Amin Alsaden is a writer, curator, and educator whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries.
Alsaden’s scholarship explores modern and contemporary art and architecture globally, with specific expertise in the Arab-Muslim world and its diasporas. He studies: constructions and perception of space; historiography, endangered heritage, and archives; environmental impact of warfare and militarization; language and calligraphic forms; Orientalism and representational tropes; museological and exhibitionary practices; monumentality, commemoration, and the public sphere. Iraq is a life-long project; his doctoral dissertation, which he is turning into a book, investigates the modernism of mid-20th century Baghdad, when the city became a locus of unprecedented encounters that transformed art and architecture well beyond this context, while engendering a vigorous local movement.
With a commitment to advancing social justice through the arts, Alsaden’s curatorial practice contributes to the dissemination of more diverse, inclusive, and global narratives, by decentering and expanding existing canons. He is particularly interested in socially engaged artists and architects who interrogate individual and collective political agency in the public realm, and challenge hegemonic knowledge and power structures. His exhibitions are informed by his lived experience, and invariably raise questions concerning the interrelated domains of geography, colonialism, extraction, organized violence, and displacement.
Alsaden holds doctoral and master’s degrees from Harvard University, a master’s from Princeton University, and completed his undergraduate education at the American University of Sharjah. He has taught at several institutions, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, offering classes on non-Western modernisms, critical and resistance discourses, and generative syntheses across art, architecture, and urbanism, among other topics. He regularly serves as an invited lecturer, critic, and jury member at art, curatorial, and design programs.
He has presented his research internationally, and written for numerous publications including Artforum, Art Journal, ArtAsiaPacific, Burlington Contemporary, Harvard Design Magazine, Ibraaz, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Momus, Ocula, Texte zur Kunst, The Brooklyn Rail, Third Text, and Vie des arts.
Originally from Baghdad, Alsaden has lived and worked in different cities around the world. He is currently based in Toronto, Canada, the traditional territory of several Indigenous nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.