Amin Alsaden is a writer, curator, and educator whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries.
Alsaden’s scholarship explores modern art and architecture globally, with specific expertise in the Arab-Muslim world and its diasporas. His research interests include museological and exhibitionary practices; historiography, endangered heritage, and archives; language, translation, and calligraphic forms; Orientalism and representational tropes; monumentality, commemoration, and public space; and the environmental impact of warfare and militarization. Iraq is a life-long project; his doctoral dissertation, which he is turning into a book, investigates the modernism of mid-twentieth century Baghdad, particularly the artistic-architectural liaisons that engendered a vigorous and regionally influential movement.
With a commitment to advancing social justice through the arts, Alsaden’s curatorial practice contributes to the dissemination of more nuanced, diverse, and inclusive narratives, by decentering and expanding existing canons. He collaborates with contemporary artists and architects who interrogate individual and collective agency in the public sphere, 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, resistance and critical discourses, and the generative syntheses across art, architecture, and urbanism, among other topics. He is regularly invited as a lecturer, critic, and jury member at art, curatorial, and design programs; with a background in planning, he also serves as an advisor on projects involving the establishment or rehabilitation of cultural institutions.
He has presented his work internationally, and written for numerous publications, such as 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.