Artist Talk with Victor Ehikhamenor, GUQ Artist-in-Residence

This conversation was moderated by Dr. Safwan Masri, Dean of Georgetown University in Qatar.

In our effort to offer both academic and artistic perspectives related to energy, Georgetown University in Qatar offered its first artist-in-residence position to Victor Ehikhamenor, a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary visual artist and writer known for his vibrant and incisive works that engage with energy humanities and postcolonial politics. This is an innovative appointment driven by our commitment to foster meaningful connections between art and the humanities–whether in the curriculum, in research, or in practice–and to create opportunities for our community to engage with art on a daily basis. Over a two-week period, Ehikhamenor created the original artwork For Those Who Slept in the Dark with Identifiable Ghosts, which was exhibited at GUQ’s “Global Energy Cultures” forum in Msheireb Museums. 

Artist Talk with Daniel Crawford, Research Scientist, University of Alaska – Anchorage (music composed in 2015, updated 2023, using scientific data)

Planetary Bands, Warming World was composed using scientific data from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, GISSTEMP v4). This is a composition for string quartet in which the notes played by each instrument directly correspond to the annual temperatures of 4 discrete “bands” of the Northern Hemisphere dating back to 1880 C.E. The pitches played by the violins represent the northernmost regions of our planet, while the viola and cello respectively “perform” the temperatures of regions closer to the equator. Scientists have been sounding the alarm about the climate crisis for decades, yet the skepticism that remains in the public and among policymakers suggests that new avenues of communication are needed. Climate scientists have typically relied on maps, graphs, and raw numbers to reach the public, so here we present a “sonification” of the global temperature series to present the scope, geography, and urgency of climate change in a different way: through music! We often think of the sciences and the arts as completely separate—almost like opposites—but using music to share these data is just as scientifically valid as plotting lines on a graph. Listening to the violin climb almost the entire range of the instrument is incredibly effective at illustrating the magnitude of change—particularly in the Arctic which has warmed more than any other part of the planet.

Musicians: Doha String Quartet, Members of Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra:

The Music Program:

Performance Details: Sunday, December 10, 2023, 4:45pm-6:00pm, open courtyard, Mohammed bin Jassem House, Msheireb Museums.

This panel addresses the colonial legacies of the spatial and historical development of energy systems in the Global South, with a particular focus on Palestine, while foregrounding ecopolitical visions of “taking back power” and making energy justice an essential element of the decolonial project.

Artist Talk with Omar El Akkad, author and journalist

This artist talk was moderated by Sheetal Majithia is assistant professor of literature and creative writing at NYUAD.

The start of Omar's journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for Young Journalists. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. His new novel, What Strange Paradise, was released in July, 2021 was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR and several other publications.

Sheetal Majithia is assistant professor of literature and creative writing at NYUAD and co-lead of the Elements in the Anthropocene: Urbanism, the Environment, and Sustainability Research Kitchen, Division of Arts & Humanities Kitchen. Her book-in-progress examines secular modernity in contemporary Indian culture, including how conceived notions of progress are challenged by the Anthropocene. Her research appears in SAMAR, Modern Drama, and South Asian Review and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Artist Talk with Ziad Abu Rish, Bard College.

This conversation was moderated by Katia Arfara, NYU Abu Dhabi.

Aligning with Msheireb’s “Kahraba street” and Doha’s histories of electricity, Tania El Khoury, an artist, and Ziad Abu Rish, a historian, created this experiential exhibition about the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into the intersection between public utilities infrastructure, people’s relationship to the state, and various popular mobilizations to shape both. The Search for Power is a sound installation of a lecture performance featuring the artist, the historian, and the audience.

On a night with a sudden electricity outage in their Beirut neighborhood, the artist and her historian husband discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War, the artist had grown up with the understanding that the problem with electricity in Lebanon began during the war. The historian, however, recalled finding a government document dated 1952 that announced scheduled electricity outages across Beirut. The two decided to research the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into the intersection between public utilities infrastructure, people’s relationship to the state, and various popular mobilizations to shape both. In time, they reach as far back as the introduction of electricity in Beirut before it was even possible to imagine a Lebanese state. In space, they collect documents across Lebanon and beyond its borders, visiting the archives of colonial powers: Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. What they find is a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the machinations of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance, survival, and sabotage. 

Artist Talk with Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter.

This conversation was moderated by Vicky Googasian, Georgetown University in Qatar.

I Can Only See Shadows is a three-channel video set in a troposphere awash in the byproducts of drilling, digging, fracking, cracking, and burning carbon-based fuels. Clouds of dusty molecules increasingly fill the air, irritating the nose and clogging particle filters: material records of energy histories. Weaving together narratives provided by artists, anthropologists, researchers in the “energy humanities,” and environmental activists, the video projects a parallel world where liquid fossil fuels have been replaced by a new, dominant global energy source: untethered carbon particulate, which doubles as a medium for communication. The sparsely populated world, slowed by the sleepily violent interference of dust, envisions new forms of neoliberal labor where tiny particles are captured, scrutinized, and collected as data. Amidst such an atmosphere, what new modes of resistance and interference might become possible or necessary?

I Can Only See Shadows was originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (US) for the exhibition Petcoke: Tracking Dirty Energy (2016) and was produced with contributions by ︎alejandro t. acierto, ︎Jacquelene Drinkall, ︎Liz Ensz, Cameron Hu, Adam Mansour, Juan Luis Olvera, Patrick Quilao, ︎Smart Air (Beijing, CN), and the Southeast Environmental Task Force (Chicago, US).