Deen Sharp in Artscope Magazine

Terreform co-director, Deen Sharp, was featured in Artscope Magazine May/June 2019 issue: “Making Connections with Julie Mehretu”.

….Sharp made the opening remarks and introduced the panel. Each panelist was tasked with responding to Mehretu’s two artworks inspired by the Arab Spring: “Mogamma,” a huge four-piece work produced during the early days of the Tahrir uprising that forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down and “Epigraph, Damascus,” a six-panel reaction to the Syrian Revolution in its fourth year of mortal struggle against the ruthless regime of Bashar al-Assad. Sharp’s talk “Marking Moments: The Actually Existing Third Space of Julie Mehretu” traced the progression of Mehretu’s work in “Mogamma,” “Cairo” and “Damascus, Epigraph.” He outlined how her marks documenting the uprisings shifted to marks making meaning out of the social chaos. “Mehretu … illuminates how we can see outwards by looking within; how tensions, contradictions and difference can exist together; how absences can create the most powerful presence; how the smallest mark can be the deepest,” said Sharp >> PDF

Thread on some number of books, events and people Deen turned for his introduction.

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Early on in the process of putting together Beyond the Square, Deen had approached Julie Mehretu about including her work on Egypt–specifically, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012) and Cairo (2013). Asking her felt like a long shot so we were both over the moon when she agreed to be involved. (Co-editor Claire Panetta in Jadaliyya).

Beyond The Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprising (Urban Research 05) Edited by Deen Sharp and Claire Panetta. With contributions from Khaled Adham; Susana Galán; Azam Khatam; C. Lanthier; Ed McAllister; Julie Mehretu; G. Ollamh; Duygu Parmaksizoglu; Aseel Sawalha; Helga Tawil-Souri. Cover art courtesy of Julie Mehretu, Marian Goodman Gallery. Cover design by Isaac Gertman / The Independent Group.

Symposium at MIT organized by Nasser Rabbat and Deen Sharp

On May 10-11, MIT will host a symposium “Reconstruction as Violence: The Case of Aleppo”. Organized by Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor, and Deen Sharp, AKPIA@MIT Post-Doctoral Fellow and Terreform co-director, participants will tackle the following questions:

How do violence and conflict not only destroy but constitute, design, and organize the built environments and infrastructure? How do we understand the urbanization of warfare in relation to urban theory and reconstruction practices? Finally, participants will be asked to consider the recent warfare in the Middle East, with a special focus on Aleppo, in relation to the built environment and the extent to which reconstruction processes can be weaponized?

The event is sponsored by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It will be held at MIT Room 6-120

UPDATE LIVESTREAM: May 10 2:30p The opening will be live-streamed on https://www.facebook.com/AKPIAatMIT/

Download the program. Cover photo by Sergey Ponomarev.

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