Saadi Nikro

Norman Saadi Nikro is a scholar from Sydney residing in Berlin since 2007, where he is currently a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. He studied critical theory and cultural studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. After completing his doctoral studies in 1998 he took up an Australian Volunteer Abroad placement in Ramallah, Palestine/Israel. He subsequently moved to Beirut in 1999, and in 2007 to Berlin. He was a founding editor of Inklings: A Journal of Words and Images, a Sydney based journal which ran from 1992 to 1998. His books include The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon (2012), and Milieus of ReMemory: Relationalities of Violence, Trauma, and Voice (2019). Among his essays on art and literature, he wrote the text for the art book Oren Eliav: Five Years (2016).

 

 

Nafssiya: Mediating Emotional Distances

In an essay written for Tohu’s special issue, Saadi Nikro writes about souls and breathing, technology, migration, and long-distance relationships. He discusses the work of two Beirut natives – artist Etel Adnan and filmmaker Ahmad Ghossein, and writes about how technologies help us conduct relationships over distances in space and time.

John Berger: The Transformational Pulse Beats of Art

Following a number of recent books by and on John Berger, coinciding with the renowned critic’s passing away in 2017, Norman Saadi Nikro dives into some of Berger’s writings and drawings. He explores the transformational impulses driving Berger’s relational, molecular, and constellation-like approach, and its relevance to today’s world in crisis.

AnArchic Archive: Phenomenal Photographs and Multiple Exposures

In what ways can an archive be regarded as an anarchic practice of collection and circulation? Following his visit to the exhibition Unboxing Photographs: Arbeiten im Fotoarchiv, Saadi Nikro raises some thoughts about the way interventionist archivists, artists, and photographic practitioners work with photographic archives.

 

Returning to Accra: Between Nina Simone, Ama Ata Aidoo, Fassbinder, and the Cockettes

Moving across New York and San Francisco, Paris and Munich, Accra and Lagos, artist and scholar Malik Gaines’s Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible offers a lively and affirmative account of stage, dress, film and television, and music performance. Saadi Nikro reviews Gaines’s recently published book, discussing its many intersections of race, theatricality, subjectivity, and sexuality.

 

Con-Temporary Art

What does the "con" in con-temporary art suggest? Saadi Nikro discusses the theme of con-temporaneity through the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, MUVART and Walid Raad