Department: Tate Modern Curatorial
Hosts: Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator, International Art, and Bilal Akkouche, Assistant Curator, International Art
During their Fellowship, Sheyda engaged in various curatorial activities, carrying out research for a major retrospective exhibition and co-curating and producing written content and interpretations for the collection display, The Shape of Words.
The display, which opened at Tate Modern in October 2024, explores artistic experiments involving text and abstraction, shared by artists whose paths intersected across North Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
To facilitate further exploration and discussions of the thematic remit of The Shape of Words, Sheyda convened Rethinking Modernism in North Africa and the Arab World at the Starr Cinema, Tate Modern, on 20 November 2024. The symposium gathered an international panel of speakers to unpack histories through a regional lens across northern Africa and the Arab world, reassessing and complicating our understanding of what constitutes aesthetic modernism.
Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz during the lecture performance, ‘Chasing Horizons or Discovering New Old Things’ at Delfina Foundation Open Studios, Spirits Searching for Forms to Settle in, 27 November 2024. Photo © Anne Tetzlaff.
Biography
Sheyda is an artist, curator, poet and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, specialising in modern and contemporary art from the north of Africa. Their doctoral dissertation, ‘Indigenous Presentness: Translocal Politics of Amazigh Art and Resistance’, focuses on the manifold expressions of indigeneity and Indigenous philosophies in art and explores the nexus between Amazigh artistic expression and sovereignty movements across the Indigenous territories known as Tamazgha.
Sheyda is the 2023 recipient of the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, awarded by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA), and the 2022 Mark Tessler Graduate Student Prize Award, awarded by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). In 2023 Sheyda completed a curatorial research fellowship in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
They are a founding member of the curatorial collective and independent press Lungs Project, which has been operating since 2016 between the United Kingdom and the United States, promoting a cross-disciplinary dialogue among early-career artists and writers.