In Conversation: Sophia Al-Maria and Arbella Bet-Shlimon

Join us for an evening with artist Sophia Al-Maria in conversation with University of Washington Williams Family Endowed Associate Professor in History, Arbella Bet-Shlimon. Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker whose current Henry exhibition, Not My Bag, interrogates histories of colonial authority in contemporary culture. Bet-Shlimon’s teaching and research focuses on the politics, society, and economy of twentieth-century Iraq and the broader Persian Gulf region, as well as Middle Eastern urban history.

Through sharing of personal stories and literary, journalistic, and scholarly references that have been crucial to their work, Al-Maria and Bet-Shlimon will explore how historical fiction and a critical study of histories can be acts of dissent while looking toward global social change.

Sophia Al-Maria has had solo exhibitions at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar; the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; the Tate Britain, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among other institutions. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; LUMA Arles, France; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New Museum, New York; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; and numerous other venues. She has been writer in residence at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. She is the author of three books: Sad Sack (Book Works, London, 2019), Virgin with a Memory (Cornerhouse Publications, Manchester, 2014), and The Girl Who Fell to Earth (Harper Perennial, New York, 2012).

Arbella Bet-Shlimon is a historian of the modern Middle East. In her research and teaching she focuses on the politics, society, and economy of twentieth-century Iraq and the broader Persian Gulf region, as well as Middle Eastern urban history. Among others her teaching has been recognized by the UW’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Bet-Shlimon’s first book, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019), explores how oil and urbanization made ethnicity into a political practice in Kirkuk, a multilingual city that was the original hub of Iraq’s oil industry.