Weintz Art Lecture Series: Anneka Lenssen

Stanford Department of Art & Art History's J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz Art Lecture Series presents Anneka Lenssen, Associate Professor of Global Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Between My Eyelids: Possibilities for a Discontinuous Global Art History

This talk queries what a global history of art built around recollections of (lost) inter-subjective practices might be able to say and do. It examines in particular the performance work of Lebanese artist Rabbia Sukkarieh, who in 1988 worked with a television cameraman to stage an action wrapping bullet-scarred trees in a “green line” demarcation zone in Beirut. Although a few seconds of footage received an almost immediate airing on Tele Liban as part of a program about artists poised to convey experimental arts into an impending postwar era, subsequent accounts of Sukkarieh’s performance have remained confined to unillustrated speculation about lost histories. This seemed poised to change last year, when a VHS tape of Sukkarieh's appearance on Tele Liban was recovered from a curator’s collection in Abu Dhabi. Yet Sukkarieh herself anticipated its fugitivity. “Third World problems sleep between my eyelids,” she wrote, 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 a global experience of dispossession. In a world constituted in discontinuity, what are the possibilities for bearing witness? Must the historian’s task of recovery be reenvisioned? 

Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds a Toban Family Faculty Fellowship. She is author of the 2020 monograph Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Best Book Prize, 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 lecture series is made possible by a generous grant from J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz.

VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located at 355 Roth Way, in the McMurtry Building of the Stanford campus. Visitor parking is free all day on weekends and after 4 pm on weekdays, except by the Oval. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne Garcia at juggarci [at] stanford.edu (juggarci[at]stanford[dot]edu). This event is free and is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public.

Connect with the Department of Art & Art History! Subscribe to our mailing list and follow us on Instagram and Facebook.