Makan is hosting a 4-day workshop for researchers in modern and contemporary Arab Art in the village of Shatana from October 19th - 22nd 2011. The workshop is a chance to allow for the group of five practitioners time to reflect on their research questions and ideas in a closed setting. This workshop comes in the framework of Makan’s interest in supporting a variety of forms of research in the field. Based on this, the group is mixed to include artists, independent researchers and PhD candidates. The group has also put forward a set of questions about methodologies in the field of research on visual practices that will be discussed during the four days.

Participants are:
Saleem Al-Bahloly is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is writing a dissertation that examines the development of modern art in Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s in order to consider the ways in which art functioned in the twentieth century as a form of thought.
Kristine Khouri is a researcher, writer, and photographer based in Beirut, Lebanon.  She has worked as a researcher for several artists, and now focuses on modern art in the Arab world, and is a co-founder of the "History of Arab Modernities in the Visual Arts" a long term research project whose mission is to investigate the of production, exhibition, critical engagement, and consumption of modern art in the region from the period of the 1950s to the early 1980s.  Her current focus is the history of Kuwait's Sultan Gallery.

Anneka Lenssen is a Ph.D. Candidate in History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at M.I.T. She is working on her dissertation entitled “The Shape of the Support: Painting in Syria's Twentieth Century."

Clare Davies is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her dissertation examines the interdisciplinary foundations of art practices and discourse in Egypt during the first half of twentieth-century, focusing on the significance of the local photographic industry, the development of the human sciences and state-sponsored modernization initiatives in the growth of an arts sphere. She currently lives in Cairo.

Samah Hijawi is a multi-disciplanary visual artist currently working on a project that investigates the political dynamics of the region, mainly Iraq and Palestine, as starting points for a reading into the influences on subject, aesthetics and visual practices in Jordan between the 1950's and 2000