University Calendar
Art Forums Welcomes Kaya Behkalam
Kaya Behkalam: Present Tenses / Art and the Gaze of the Historical
Kaya Behkalam is a German-Iranian visual artist and filmmaker, living in Berlin and Cairo, Egypt. He obtained an MFA in Media Art and a BA in Visual Communications at the University of Arts Berlin; currently he is a PhD Candidate in Artistic Research at the Bauhaus University Weimar/Germany. From 2012-2015 he served as an Assistant Professor of Time-based Media at the Art Department of the American University in Cairo and the director of the Sharjah Art Gallery. For his work and research he has been awarded various stipends and awards, such as the Dialogue Award of the European Media Art Festival 2012.
His video-, installation- and text-based works explore the entanglements of historiography, image and media politics, as in his current long term research project SEEING HISTORY, which explores archival practices and changing medialities of the historical in the context of post-revolutionary Cairo.
Among other places his art works have been shown at the HKW and Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Berlinische Galerie, Queens Museum, Eye Beam, and Sheila C. Johnson Design Center New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, Reina Sofia Museum Madrid, Azad Gallery Tehran, Kunstverein Heidelberg, the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, IDFA Amsterdam and the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. He is the co-editor of a series of books on contemporary Egyptian artists (2015, Revolver Publishing, together with Anneka Lenssen), as well as the Prince Claus publication “Damascus: Tourists, Artists, Secret Agents” (2010). He is the co-founder of the artist group RELOADING IMAGES, an initiative that works on collective projects of artistic research. Past projects were set in Berlin and Tehran (2007), Damascus (2008), Bangalore (2011), Izmir and Cairo (2012).
Art Forum is a weekly program for undergraduate and graduate students, and the public. The program brings in artists, designers, art historians and art critics from around the world to present their work and ideas in an open forum. It is also a course (ARGS 280, 3 SH). Admission is free.