent project, a co-edited volume, Chronicle of the 1980s: Representational Pressures, Departures, and Beginnings in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey, which she just submitted to AUC Press (with 40 collaborators).